• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
Wind and Solar Cheaper than Gas Plants in Ontario and Alberta, Study Shows February 7, 2023
AI Predicts World Over 1.5°C Limit by 2030, Undercuts Climate Progress Reports February 7, 2023
February Brings Record Cold, Widespread Power Outages to Much of North America February 7, 2023
Solar Geoengineering Banned in Mexico After ‘Rogue’ Stunt February 7, 2023
Lithium Mine Divides Nemaska Cree Over Impacts, Benefits February 7, 2023
Next
Prev

Solnit Casts Surging Climate Movement, Wind and Solar ‘Revolution’ as Antidotes to Climate Despair

October 28, 2018
Reading time: 4 minutes

U.S. Department of Energy

U.S. Department of Energy

1
SHARES
 

The fight against climate change is only lost if people think it is, renowned writer Rebecca Solnit insists, in a recent opinion piece aimed at quelling the despair that too many people took away from the recent IPCC report on 1.5°C pathways.

“The future hasn’t already been decided,” Solnit declares, after recounting the sense of doom that showed up online in the wake of the report. “Climate change is an inescapable present and future reality, but the point of the IPCC report is that there is still a chance to seize the best-case scenario rather than surrender to the worst.”

  • The climate news you need. Subscribe now to our engaging new weekly digest.
  • You’ll receive exclusive, never-before-seen-content, distilled and delivered to your inbox every weekend.
  • The Weekender: Succinct, solutions-focused, and designed with the discerning reader in mind.
Subscribe

And that, she says, is very similar to what past generations of global campaigners have had to contend with, summed up in this quote from Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, remembering the words of his mentor Andrei Sakharov.

“They want us to believe there’s no chance of success,” Sakharov said. “But whether or not there’s hope for change is not the question. If you want to be a free person, you don’t stand up for human rights because it will work, but because it is right. We must continue living as decent people.”

Solnit adds that, “right now, living as decent people means every one of us with resources taking serious climate action, or stepping up what we’re already doing.”

That perspective is essential because climate change is an issue of human rights and intergenerational equity, but also because “taking action is the best way to live in conditions of crisis and violation, for your spirit and your conscience as well as for society,” she writes. “It’s entirely compatible with grief and horror; you can work to elect climate heroes while being sad.”

Climate action is also the only option for confronting the crisis, even though “there are no guarantees,” she adds. “But just as Sakharov and Sharansky probably didn’t imagine that the Soviet Union would dissolve itself in the early 1990s, so we can anticipate that we don’t exactly know what will happen and how our actions will help shape the future.”

From the abolition of slavery in the United States to the dawn of human rights in the former Soviet bloc, “the histories of change that have made me hopeful are often about small groups that seem at the outset unrealistic in their ambition,” Solnit writes. And she cites two changes in the last little while that are bigger, and point toward hope on climate change and climate solutions.

The global movement to draw down greenhouse gas emissions and address the impacts of climate change “was small, fragmented, mild a dozen years ago, and the climate recommendations then were mostly polite, with too much change-your-lightbulbs focus on personal virtue,” she recalls. Now, “the movement that has taken on pipelines and fuel trains, refineries and shipping terminals, fracking and mountaintop removal, divestment and finance, policy and law, and sometimes won is evidence of what can happen in 12 years. Some of what were regarded as climate activists’ wild ideas and unreasonable demands are now policy and conventional common sense.”

The other “encouraging and even a little awe-inspiring” source of hope is the lightning-fast rise of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and battery storage technologies.

“At the beginning of the 21st century, renewables were expensive, inefficient, infant technologies incapable of meeting our energy needs,” she writes. “In a revolution at least as profound as the industrial revolution, wind and solar engineering and manufacturing have changed everything; we now have the technological capacity to largely leave fossil fuel behind. It was not possible then; it is now. That is stunning. And encouraging.”

