Don’t say ‘Climate Action Now!’
The movement for climate action is one of the biggest and most international activist campaigns the world has seen. The demand for “Climate Action Now” really picked up about 15 years ago and has stayed quite present in the zeitgeist, making it a slogan with unusual longevity.
But what does “Climate Action Now” really mean?
Underlying these three words are a powerful punch of widely held assumptions – and, as I will argue, dangerous misconceptions – about what is needed to heal the planet and the broken climate cycle.
Generally, the twin demands are: 1. A moratorium on new fossil fuel projects, and 2. Immediate investment in large-scale “renewable” energy projects.
As an environmentalist, this seriously scares me.
I sympathise with the intentions of the climate movement, and I am grateful that their slogans increasingly shift the focus away from individual consumer behaviour, stressing the need for policy change in its place.
But most of the movement buys into a “green transition” narrative — the idea that we can simply switch out fossil fuels for new, “clean” energy sources to meet the outrageous and growing energy demand of a globalised industrial economy. In buying into this, the movement has come to act less as a force for systemic change, and more as the lobbying appendage for the solar, wind and even nuclear industries, peddling technologies which have their own suite of serious environmental impacts — impacts which, if we scale the technologies up, will be every bit as serious as those of fossil fuels. Under the banner of “climate action”, activists find themselves waving the green flag for what promises to be yet another mega-industrial project – yet another siege on the Earth.
What would happen if, tomorrow, all governments were to declare: “We are taking climate action seriously! We are going to transition the global economy to renewable sources, quick smart!”?
The demand for “critical mineral” deposits (things like copper, cobalt, lithium, manganese etc) would boom. A World Bank report, with the telling name of ‘Minerals for Climate Action’, predicts a 450% increase in demand for minerals like cobalt and lithium by 2050. Areas of the globe rich in deposits – notably indigenous lands, biodiversity hotspots and remaining tracts of intact wilderness – would be handed over on a silver platter to mining corporations. Elon Musk’s share prices would skyrocket, while river systems in places from Australia and the US to Bolivia and China would be diverted to process heavy metals in energy-intensive refineries, leaving highly toxic pollution in the water and in all those who drink it.
Then, seeing as we haven’t even identified enough deposits of key minerals like lithium to fuel the transition, governments would partner with corporations to scour the deepest seabed and launch rockets to mine other planets for the goods.
Meanwhile, demand for plastic, concrete and steel would skyrocket too. It has been estimated that, to build enough new wind turbines to meet half the current global economy’s energy demand, 2.4 billion tons of steel and 2.6 billion tons of concrete would be needed – the material equivalent of no less than 16,000 Hoover Dams. And those wind turbines would need to be replaced every decade or two, so it would be an ongoing production line.
And, with everyone’s eyes turned to CO2, emissions of three extremely potent greenhouse gases —hexafluoroethane (C2F6), nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) — would be set to explode. Emitted in the manufacture of solar photovoltaics, hexafluoroethane has a global warming potential that is, according to the IPCC, about 12,000 times higher than that of CO2. It is 100% manufactured by humans, and supposedly survives 10,000 years once released into the atmosphere. Nitrogen trifluoride is 17,000 times more virulent than CO2, while sulfur hexafluoride is over 23,000 times more threatening. Compared to these, CO2 emissions seem like little more than a gentle sigh in the breeze. (Oh, wait…)
Then, in recalling that the wind only blows and the sun only shines some of the time, and in realising wind and solar still don’t provide much bang for buck in terms of energy output, corporations and governments will continuously try to cheat the logic of sustainability by greenwashing the sh*t out of other destructive energy sources:
They would build ever bigger elevated dams for hydropower, disrupting hydrological cycles and releasing “methane bombs” by flooding forests and farmland (note: the construction of dams is the biggest anthropogenic source of methane emissions, which is a greenhouse gas about 84x more potent that CO2.)
Following in step with the posterchildren for green transition, the EU and especially Germany, our governments would re-brand biofuels – which basically means the wholesale chopping and burning of forests and the raising of monocultural crops to burn – as “sustainable”.
