Jan 23, 2022 Hot Take

The Climate Movement Needs to Hold Itself Accountable

By Amy Westervelt

For many, many—too many—years the consensus in the climate movement was that social justice issues (systemic racism, sexism, poverty, labor issues, really anything other than emissions and energy) were a "distraction" from the real work of fending off catastrophic climate change. We'll get to that later, they (usually white, affluent men) said.

During the Standing Rock protests of 2016, the mainstream climate movement finally started paying attention to the work frontline communities had been doing all along, and some folks realized a broader more inclusive movement was the way to actually win for a change. But not everyone was into it. As recently as 2019 some climate talking heads wondered aloud if things like the Green New Deal weren't "saddling the climate movement with a laundry list of other social programs" and thus turning off much-needed allies like moderate Democrats and Republicans (aka, educated, wealthy white people who don't historically line up to challenge the systems they benefit from).

This framing of inequality as a distraction rather than the root cause of the whole damn crisis, is a lot less common in the climate movement today. But don't celebrate just yet.

It's not gone, it's merely been replaced by a more genteel and thus more insidious version, what I've been calling the "united front" approach. In his book, The New Climate War, atmospheric scientist Michael Mann makes some valid points about the long history of propaganda in the U.S. (although he's far from the first to point that out), and argues that part of what he calls "the new denialism" is the fossil fuel industry sewing divisiveness in the climate movement. It's true, they have been! But while other climate folk (most recently climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe) have pointed to things like the spread of doomerism, Mann adds his old favorite target: "identity politics."

"The climate action deflectors," he argues, "are attempting to drive a wedge into pre-existing rifts within the climate community. That includes rifts arising from the ongoing debate over the role of personal behavior versus systemic change. (It also includes rifts involving the politics of identity, and matters of gender, age, and race.) When the climate discourse devolves into a shouting match over diet and travel choices, and becomes about personal purity, behavior-shaming, and virtue-signaling, we get a divided community unable to speak with a united voice. We lose. Fossil fuel interests win."

Whew that's quite the parenthetical aside! Some of this is very true, of course. I've documented myriad ways the fossil fuel industry tries to take advantage of weaknesses like racism and exploit them. But that's not an argument for not talking about race—it's the exact reason we must address systemic racism and how it shows up in climate spaces. Mann is far from alone in this sort of thinking, which is unfortunate because the idea that the way to get to a united voice is to simply stop disagreeing, to sidestep these longstanding issues altogether, is a far greater gift to the fossil fuel industry than what they might dare dream of.

This is not to say that there are no valid criticism of identity politics, particularly the idea that simply slotting in women or people of color to positions of power will automatically deliver wins (stares in Kyrsten Sinema). But that's not what Mann and his Mannions are talking about. As one acolyte put it recently (retweeted and amplified by Mann): "One of the climate inaction deflection tactics: making it an identity issue that polarizes the debate. Result: no policy, no progress - in spite of majority support for most common sense climate action policies." Translation: Stop talking about race so we can pass climate policy already!

The climate counter-movement is able to exploit these -isms because of the movement's refusal to deal with them, not because we're finally talking about it after 50 years. Advocating for more civil discourse amongst allies is one thing, but when it becomes "don't criticize me because we all need to be united against the real bad guys: Big Oil," then it's just another way to shut down the climate voices that are only beginning to find space in the movement. Fossil fuel interests win when we don't talk about it, actually.

I understand that conflict makes some people uncomfortable. And obviously I don't disagree that Big Oil are the bad guys but… how are you gonna hold them accountable when you can't even hold your friends accountable? Or take responsibility for your own shit? And why does just talking about race and gender and equality automatically mean arguing or a "shouting match"? Maybe it wouldn’t be a shouting match if some people would just learn to listen. We're not behind on climate because we're talking about race, if anything we wouldn't have the climate crisis without white supremacy and racialized capitalism before it, and the longer we ignore that, the longer it will be before we make progress.