Citing the IPCC report, Solnit stresses that the “major obstacles to [the transition] are political, the fossil fuel and energy corporations and the governments obscenely intertwined with them.” While too many countries, including Canada, focus most or all of their effort on curtailing energy demand rather than driving down fossil energy supply, she points to Belize, Ireland, New Zealand, France, and Costa Rica as the first five to consider bans on new fossil exploration and extraction.

“We have to be real about this: this is the oil industry, and wars are fought over it,” Oil Change International Director Steve Kretzmann told Solnit. “There’s a lot of political power there, and there are a lot of people defending that power.”

But at the same time, “the moment it’s clear it’s inexorably on the wane, it will pop,” he said, and Solnit notes that people around the world have worked to “hasten the popping” by cutting fossil subsidies, and building a “once-mocked”, now US$6-trillion fossil divestment movement.

“The fading away of the malevolent power of the oil companies would be a profound transformation, politically as well as ecologically,” she concludes. “I don’t know exactly if or how we’ll get to where we need to go, but I know that we must set out better options with all the passion, power, and intelligence we have. A revolution is what we need, and we can begin by imagining and demanding it and doing what we can to try to realize it. Rather than waiting to see what happens, we can be what happens.”



in Climate Action / "Blockadia", Community Climate Finance, COP Conferences, Ending Emissions, Energy Subsidies, Environmental Justice, International Agencies & Studies, Oil & Gas

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

Peoplepoweredbyenergy/Wikimedia Commons
Ending Emissions

Wind and Solar Cheaper than Gas Plants in Ontario and Alberta, Study Shows

February 7, 2023
533
The hottest summer days in a typical New York City year are now about 11 times more frequent than in the 19th century. Image: Andreas Komodromos via Flickr
Carbon Levels & Measurement

AI Predicts World Over 1.5°C Limit by 2030, Undercuts Climate Progress Reports

February 7, 2023
100
Andre Carrotflower/wikimedia commons
Severe Storms & Flooding

February Brings Record Cold, Widespread Power Outages to Much of North America

February 7, 2023
56

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Peoplepoweredbyenergy/Wikimedia Commons

Wind and Solar Cheaper than Gas Plants in Ontario and Alberta, Study Shows

February 7, 2023
533
Government of Alberta/flickr

University of Calgary Suspends Admissions for Oil and Gas Engineering Program

July 12, 2021
393
Beckyq6937/Wikimedia Commons

Solar Geoengineering Banned in Mexico After ‘Rogue’ Stunt

February 7, 2023
159
Peter Broster/wikimedia commons

Ottawa Mulls Higher-Speed Trains on Busy Toronto-Quebec City Corridor

February 7, 2023
117
Brian Robert Marshall/Geograph

Canada’s Solid Renewables Growth Falls Short of Net-Zero Ambitions

February 7, 2023
98
Michael E. Brunk/flickr

Green Building ‘Heroes’, Climate Contrarian ‘Zombies’, Shell Lawsuits, and ‘Sponge Cities’ to Solve Flooding

February 7, 2023
124

Recent Posts

The hottest summer days in a typical New York City year are now about 11 times more frequent than in the 19th century. Image: Andreas Komodromos via Flickr

AI Predicts World Over 1.5°C Limit by 2030, Undercuts Climate Progress Reports

February 7, 2023
100
Andre Carrotflower/wikimedia commons

February Brings Record Cold, Widespread Power Outages to Much of North America

February 7, 2023
56
Nemaska Lithium/Facebook

Lithium Mine Divides Nemaska Cree Over Impacts, Benefits

February 7, 2023
43
Mike Mozart/Flickr

BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022

February 4, 2023
372
Gina Dittmer/PublicDomainPictures

Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB

January 31, 2023
219
CONFENIAE

Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty

January 31, 2023
85
Next Post
USEPA / Wikimedia Commons

Mobilize Energy Efficiency Financing, Push Skills Development, Efficiency Canada Urges MPs

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}