Primary Concerns

OK, Maryland has a primary election next week. Let’s go over the hopefuls from a climate perspective–while there ARE other important issues, none of the others are the business of this blog. And, you know, without effective climate action, none of the other issues are going to make much difference.

Most of you are probably not in my voting district, or even if Maryland, so just consider this an example of how to look up information if you haven’t had your primary yet–and essentially the same process works for the general election.

Start by searching online for sample ballots for the relevant election. Ballotopedia is a good source. You put in your address and it figures out who will be on the ballot in your district. Ballotopedia also provides basic information on each candidate, but you can search for additional information. For any who have prior legislative experience, the League of Conservation Voters will provide a score on environmental issues. For those without a score, you can look up their campaign website (though of course campaign promises have to be taken with salt), or do on online search for news stories and articles about the candidate and climate change.

Presidential Race

There are five people listed for the presidential race: Joe Biden, Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, Nikkie Halley, and Donald Trump. The latter two are contending for the Republican nomination–although Halley has suspended her campaign. The other three are Democratic contenders. As far as I can tell, Phillips and Williamson are still in, which surprises me as I had not heard of either of them being in to begin with.

I am not going to bother profiling Donald Trump as he is a vocal climate denier, nor will I profile Halley, as she has dropped out.

Joe Biden

President Biden’s record on climate has been good but not great–though it’s worth remembering that his efforts have been significantly undermined by Congressional Republicans. His record would have been substantially better otherwise. His lifetime score with the League of Conservation Voters for his legislative work was 83%, which is pretty good. He has shown himself willing to listen to activists, taking stands on climate issues because environmentalists push him to do so. That’s a very good sign.

Dean Phillips

Mr. Phillips is a businessman from the Midwest who has served three terms in Congress and is running for president on a largely economic platform. His record with the League of Conservation Voters is good, and would have been better had he not missed a number of important votes because he was campaigning. While he has made votes that LCV considers “anti-environmental,” these have been very few. He appears to be a good Congressman, but as a presidential candidate he has attracted precisely no attention. I am not sure he is even still running, but his campaign website is still active.

Marianne Williams

Ms. Williams has no prior political history. Her campaign website does address climate change, asserting the importance of climate action, and laying out an ambitious series of admirable but extremely vague goals. It’s not clear she has any idea how to accomplish any of it. Again, her campaign has attracted no attention whatever, but her website is still active.

U.S. Senate Race

Maryland’s Senator Cardin is retiring, and there are NINE people contending for the Democratic nomination to succeed him, and seven for the Republican nomination. I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t profile all of them but focus on those thought to have a serious chance of winning their respective primaries.

Angela Alsobrooks

Ms. Alsobrooks is the current County Executive of Prince George’s County. She has focused on issues including education, veteran’s services, and improving the economy. Her website’s section on climate change is short but concrete and practical, promising to support specific policies and programs. She has also been endorsed by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network Action Fund. She is a Democrat.

David Trone

Mr. Trone is currently a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. As such, he has an excellent record with the League of Conservation Voters, a 96% lifetime score. He is a self-funded candidate with deep resources of his own, and is proud of not needing to depend on donors. He is a Democrat, although he has also been supporting Republican candidates in other states.

Larry Hogan

Larry Hogan is a former governor of Maryland. He has no legislative record, but the League of Conservation Voters did do a detailed assessment of his governorship, giving him letter grades in four different areas. He got two Ds, a C, and a B-. The group also noticed that he made some strong, pro-environment statements but did not strongly follow up on them. He is not an anti-environment candidate which is why I am profiling him. He is by no means a climate hawk, but for someone voting in the Republican primary who cares about the issue, he’s your guy.

Other Republicans

There are several other aspirants to the Republican candidacy, but none of them have much to say about climate change.

