The long read: So much is happening, both wonderful and terrible – and it matters how we tell it. We can’t erase the bad news, but to ignore the good is the route to indifference or despair
, in the US, Wells Fargo, Chase, Citi, and Bank of America – your retirement funds or savings account may have a much larger climate footprint than you do. The impact of your diet and how you get to work may pale in comparison to the impact of your money in the bank. The vegan on the bicycle may still be contributing to climate chaos if her life savings are in a bank lending her money to the fossil fuel industry.
Humour aside, this has little to do with how the world really gets changed most of the time. The skills of real-world superheroes are solidarity, strategy, patience, persistence, vision and the ability to inspire hope in others. The rescuers we need are mostly not individuals, they are collectives – movements, coalitions, campaigns, civil society. Within those groups there may be someone with an exceptional gift for motivating others, but even the world’s greatest conductor needs an orchestra.
Such relay races have long been how human rights campaigns work: a good protest, campaign, or even piece of legislation can introduce new ideas that do their own work in the world at large. Even failed campaigns may succeed in opening the path for later change. The Green New Deal did not pass in the US Senate, but it became a template for the Biden administration’s climate legislation, and shifted the conversation about what is possible.
The South Pacific climate activist and poet Julian Aguon recently declared that Indigenous peoples “have a unique capacity to resist despair through connection to collective memory, and just might be our best hope to build a new world rooted in reciprocity and mutual respect – for the Earth and for each other”.
We tend to think utopias are unbelievable, but this is a sober-minded thinktank focused on climate and energy politics. The report made little impact on the general public. Because the energy revolution has been incremental, there’s been no single breakthrough moment. Yet it adds up to an encouraging, and even astonishing narrative.
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