The Only Good Thing About 2021

By Mary Annaïse Heglar

There weren’t a lot of good things about 2021. It came in hot as the second year of a pandemic with an actual storming of the Capitol, in which we nearly saw elected officials publicly lynched and lost all democratic function. Then there were the skyrocketing temperatures and raging wildfires and storms, and even the OCEAN CATCHING FIRE. Among so, so many other things. But, here’s one good thing: the media is finally paying more attention to climate change.

In fact, according to the good folks over at the Media and Climate Change Observatory, 2021 saw the highest climate coverage ever. Let’s get into the numbers. Global climate coverage increased by 55 percent in 2021, compared to 2020. Granted, 2020 saw a dramatic decrease in climate coverage compared to 2019, but climate coverage in 2021 was still 19 percent higher than 2019 coverage. And it was more than double climate coverage in 2016, 2017, and 2018. It was up by 90 percent from 2015 levels. That’s some serious progress.

That said, there’s still so much further to go. Greenhouse gas emissions are still going up and the fossil fuel industry is not going to tell the truth about itself (trust me, it won’t). As we go into 2022, we need to do everything in our power to make sure that climate coverage is high in both quality and quantity. If you work in media, it’s time to write like all our lives depend on it. If you consume journalism, it’s time to write letters to the editor or make calls to demand good climate journalism, and to subscribe to the places that invest in it. The world is on fire. It should be dominating the headlines.

All Science Matters

By Amy Westervelt

For the past decade or so, and especially in the last five years, the climate movement has come to realize that climate change is not a so-called "information deficit problem," solved by simply getting people data and information they might be missing. It is instead a question of political will. Which, you would think, would lead us straight to the question: okay, how do we build political will toward climate action? And for the answer to that, of course, the media and politicians have largely turned to…climate scientists. Um, what? Why?

Bless the climate scientists for figuring this out in the first place and telling us it was coming, and trying SO HARD to get their point across, but how tf are we still not realizing that it's psychologists and environmental sociologists and eco-economists and political scientists and science historians and futurists and philosophers that we really need to be listening to when it comes to the question of what human societies are actually going to do about climate change? What they're likely to do, what they respond to or not, what's driving social norms, how much money has gone into instilling the exact ideas about the environment and the economy that would preclude any climate action ever? These are the questions we need answers to, so why are physical scientists the ones on all the cable news shows telling us how we're going to act on climate? Why do most of those "400 scientists say" lists exclude social scientists working on climate altogether? Why did it take the IPCC until 2021 to include social scientists in its reviews on the climate situation? And WHY for the love of all that is holy, did they decide to publish the social science report last, so that it's coming out this year, months after the COP26 debacle (which, by the way, could have really used some social science input)?

Okay so yes, I do have some theories. First, there's the funding. According to a recent study, STEM sciences get a whopping 770 percent more funding than social science. Then there's the fact that, at some level, a majority of people want there to be an easy technological fix for climate change. Grappling with the complexities of human behavior and human societies—and looking at both the root causes of the problem and what it's going to take to unlock real action—means accepting that the solution probably isn't gonna be that easy and straightforward.

And then, let's not forget we had about 30 years of climate denial, during which every single person who ever said a word about climate was required to answer obscure scientific "gotcha" questions about it. During that time, folks who were against climate action kept the conversation focused largely on the (physical) science and whether it was solid enough to inform decisions.

But about 10 years ago, the climate counter-movement shifted gears. They focused on how climate action was gonna take away your hamburger. They talked about how cold it was outside. They trotted out spokesperson after spokesperson who said "look I'm not a scientist, but everything seems fine to me and we don't want anyone losing their job over this." Not a bit of hard science in there. Because guess what? Guess who has social scientists all over their comms and lobbying strategies? The damn oil industry, people! Of course they do!

So, again, with all love for the hardcore climate scientists, it's time we spread that love to the social scientists, and accept that the solution to this crisis might not fit neatly into a model or graph.