U.S. House of Representatives

The District 1 House race–the one I vote in–has an incumbent in the person of Republican Andy Harris. There are two other Republicans vying with him to be the candidate, but neither appears to be attracting media attention. Mr. Harris has made pro-environment public statements, but his lifetime score with the LCV is two percent. One of his challengers is on record as saying environmental problems are best left to the private sector.

There are two people vying for the Democratic candidacy. Blane Miller III has not made any information about himself. Blessing Oluwadare has been somewhat more forthcoming, but nothing comes up related to climate change for either of them.

So these races will have to be decided on some basis other than climate concerns.

Why This Book?

My climate change book group read How Civil Wars Start recently. At first glance, it doesn’t look like a good fit for the topic, but actually it’s perfect and important.

To briefly summarize– apparently there is a lot of scholarship out there on what countries have in common right before the outbreak of civil wars, the statistically-important risk factors. The more of these risk factors a country has, the more likely it is to have a civil war soon. There is some scholarly understanding of why these factors matter, but the factors are derived from data analysis, not from speculation. Anyway, the author, Ms. Walter, summarizes and presents this scholarship in a clear and accessible way, using various historical situations to illustrate her point–and also argues that the United States of America shows all the signs of being on the brink.

The full title of the book is How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, but the stopping them part is a short section at the end that contains nothing that isn’t obvious to someone who has read the rest of the book. For example, she says that a deterioration of government services is a risk factor, and so among the tips she offers at the end is Improve the quality of government services. OK, how? How am I, Caroline Ailanthus, supposed to do that? And even if I were in a position to directly change policy and procedure, it’s worth noting that America has not experienced a deterioration in services by pure accident–a great many people have fought hard to prevent the deterioration, and have simply been out-fought by people who wanted services to deteriorate. How should we who wish to prevent civil war deal with that? Ms. Walter doesn’t say.

It’s worth noting that her advice, unlike the rest of the book, does not appear to be based on statistical data analysis–she does not suggest anyone has looked for answers to countries that had the warning signs and avoided war, to see what they did. Have there been any such countries? I suspect the advice is simply tacked on as an after-thought to make the book more palatable. More on that shortly.

While I’m offering criticism, I should admit that while Ms. Walter’s central points seem solid, some of her secondary, supporting points are at best poorly-phrased. For example, every country can be placed somewhere on a continuum between autocracy and democracy, with a zone in the middle called anocracy that is particularly risky for civil war. Well, Ms. Walter states that the US is now closer to anocracy than it has been at any other time since 1793.

Really?

Now, our country well may be more something it hasn’t been since 1793, and I’m sure it’s not good, but on the face of it “closer to anocracy” seems like it must mean “less democratic,” and there is no way we are less democratic now than we have been at any time since 1793, given that in 1794 (and for many years after) there were laws preventing women, black people, poor people, and immigrants from voting.

But let’s talk about climate change.

There are several very good reasons why anybody concerned about climate change should also be concerned about civil war, particularly civil war in the United States.

• There is NOTHING so bad that the mighty American war machine turned against itself will not make worse. Look up some stats on what happened last time and then consider that since then we’ve largely forgotten how to be polite and we’ve invented nuclear weapons.
• More specifically, if the United States has a second civil war, do you really think there will be meaningful American climate action during the war? Do you really think the rest of the world can avert catastrophe without America’s participation?
• If the United States has a second civil war, the people who get hurt the most will be the same people already most vulnerable to climate change. The hurts will multiply.
• According to Ms. Walter, crises often escalate to war through a process of mutually-reinforcing polarization wherein factions form, and each faction becomes convinced that the other poses an existential threat that must be defended against–and the defense further feeds other faction’s fear, which in turn…. And very few people who get involved in this process understand what is happening until it is too late. In America, concern about climate change has largely been consigned to a single side of what is increasingly an us/them divide. To the extent that we treat that divide as real–that we identify as “us,” opposing and opposed by “them,” we prepare for and foment civil war.
• It’s possible to argue–and I have argued–that the present political movement towards autocracy and fascism in America has as its primary and ultimate aim the prevention of meaningful climate action.

