Panic and emptiness: climate activism and the emergency response

“And the goblins — they had not really been there at all? They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or ex-President Roosevelt, would say yes. Beethoven knew better. The goblins really had been there. They might return — and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall.” EM Forster Howards End.

The goblins are walking the world from end to end and dissolution beckons. People are sharing panicked and sharing emotive stories and articles on social media about climate change. “How can we go on?” they ask. “Why aren’t you panicking about climate change and the sixth extinction?” Climate change is a multitude of tragedies. Our narrow window of opportunity to prevent it from taking root and unfurling inexorably over the coming decades and centuries is nearly closed. We will soon pass the point of no return after which we will no longer be able to control the escalating feedback of heat and tumult, extinction, degradation, conflict and cataclysm.

In such a situation, with such knowledge, it would be a relief to panic, to wrap ourselves in the blanket of fear and self-pity, but it would make no difference at all to do so. It might even be counter-productive.

There are many analogies deployed to evoke the climate emergency: your house is on fire! There’s a storm sweeping through! But emergencies come with different textures. There are sudden and shocking emergencies, like fire, but climate change is not that kind of crisis, though it will cause many more of them to occur. This is a slow emergency that unfurls in a broadening spiral. It is a compounding emergency. Politics is already being changed by it.

In May, Newcastle Council debated a motion to declare a climate emergency proposed by Greens Councillor John Mackenzie. Instead of passing Mackenzie’s motion, the Council, which has long been a champion of environmental sustainability and labour rights, passed a motion proposed by the Labor Councillors recognising that there is a global climate emergency, reaffirming Council’s commitment to a just economic transition for coal mining communities and “encouraging environmental activists to consider the broader impact of their actions, and work towards building consensus across the political spectrum to address global warming; including raising their concerns directly with the re-elected Federal Liberal National Government.” It seemed a cheap political rebuke to the 150 people that had gathered to press for the emergency declaration, but if our reaction to it is a deeper retreat into ourselves, we will have missed a critical opportunity to turn this disaster around.

The urge to declare climate emergency is part of a hyper-rationalist response to climate change that has always been present in the self-selecting movement of people trying to tackle the problem and convince others to do the same. In 2007–09, the grassroots climate movement was earnest and aflame with the urgency of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment report. Superlatives and absolutes were part of how people established their roles and place in the movement. The position that one took about how rapid the transition away from fossil fuels ought to be was a moral one. It was fundamentalist in its teleology: we want climate change to not be happening, therefore, we advocate for policies and actions by Governments and economies that will arrest it in the shortest possible time. First and foremost, we must accede to the irrefutable determinism of physics: someone else then could figure out how to make the other humans carry out the necessary work to change pretty much everything about our society. Ten years later this flame still burns. The argument is dressed in the language of reality: scientific principles, observations and predictions indicate that x, y and z catastrophic effects will happen unless we dismantle the greenhouse emitting industries. Politics, society, culture, the human condition, all of these are deemed adaptable and malleable compared to the fundamental rock of “the science” and the “reality” of the challenge we face.

Other parts of the environment movement have tended to speak of different realities: political and economic realities. These seem to the people that understand them no less immoveable than physics. Ten years after the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme split the environment movement, cracked open the Liberal Party, and narrowly failed to gain a foothold in Australian law, it’s hard to disagree with that. The difference boils down to the nature of the problem we were trying to solve. Some are trying to understand and solve technical problems: what concentration of greenhouse gases is “safe” to maintain a stable climate? How much less is that than what we’re currently producing? Deduct industry from society and present results. Others are trying to solve a social and political problem: we are currently running our society on stuff that is creating wealth and comfort now, but will cause us great harm in the future. How do we help our society change its mind and stop doing that before the harm becomes irreversible?

Part of my resistance to the emergency urge is an anarchist distrust of executive decision-making. Of all the challenges we face, climate change is the one that most demands that we create consensus to resolve it. In 2009, when the turmoil of Australian climate politics was being sown, I went for the first time to the UN climate negotiations. Regularly attending those talks for two and a half years gave me a profound understanding of the rationale of consensus. Previously, I had thought of consensus philosophically, as a way of enabling cooperation and equality and respecting autonomy. At the UN, I understood for the first time the practicality of consensus in situations that demand participation by every member of a group in the implementation of those decisions.

That is what climate change is. It is a problem of a different shape and texture to the problems environmentalists have tackled before, like saving the Franklin from damming, the Daintree from roading, the Great Barrier Reef from mining. It is being created by innumerable decisions and actions by people in more than 20* countries across a dozen sectors of activity with different dynamics of labour, capital and natural resources, consensus must be achieved to make any progress at all. The complexities of why the human communities of the world have not so far responded effectively to climate change are as involved as physics and are as real.

