The biggest news story of this week was not really news at all. On Monday, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its new report on climate change, which confirmed what climate scientists have told us for many years: that climate change is real and the result of human activity. All that is new in the report is the authority with which the IPCC addressed the issue, and, perhaps, the starkness with which it presents the reality of our circumstances.
As The Wild Hunt, among many other outlets, reported earlier this week, the IPCC’s document portrays a bleak and unequivocal picture of our environment’s future: the carbon already present in our atmosphere has locked in warmer and warmer temperatures for the next thirty years, at least. No matter what, we are already looking at significantly hotter temperatures across the globe, and with that, more extreme weather and other disasters: wildfires, drought, melting ice in the arctic.
The Pagan Cluster live at the People’s Climate March in NYC [Via Twitter @Pagan_Cluster]
This is not hypothetical: it is a prophecy more certain than any made by an oracle before it. We live on a warming planet, and we will collectively face the consequences of climate change in the decades to come.
Understandably, for many, the IPCC report has led to feelings of pessimism and hopelessness. If climate change is a foregone conclusion, then what good is it to fight? The time to act was 40 years ago, or even further – through inaction, we have already lost. This sense of climate despair was everywhere on social media as the report and its contents circulated. The challenges described in the report seem so insurmountable that it feels like there is nothing to do about them except to close our eyes and try to shut the inevitable out.
This response is understandable; it is also wrong.
The headline statement of the IPCC report – the first and most important thing it says – is this: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.” Human influence: things that we did, and are doing, and are choosing to continue to do. Specifically, as Friederike Otto, a co-author of the report, told Reuters, the primary thing humans have done to cause climate change is burn fossil fuels for energy. That is the root of the problem and the entirety of the solution: we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
To which one might reasonably say: oh, is that all? Fossil fuels, like it or not, are the basis of the global economy, and reconfiguring that economy to work off of some other energy source – or even off of a severely diminished amount of fossil fuels – could seem like a Sisyphean task. But this state of affairs is extremely recent in terms of human history; not very long ago, within the span of just a few generations, even the most advanced economies on the planet did not have our current reliance on fossil fuels.
We are an adaptable and clever species; we have reconfigured our way of living many times before, and we can do it again now.
The obstacles to making this change are numerous, and politicians especially seem completely incapable of addressing it. On Monday, the Biden administration responded to the IPCC report with the following tweet:
We can’t wait to tackle the climate crisis.
The signs are unmistakable. The science is undeniable. And the cost of inaction keeps mounting.
— President Biden (@POTUS) August 9, 2021
Within 48 hours, though, the Biden administration was calling on OPEC to drill more oil, claiming that higher gasoline prices could stymie the recovery from the COVID-19 downturn. It was a demonstration of the contradictions and hypocrisy to be found in American climate policy: even as we stare down the most damning and authoritative report yet on how burning oil is cooking the planet, our leaders still keep pressing to burn even more.
Yet this does not make me lose hope – not entirely, anyway. The obstacles in front of us are still just human decisions. The solutions are not easy, but in many ways, they are simple. We know that climate change is caused by us. We know the things that humans, especially humans in rich countries in the global north, are doing to heat up the planet. We know what we would need to change in order to stop heating up the planet.
To make those changes will take an immense, ongoing, collective action; it will take politics. But what we should take away from the IPCC report is not that we are doomed – quite the opposite. If we were doomed, we would have no agency in the matter; our fates would have been determined for us in advance.
With apologies to the Norns, that is not the case for us. Humans created this mess, and humans can overcome the human institutions that are preventing us from fixing it.
It is tempting to believe that climate change is an all-or-nothing game and that we have already lost, but that isn’t true at all: “The reality, according to the IPCC, is that every 10th of a degree translates to tens of thousands of lives lost,” says Kate Aronoff in Jewish Currents this week, “so every little incremental step we can take to mitigate climate change matters a tremendous amount. There’s no point at which you can say that we might as well just give up.”
Aronoff’s words cut straight through my own climate despair. They made me want to get to work on protecting the earth and the life upon it. If there is anything to take from the IPCC report, it is that human actions got us into this, and human action is the only thing that’s going to mitigate it going forward. We have no time to despair.
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