What Do You Do When the Lights Go Out?

Or, It’s All Over Baby Blue

Flooding.

Drought.

Hurricanes.

Wildfires.

Heat domes.

Arctic vortices.

Growing season changes.

Habitat loss for beneficial insects, like pollinators.

Crop failure.

Mass human migration.

Climate change is unleashing a mind-blowing Pandora’s box of horrifying and unintended consequences, not just the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, and droughts that are commonly associated with the climate crisis in the popular press.

The greenhouse gases that we’ve been belching unchecked into our atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution are forcing rising sea levels, killer wildfires, wildly altered precipitation patterns, and myriad far-reaching impacts on human health, agriculture, and the economy - some of which we aren’t even able to predict right now, but are likely to include horrifying new pandemics, mass human migration, and even broad-scale civilizational collapse.

Climate change is not just weather. It’s not just a few days or weeks of uncomfortable heat during the summer - or minor seasonal burn bans - or a few more hurricanes in Florida. And what we are experiencing now isn’t “the new normal.” The “new normal” is everything getting worse - and worse - and worse - and worse, with no end in sight, as long as you and your children live.

Climate change is all encompassing. Nothing - and nobody - will escape it. Remember, everything on Planet Earth takes place INSIDE the climate. Every garden planted, every journey taken, every baby born, every home purchased, every healthcare decision made, every corner shop opened, every wedding planned, every love affair, funeral, first day of school, heinous crime, fond hope and dizzying magical dream.

Nowhere is safe, even if from some perspectives, in the short term, some changes might initially seem benign (warmer winters in Minnesota, for example). And nowhere is safe even if you are a toxic narcissist of a billionaire who has bought a private island in the North Sea, hardened it, dug an elaborate bunker, and fortified it with state-of-the-art security and a shark-infested moat.

So it is difficult to overstate what it means when David Suzuki, legendary naturalist and venerable host of CBC’s The Nature of Things, says we’ve lost the battle over climate change.

Suzuki is unflinching.

Public concern (about the climate) in the late 1980s was right at the top and we had the first international conference on the atmosphere in 1988, where there were 300 people, over 40 governments, environmentalists, scientists, private sector people, you name it.

At the end of that conference, they said global warming represented a threat to humanity, second only to global nuclear war. If the world had followed the conclusions from that conference, we would not have the problem we face today and we would have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives.

Now, it is too late.

I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and Johan Rockström, the Swedish scientist who heads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. As long as humans, like any other animal, live within those nine constraints, we can do it forever, and that includes the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the pH of the oceans, the amount of available fresh water, the nitrogen cycle, etc.

I’m saying, as an environmentalist, we have failed to shift the narrative and we are still caught up in the same legal, economic and political systems.

For me, what we’ve got to do now is hunker down. The units of survival are going to be local communities, so I’m urging local communities to get together.

Please read that again. “The units of survival.” If that does not rivet you, and freeze your very bones, then…

I have not posted to this Substack for over a month. I haven’t had a goddamned thing to say. The political world has been, to put it mildly, on fire, and problems of terrible and immediate human urgency - the loss of American democracy, genocide in Gaza, ongoing war in Europe, bombing runs on Iran’s nuclear facilities - have crowded out any wider discussion of the climate crisis.

What is there to say? In the popular media we’ve moved, in just a couple of years, from arguing over whether “climate change is real” and carefully both-sides-ing the topic, to newscasters blithely mentioning climate change as they run cheery local stories of gardeners in Sussex replacing their rose gardens (it’s too hot and dry for roses now) with Mediterranean rock gardens featuring heat-hardy shrubs and herbs.

Where I am in the UK, members of Parliament argue about “net zero” (a shocking fiction) - and I think, “At least they are talking about it!” Because in the United States, where I hail from, it’s still an angrily argued contention among the unlettered, fascist-friendly, gurning, grifting ghouls in the GOP that “climate change is a religion.” And not one they believe in.

Meanwhile, we head into fall, and COP29, where it is certain that no agreements will be reached and nothing will be done to slow or reduce emissions. Why, I wonder, are they even bothering?

Why, for all that, am I bothering to write here, particularly under that silly Climate Revolution Now banner?

I’m figuring it out. I am trying to find community. I am searching for ways to be useful. I am hoping to be able to provide insights, and help… of some as-yet-unspecified kind… in the fight that now needs to be undertaken to save at least something, and some of us, as we head together into the bellowing, unknowable, and shattering storm.