Simply put, if America has another civil war, it will be fought over climate action (whatever the people who first start shooting think they are shooting about), and the climate will lose (regardless of what the people who emerge victorious say they want). And our good intentions alone will not prevent us from making the situation worse or being used by others to make the situation worse.

Ms. Walter doesn’t know how to stop it. I don’t either. But, like her, I consider reading up on how civil wars start a good place to begin.

Why I Write Novels

The other day, I was telling a friend that sometimes it feels like the best thing I can do for the planet is to write novels. It doesn’t make sense. It feels almost like an admission of despair. But it’s also a kind of desperate, audacious hope.

To my surprise, she said the same.

In fact, we are writing about very similar themes and ideas, though in different ways. I’d known that. I hadn’t known about why she was doing it.

“I’m hoping to be the opposite of The Turner Diaries,” she said. “As much bad as that book has done, that’s as much good as I hope my book does that much good.”

“I hope mine is kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” I replied. “When Harriet Beecher Stowe me Abraham Lincoln, he said ‘so you’re the little woman who started this big war.'”

So, if we’re both being audacious, maybe we’re not far off?

Looking to Easter

Technically, this is last-week’s post. I mean, it’s a re-post from previous years that I should have re-posted last week but didn’t because I was busy being way too anxious. Enjoy.

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Easter is the commemoration of the death of a political prisoner at the hands of the State. I’ve always found the thought of Jesus-as-activist much more intriguing than the possibility of His resurrection–which might be because I’m not Christian, but I know dedicated Christians who seem to feel the same way. It’s a fact that being a good person can be dangerous. It’s also true that we keep having good people anyway.

I’ve decided to honor the incontrovertible miracle of bravery in the face of persecution by acknowledging climate change martyrs–scientists who are being harassed, even threatened, because of their work on climate. Some may be murdered, if the problem persists. They keep working.

The harassment goes back to the mid-1990’s, but has been increasing in recent years. Examples taken from the various articles I read for this piece (and have linked to) include: threats to “see to it” that a scientist would be fired; vague threats on a scientist’s children’s safety; the deposit of a dead rat on a scientist’s doorstep; the display of a noose by an audience member during a public talk by a climate scientist; and multiple, spurious accusations of fraud or other wrongdoing on the part of climate scientists.

That last may seem less frightening than the physical threats, but it’s actually much more sinister. After all, it is illegal to physically attack someone, so the chance of anyone actually making good on a death threat are very low–but it is not illegal to file so many Freedom of Information Act requests or legal challenges over the use of government money that the target cannot conduct research.

Some researchers are becoming afraid to speak out on climate change, sometimes asking that their names not be associated with their work. Others labor on behind locks that have been changed and phone numbers that have been de-listed. This is happening.

Curiously, the problem is largely American. Australian climate scientists have also been harassed, but not on the scale of what their American counterparts have had to deal with. And while Canada has had a serious problem with high-level climate denial in the past, it never bubbled over into organized harassment of scientists. Britain and continental Europe and Japan have seen little of the problem, although scientists there are very concerned for their American and Australian colleagues. Climate-denial in general is specific to the English-speaking world, at least in part because organized climate denial is propagated largely by American organizations–that speak English. That the United States is at the center of the problem should, perhaps, not be much of a surprise. After all, the United States is key to global climate action–without American leadership, meaningful emissions reduction is unlikely to happen. With American leadership, we have a chance. And since the only way to accomplish meaningful emissions reduction is to stop burning fossil fuel, if I owned a boatload of stock in the fossil fuel industries and had no conscience whatsoever, I’d try to take out American interest in climate. Wouldn’t you? And, clearly, attacking American climate scientists is part of that effort.

