The sounds on a distant shore might as well be within earshot: the grumble of an ice cap chipping off a summit before plunging into the sea; the swish of a storm surge; the crackle of fires gutting rainforests; and the wailing and weeping of villagers scrambling to stay adrift on a flooded lowland five-thousand miles from where a 15-year-old kid sits hugging her knees, protesting by herself, outside the Swedish parliament.

On August 20, 2018, the day Greta Thunberg decided to quit school to strike and draw attention to the climate crisis, the unusually shorter monsoon season in Taungoo District, Myanmar bucketed down for hours on end, buckled bridges, and swept houses in 85 villages away in a torrent. Meanwhile, down south, a different version of calamity raged on as drought levels triggered fires in West Kalimantan and other forested areas.

Ecosystems elsewhere knuckle under temperatures so ruinous that they hark back to degrees during mass extinctions far beyond living memory. Biblical forecasts of cataclysms are weather advisories in the making that Thunberg and others before her have sounded the alarms about.

“We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis,” Thunberg said at the 24th session of the Conference of the Parties, the decision-making body of the United Nations climate convention, in Poland last year. “And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.”

Indeed, the fact that the planet’s unwinding has accelerated is a scientific consensus beyond dispute. What is less obvious, particularly among nations wedded to global capital, is that today’s political economies must be retooled before the natural world reels irredeemably towards a tipping point. For neither pretension to stopgap reforms nor visceral fear for mankind’s fate can keep the chaos at bay.

Cathedral thinking, in the words of Thunberg, would prove a counterpoint: the need to lay the groundwork for a habitable future while the ceiling of such a structure is yet to be built. This foremost requires the rigor to dismantle the inequities that undergird societies — the very conditions that have led to this emergency — while multiple movements on all scales struggle to cope, organize, and sketch out prospects of solidarity and social justice despite, or precisely because of, apocalyptic threats. 

Sweating Bullets

Pushing back against doomsayers, denialists, and demagogues will be tough. The disasters of climate change compel not so much a reckoning with various illiberal forces as a rebellion against their overtures to policies bent on degrading public life and the environment.

Their likes appear to strut through the world, having crept from the fringes of the political arena to seize seats of power. President Donald Trump of the United States, once a huckster of a real estate empire and a jokester of reality TV, assumed office by eliciting the furies of an electorate disillusioned with liberal rule. Taking cue from most populist authoritarians, he relishes conspiracies, lies, and the rejection of reason.

Trump, who has called global warming a Chinese hoax, rolled back 85 environmental rules that could hike up greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This was almost a postscript to his pullout from the Paris Agreement in 2017, rescinding America’s pledge to keep global temperatures below 20C above pre-industrial levels. On many counts this move squared with his America First policy, a protectionist appeal to white supremacy.

Even countries where the Left once held sway have followed suit. Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, combative where his predecessors were conciliatory, stocked his ministry with billionaires who have bled natural and indigenous reserves. Along with Trump, he vowed last September to blaze the trail for “private-sector sustainable development” in the Amazon. This transpired just weeks after a spate of criminally ignited fires spotlighted how Brazil is lurching in the opposite direction of its Paris Agreement carbon reduction targets.

To be sure, there is no reason to think that strongmen elected on a platform of violence would posture as earth’s saviors. Yet they demonstrate the futility of prevailing transnational coordination to police crimes against the planet, and the fragility of legal compromises that too disturbingly resemble a lack of conviction. 

With their conservative politics, they have done the inadvertent service of throwing into vivid relief the need for a radical alternative. Such is the kind that recognizes inequalities even of vulnerability, and so welcomes engagement with the very disenfranchised billions who could wind up as the first casualties of this crisis.

Storm in a Teacup

There is no bleaker irony than in the certainty of the miseries to be borne by the marginalized majority, scapegoated by no less than a wealthy minority liable for an ample share of carbon emissions. The same cast of economic planners, politicians, and policymakers with vested interests convene at global summits — the closest to a progressive response to the crisis at present — held in proverbial corridors of power.

If nothing else, an international agreement built on shared sacrifice is a feat. Yet the Paris Agreement, unlike the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, fails to commit countries to binding limits on carbon emissions based on income or per capita gross domestic product. It presumes that they can all, in good faith and with political will, deliver on their pledges to limit warming to below 1.50C fast enough to halve their emissions by 2030.