There has been debate among climate activists and advocates for twenty years about the framing of climate change in popular discourse and about which socio-political pillar is the one that must shift to address this existential catastrophe. Some argue for popular uprising. Some for advocacy to banks and boardrooms. Others for political leadership and still others for voluntary anti-consumption. There is a deep yearning to find a unifying answer and transform society before we reach critical thresholds that will be remembered for generations as points of no return. Government is a tempting place to turn to relieve this longing. Governments can pass laws. Government can, with the stroke of a pen make all of this not be happening. Proscribe, prescribe, regulate and mobilise resources. This impulse is described by Bruno Latour as “the panicky desire to return to the old protections of the nation-state.” If Government has this magical power, why has it not yet used it? Because of cowardice and “lack of political will” of course! But as Tim Lyons has reflected, real social movements drive electoral politics, they don’t respond to it and most politicians are followers, not leaders. This is more true of climate change than the struggle between labour and capital, because the climate change movement has no economic leverage. All it has is appeal to conscience, and, these days, perhaps the bankers’ and insurers’ fear of losing their money. In the lead up to the recent federal election, many of us were lured by the temptation that dealing with climate change might be as simple as voting for the right political party. Now that this delusion has been dispelled, we need to ask, what kind of emergency is this and what mobilisation can tackle it?

None of this is criticism of the young people striking from school and their stern oracle, Greta Thunberg. Young people must have the latitude to express their dismay and disgust at the molten shit-soup they are being bequeathed by their elders. But I will nevertheless resist Greta’s exhortation to panic. Not because I deny that the situation we face constitutes an emergency, We must struggle with every fibre of our beings to stop the pollution that is driving global warming over 1.5 degrees and we have perhaps another year or two before that unthinkable tipping point becomes an inevitability. What I argue is to take the word emergency back to its roots and into a different direction. From the Latin emergere we might take the movement in a more emergent direction. Resist the temptation of singular and unifying responses. Accept that there is no authority in Australia or anywhere around the world that will overrule the rebel polluters and just ban all the bad things and mandate all the good things. Even the Chinese Communist Party does not wield such power but must grapple with provincial governments, industrialists and local politics. Every source of pollution must be tackled one by one, every carbon-neutral practice in agriculture, construction, shipping, waste and energy must be implemented piece by piece.

This may make climate change seem impossibly complex to resolve, but in fact offers each of us an opportunity to tangibly contribute to solving it. You do not have to live in the Galilee Basin, or the world’s biggest coal exporting, port to be on the front line of the struggle against world-harming greenhouse pollution. It is being created everywhere and the solutions must be implemented everywhere. The way your local council disposes of your waste matters. Farming practices matter. Energy efficiency matters and so do manufacturing and new construction. All our social systems must adapt to changes that are already underway and locked in. Organisations like Meals on Wheels and the State Emergency Service are trying to do this and probably need your help. On election night I met a woman I went to school with who works for Orica, a company that manufactures the explosives used in the Hunter mining industry. She remarked that I probably hated that this was her livelihood and was relieved and surprised when I told her I envied her for being in a position to be part of creating a just transition for the Hunter region as it moves beyond coal over the next decade. Wherever you are there is a place for you in being part of humanity’s extraordinary eleventh hour planet rescue effort.

You can be part of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the climate change we have already locked in. Look around in your local area and find an emissions source that you are in a position to tackle. Form a group and work together to reduce greenhouse pollution where you have influence and opportunity. You can’t stop Adani’s coal mine from suburban Sydney but you can campaign to expand public transport, or capture methane from waste, or ensure there are street trees in the western suburbs, where the heat is intensifying. Find a collective of people who share your values and want to make a practical contribution to climate change. Stay off the front page of the Daily Telegraph and quietly work towards your objective. Go door-knocking in your area to find out what worries or confuses people near you about climate change and our shared future. Be responsive and build bridges and networks. Talk to collectives in other places about what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it. Listen to what Newcastle Council is trying to say: it is more important to be effective than it is to be right.

With the impulse towards emergency, the fabric of our relations to each other will only pull further apart. Those whose livelihoods are not bound up in the fossil fuel economy will yank themselves violently into acrimony. Those who work in industries that create the reviled greenhouse pollution will dig their heels more resolutely into the ground. As extreme weather and earth-rebellion unrolls, we will need strong social bonds to grapple with the goblins of violence, greed and panic that might come. The spectacle of people in electric cars driving the length of the east coast to stand between a Central Queensland coal miner and his six-figure remuneration feeds these goblins. Resist the urge to slough responsibility for climate change onto someone else and take up the struggle where you are. There is plenty of work to do.

*there are 200 countries in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but the bulk of greenhouse emissions have been created by about 20 of them, including Australia.