The recent rise in harassment dates to over ten years ago, when two events occurred in quick succession: the release of the 2007 IPCC Report, which seemed on the verge of triggering meaningful climate action in the United States; and the election of a black man as President of the United States. The latter made possible the rise of the Tea Party, a movement that is demonstrably fueled by racist resentment rather than ideological concerns about government and yet is funded by the Koch brothers (plus Rupert Murdock), oilmen whose personal racism (do an internet search on “are the Kochs racist?”) is obviously less important than their investment in preventing climate action–they also fund the Heartland Institute, which is a major driver of American climate denial.

That the American version of hostility to climate action became deeply enmeshed with suspicion of government over-reach at the same time that the government was headed by a black man may not be a complete coincidence.

I do not raise the specter of racism simply to discredit climate deniers, but rather to suggest a mechanism whereby American conservative populism may have been hijacked and made to serve an anti-environmentalist agenda.

Some attacks on climate scientists–and by “attacks” I mean everything from threats to legal action to deliberate bureaucratic nonsense–have been perpetrated by individuals, others by organized climate-denier groups. Some of the most frightening, to me, anyway, come from government officials, including Lamar Smith, the (now former) Chair of the Science Committee of the US House of Representatives, and (now former) Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli.

Scientists themselves are not passive before all of this, and are fighting back, both individually and collectively. The Union of Concerned Scientists particularly is taking action, but needs money, and possibly other support. They need money with which to fight spurious lawsuits and stave off equally spurious bureaucratic demands which, together, might otherwise stop American climate scientists from working. I’m posting a link to their request again, here. Please support them.

Silencing inconvenient people is not an American thing to do–and when it happens anyway, the American thing to do is to stand up and do something about it.

I chose “Ideas Are Bullet-proof” as title for the original version of this post. It’s a quote from the movie, V for Vendetta. The bad-guy has the hero riddled with bullets, and yet the hero does not fall but ultimately triggers the fall of the corrupt and authoritarian government–because while the hero is not personally immortal, ideas cannot be murdered. I had occasion to remember the quote recently–a friend of mine, a political organizer and activist and a deeply religious man, wrote something on Facebook that, knowing him as I do, reminded me of the ultimate futility of trying to erase ideas by attacking inconvenient people.

I have just asked his permission to share his post with you:

A few minutes before Easter. I love this annual celebration of the underlying reality that empires can’t kill the Spirit, and that a spiritual wholeness is resurrected every time we take loving and wise action in the world around us. I see the life of Jesus as one of the most powerful patterns and examples of radical faithfulness. Miracles continue to happen. Blessed be.

Nasty Things

Last week, on a cold, sunny day, my husband and I went over to Ocean City to where Representative Andy Harris was holding a public hearing on a proposed wind farm off the Maryland coast. The wind farm has been controversial for years, now, with critics complaining that the turbines might ruin the view from the beach of the resort community or that they might cause some sort of environmental problem. I do not see much value in those arguments personally, though I admit I have not made myself an expert in these issues. The problem with the hearing is that all of the people slated to speak belonged to the same side of the controversy–they all were against the wind farm. My husband and I saw a violation of due process there.

So we went to embody the other side of the controversy ourselves.

It was an organized demonstration, although a small one, and smaller even than I expected. A few people stood at the entrance to the parking lot, holding signs. By the door of the venue, my husband and I stood with two young men who were holding signs about Representative Harris being “in bed with big oil.” We did not go inside to hear the speakers. We stood by the door as people went in. Once people stopped coming in, we left. We had other things to do.

The thing I want to talk about is how the people acted when they saw us.

A few were supportive, giving us thumbs up or briefly murmured praise. Many didn’t acknowledge us at all, which was to be expected. But a large minority heckled us.

…………………………………….

“How much are they paying you?”

Nothing

“Well, then you’re idiots.”

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“Assholes”

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“Are you afraid to show your faces or are you afraid of the China bug?”

Neither. It’s twenty degrees out. We don’t want our faces to freeze.

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“You’re in bed with big wind!”

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“There’s a lot more of us than there are of you!”