This is a tall order. Even in the unlikely scenario that these commitments are met, neither guarantees that an atmosphere already too far gone would cease to wreak havoc. The palliatives endorsed by the UN, at the nexus of such global alliances, are no less dispiriting. 

One such solution is the carbon market, where governments impose a limit on how much GHGs firms can emit. The latter can earn credits by funding GHG-saving projects elsewhere. In 2008, this scheme allowed RWE, a German electric utilities company, to build more coal plants in Europe by earning credits for funding the Xiaoxi dam in China, which came under fire for displacing over 7,500 villagers. RWE went on to spew almost triple its legal cap of GHGs and has over the years hedged higher carbon prices. 

This cap-and-trade system dovetails with carbon-capture technologies that, in effect, embolden industries to belch coal that they know can be injected back underground. They represent a misnomer, though, as the few such facilities available in power stations cannot soak up carbon concentrations long stored in the air.

At the core of such techno-fixes is a refusal to wean humanity off wanton petrol use. The human enterprise that first tapped its power over two centuries ago burns through oil reserves to cough out, on average, 21.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually — akin to 128 million blue whales pressing down on the earth’s crust.

All along, this has been the diet that fattened a capital-hungry global order. Market-mending measures aimed at adaptation, from desalination plants to coastal defenses, would thus only whet the appetite for super-profits of businesses that peddle these crutches after crippling the planet in the first place.

Breaking the Ice

Climate negotiations, led by institutions like the UN, do more than mask the windfalls that corporate culprits snitch. So-called historic accords like the Paris Agreement are drafted from behind closed doors for liberal democracies to speak on behalf of the rest of the world that they have plundered and laid waste to.

While China, a developing country, has secured a seat at the negotiating table, its neighbors in the Global South have yet to catch up to enjoy the same right to emit. Such a policy tweak, for example, as the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN) Law in the Philippines aims to steamroll a transition from coal-fired electricity by levying higher taxes which power distributors ultimately pass on to consumers.

In the name of shifting to greener economies, low-income nations are forced to march in step with the very imperial powers keen to shirk historical accountability for miring them in underdevelopment.

This underscores how problematic a geopolitically lopsided climate convention is. For one, the US has dumped the bulk of cumulative carbon dioxide worldwide, at 25 percent, per the Global Carbon Project. Now, having been rather tired of pumping Saudi oil, it operates a fracking industry for stockpiles of shale gas. It is on track to become the largest oil producer by 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. Still, it nailed down the dilution of the Paris Agreement in its insistence on voluntary, non-binding emissions cuts.

Trump is almost certain to sharpen this contradiction. His contrarian stance has not diminished the stakes of the US in the global climate debate. If anything, it has only shaken what sparse room is left for countries otherwise excluded from decisions that could spell the difference between life and death for their people.

Whatever concessions liberals may clinch in these venues, or however fiercely autocrats and skeptics resist them, either way would fail to lead to any change of mythic magnitude before the clock runs down. At this point, to pin any hope on climate diplomacy is a luxury only elite economies and their institutions can afford.

It is no wonder that such urgency has dawned on the generation of Thunberg, who will not have yet reached their prime by the time the 1.50C deadline rolls around. They make a case for hope. Equally vital, too, are the voices and wisdom of those on the peripheries, whose destinies are just as precarious at this juncture.

Most of them, like the world’s indigenous and racialized communities, have grappled with vulnerability long after centuries of colonial dispossession. They serve as nature’s stewards by challenging the notion of land as property and resources as commodities. The role they play as a wellspring of political resilience promises more for a climate justice movement organized on the premise of struggles rather than geopolitical bounds.

The tasks ahead cannot be underrated, and today’s mounting sense of siege cannot be overstated. It could only be so when the global powers that be have yet to push off from their comfortable shores and heed what could be the civilization’s death knell. It is yet another tragedy of the climate crisis that, without upsetting such inequalities, only with radical hope could mankind imagine itself into an unimaginable future. ●

Published in print in the Collegian's October 9, 2019 issue, with the headline “State of Emergency: Weathering the Warming World’s Warnings.”