Addressing climate change: why we need courage more than hope
The night of Dec 12, 2015, was clear and cold in Paris. As I took a seat in the front row of the UN climate conference negotiating hall, I could feel both hope and anxiety crackling through the room like a live electrical wire.
I’d been awake for 20 hours already, but pumped with adrenaline, I didn’t feel tired. I served as the climate speechwriter for the head of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, and tonight would be when 20 years of negotiations culminated in a global agreement on the greatest challenge of our time: climate change.
The gavel came down, the Paris Agreement was adopted, and the room exploded in whoops of joy and incredulity. I jumped up and hugged the person next to me, former Irish President Mary Robinson on my right, and a “sustainability” executive from a European energy company on my left hugged me. Al Gore was a few chairs away, immediately on his phone. Such was the marriage of strange bedfellows that gave birth to the Paris Agreement a decade ago.
“What was once unthinkable has now become unstoppable,” I wrote in the Secretary-General’s speech. The unthinkable: collective global action by 194 countries and the EU, anchored in national plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Hope was the air we breathed, and hope was what everyone in that room needed and wanted after years of entrenched arguments, denial, and delay.
A decade on, there has been some significant progress. The uptake of renewable energy has been wildly successful. Cities across the globe have gone greener. Citizens the world over have mobilized – young people in particular.
However, the scent of Parisian hope is no longer in the air. Emissions continue to rise. Temperature records are set, then broken, as the planet heats up. US-China cooperation on climate change, pivotal for securing the Paris Agreement, has vanished with the Trump Administration’s withdrawal not only from the UN talks, but from consensus climate science itself.
Negotiations in Belem, Brazil, ended not with a bang, but a whimper. Overall progress on meeting the 1.5C goal has been too little, too late. The world is now heading toward nearly twice that amount – 2.8C – over the next 75 years – a single lifetime.
We are far from the promised land, still wandering in the wilderness of fossil fuel emissions that we know are the cause of rising temperatures, shifting populations, increased wildfires, floods, droughts, melting glaciers, rising seas and rapidly melting poles.
Ten years on, I still work on climate change, though from a much different perch outside the UN. My work now focuses on encouraging countries to develop global guardrails and guidelines for solar geoengineering, a highly controversial, climate altering technology, born of desperation. If used at scale, it could quickly turn down the global thermostat and potentially alleviate suffering in the coming decades for millions of people who live in areas of extreme heat and other climate impacts. But it could also usher in serious risks – environmental, geopolitical, governance, and ethical. More publicly accountable research is needed to answer gaping holes in our knowledge, which has implications for not only our own species, but thousands of others as well.
I went into this field for one simple reason: fear, not hope. I was – and still am – frightened by the thought that one day, some actor somewhere might decide to use these technologies without adequate responsible research and safeguards in place. At present, there is nothing in international law that would explicitly prohibit the use of solar geoengineering.
To be clear, solar geoengineering is not a solution. It does nothing to address the cause of climate change, and is not a substitute for all the actions we should be taking, but haven’t at the scale and speed needed. There is also an understandable fear on the part of governments that geoengineering might seem like a quick techno-fix and divert attention and funding from what we must do, regardless: decarbonize the global economy as quickly as possible and strengthen adaptation. So we are back to square one again: fixing the problem at root.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that the question I’m most often asked hasn’t changed since my UN days: do I have hope?
I know the answer audiences want me to give. To say anything but this is unthinkable. And yet, I cannot say what they want to hear.
How can I not have hope? My husband and I named our daughter Hope, in memory of a brave family friend. Surely, I must understand that doom and gloom don’t win people over.
So here’s what I say now when asked the hope question, echoing a brilliant young climate scientist: Ten years after Paris, hope is the wrong question.
The question we need to ask ourselves is this: Do we have courage? Do we have the courage to speak the truth – and act as if it mattered?
Do I have the courage to say things that are deeply unpopular and unwanted, but true: there are no risk-free options ahead of us when it comes to climate change. No one wants to hear that.
Geoengineering is certainly not risk-free. But neither is business as usual. Today at 1.4C, climate impacts are exceeding scientists’ estimates of even a few years ago.
Do we have the courage to speak the truth about the climate crisis, and not engage in magical thinking, either by the techno-optimists or the ‘green consumerism’ crowd? Do we have the courage to stand up to autocrats who refute consensus science, and to challenge the fossil fuel industry with its delays, denials and deceptions?
It starts with courage, but it doesn’t end there. We need compassion and social cohesion as well.
With climate impacts increasing, compassion must be at the root of an equitable response. Those who have done least to cause the climate crisis are suffering first and worst from its harms. Our response must not stop with words, but with cash – lots of it. Nothing close to what’s needed is now on offer.
And finally, will we foster the social cohesion needed to successfully retrain workers and ensure that combatting climate change doesn’t pit one sector of society against another?
The opposite of hope is not despair, but inaction. The climate is changing because we are not – not with the urgency needed to avoid massive suffering this century for tens of millions of people. Not just people in faraway places, but on our own shores.
Despair at least identifies that which is worth caring – and despairing – about. Hope helps spur action, but do we need hope to act?
I honestly don’t think about hope in my work. There’s too much to do. Isn’t doing the right thing, regardless of the outcome, enough, as one young climate activist asked recently? Do we act only if we’re sure the outcome might be favorable? If that were the case, the Paris Agreement would never have happened.
Ten years after that jubilant night in Paris, I still stand by the words I penned for the Secretary-General’s speech:
“When historians look back on this day, they will say that global cooperation to secure a future safe from climate change took a dramatic new turn here in Paris.”
Paris represented a new turn, a rare moment of global solidarity, and thus hope. But it doesn’t end with hope. Our task now is to get on with the hard work that courage requires of us, for this and future generations.
Article originally published on LinkedIn .