A little caveat here: In 2021, biofuel accounted for about 60% of EU renewable energy production, much of it imported as wood pellets from the once-biodiverse forests felled on the other side of the Atlantic in the USA’s southeast. Meanwhile, in Germany, a total of 2 million hectares, laden with fossil fuel-based synthetic fertilisers, is devoted to growing biofuel crops – that’s 17% of total arable land, and 6% of total land in Germany. Oh, and never mind that burning biofuel actually produces 15-20% more carbon emissions than burning coal – because the forests and crops can theoretically regrow, it’s called “renewable” and “net zero”.
Nuclear power plants and their uranium mines would also join the list of so-called “green” solutions.
This too is worth a caveat: The half-life for nuclear waste in the form of plutonium isotopes is about 24,000 years. So, no matter how many holes you dig and no matter how deep they go, there’s no sure-fire way of disposing of this highly toxic by-product in a sound way. We’re talking geologic time scales – the Earth’s crust could literally shift in that time.
Unfortunately, much of the climate movement is not aware of how all of these supremely destructive developments hitch a ride on their banners for “Climate Action Now”. Without context, those words pave the way for the scaling up and speeding up of industrial extraction, spelling a death sentence for ecosystems and communities across the planet.
So, then, what on earth do we do about the climate?
Of course we need action on climate change. I even begrudgingly accept that some level of material extraction and industrial development for new power installations is going to be part of this action, in order to provide for real human energy needs. I am willing to have those hard discussions about what kind of flawed, polluting technologies should be employed.
However, I am totally unwilling to have those conversations within the current framing. We must drop the idea of “transitioning” the current global economy – with its outlandish and unnecessary and absurd and expanding energy demands – to new energy sources.
Rather, the first point of call for any conversation about climate action or renewable energy needs to be a radical re-assessment of what our real energy needs are. Let’s look squarely at the question: How do we create a good quality of life for people while using precious resources and energy wisely?
At this juncture, there’s an important observation: the current global system is categorically failing us, and not only on the resource-management side of things. It is failing us on the quality-of-life metric, too.
The global techno-economy has uprooted communities, undone local economies, and trashed systems of food, fibre and energy that worked better. It has spurred seismic demographic shifts, and created a situation where people are, by no choice of their own, working harder than ever to live unfulfilling and unhealthy lives, even as they are cornered into using and wasting more and more resources per capita.
Under this global system, we feed ourselves with nutrient-poor food packed twice in plastic; food which has often been highly processed and shipped from the other side of the world, and grown using fertiliser synthesised from fossil fuels. Urbanisation has pushed more and more of us into concrete high-rise buildings (and let’s not forget that the production of cement alone contributes 7% of global emissions). It has left us socially isolated and dependent on the never-ending infrastructure project of ever bigger dams, wider roads, elevated highways, longer distance trade and transmission lines, ever fuller dumps… the list goes on. It’s a chronic situation. The planet hates it. And it’s not making people happy either.
So, flip the coin, and we are left with an elegant proposition. Moving away from this system offers us the chance not only to massively reduce resource- and energy-use, but to simultaneously do a much better job of meeting people’s real needs.
With this in mind, I propose a very different framework for understanding “climate action”.
Before we talk about renewable energy, we accept the need to halt urbanisation, combat consumerism, and reverse policies that expand global trade and centralised corporate control. We curtail these, the underlying dynamics of unsustainability that drive the global economy. For example:
We call out the practice of redundant trade, whereby countries routinely import and export near-identical quantities of identical products. We stop promoting trade for trade’s sake.
We direct funding towards lighter, decentralised, regional infrastructures, rather than heavy, centralised, urbanising infrastructures. Investments in business, culture and education are used to create good livelihoods in regional areas.
We redirect economic incentives – like subsidies, tax-breaks, regulations and investments – away from export-oriented mass-production, and towards lower-input diversified production for local and regional needs first.
We restrict ads and messages that encourages consumerism, and outlaw practices like built-in obsolescence in product design.
We renegotiate the debt packages and free-trade treaties that have locked nation states into a treadmill of industrial development and globalisation.
Most inspiringly, we begin a process of decentralising/localising economic activity, making communities more responsible and accountable to their resource base, spurring the development and/or revival of lower-impact, locally adapted techniques for the production of food/fibre/energy. This process can revive and empower a diverse multiplicity of cultures, local economies and knowledge systems that are fit for solving the energetic problems of their own specific contexts.
Once the climate movement has accepted that need to scale down, slow down and re-localise economic activity as its first point of call, then we can talk about how to use our precious minerals and energy technologies in ways that actually meet real needs and enhance quality of life.