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“YOU’RE using petroleum! It’s in your clothes, in your cars….”

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“I HOPE he’s in bed with big oil!”

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And so on. That last one especially puzzled me–you want your political leaders to be corrupt? That’s what “in bed with” means. I mean, me, I don’t just want my leaders to agree with me, I want them to be ethical while they’re at it.

None of them stopped to talk with us, they only heckled us as they went by.

I don’t like being heckled, taunted, insulted. Nobody does. I didn’t get my feelings hurt or anything, though. It so clearly wasn’t about me as an individual, and I don’t look for personal affirmation from people who like political corruption anyway. I was, of course, discouraged by the presence of so many people apparently committed to an agenda I don’t like.

But most of all I was bewildered by the venom, the willingness of these people to verbally attack strangers over a political disagreement.

I am deeply disturbed.

I have just seen on the local news that the company that had agreed to build the wind farm has pulled out of the project for economic reasons. I don’t know whether to controversy played any role in the decision. It might not have. The Governor has expressed continued interest in offshore wind as part of the state’s plan to switch to all-renewable energy.

Intervention

I don’t usually say this sort of thing, but Donald Trump really should not be on any ballots. He’s already won one caucus. He should not participate in any others.

I don’t say this lightly.

In a democracy, the people have a right to vote for whom they want, even if I do not personally like the result. I might encourage the choice I think best, but I would never suppress or obstruct the alternative. But this is different. Donald Trump attempted to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power–he attempted to falsify election results and, when that failed, sicced a violent mob on the US capitol. For him to be allowed to run again is to say that doing all that is OK, that the American people have the option to elect someone who has attempted to undermine an election.

And no, we shouldn’t be allowed to do that. We should not have the option to end our democracy.

To be very clear: if America elects a president substantially similar to Mr. Trump, I shall be sad and worried, but I would not consider it an immediately existential thread for our country. Were it in my power, I would not keep such a person off the ballot. On the other hand, if Mr. Trump has full ballot access and is defeated, I shall feel a bit relieved but only for the short-term–the existential crisis will still exist.

Contact your election officials. Ask them to deny Mr. Trump ballot access (or encourage them to hold strong if they are already trying to deny him). Contact the election officials of other states, too. Do whatever you can. Ask your friends. Please.

What has this to do with climate change?

When Donald Trump jokes about being a dictator (for one day!), he says he’s going to “drill, drill, drill.”

All Hands on Deck

There’s a lot of climate news goes on right now, but I’m going to wait until the current climate conference finishes before trying to summarize it and comment on it.

Meanwhile….

For years now, the idea that the United States might fall–either into totalitarianism or into civil war–has been the subject of whispers, jokes, and far-fetched dystopic fiction. But in the past month or so the conversation has shifted. I’m hearing serious, not-especially-partizan people say it out loud:

My country is at serious risk. Do an online search on “United States vulnerable to civil war” and see how many articles come up. It’s probably beyond the scope of this blog to go too far into a discussion about how and why we’re vulnerable–but you know, don’t you?

And one of the scariest parts is that Donald Trump could re-take the presidency. This is the man who made a serious attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power, culminating in his inciting an insurrection and siccing a lynch-mob on his own vice-president. He could re-take the presidency–and is now openly using fascist language in his speeches. He is promising to hurt people.

Dammit, people fought and died over this crap already.

I was raised…to believe this could not happen, it could not be a serious concern. The story of America is one of an ever-closer approach to our national ideals, a process that is by no means complete but it’s not over either. The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, and the goodguys always win. But the story of history, any country’s history, is not pre-written. Nothing is certain until it happens, until we make it happen, or until we let it happen.

Need I remind you that if the United States falls, the possibility of meaningful climate action falls with it?

Do whatever you have to. If you don’t like Democrats, fine, but there is nothing Joe Biden, or any other Democrat, could possibly do that could be worse than what a fascist demagogue would. I’ve said before–if you want to support outsider politicians, the place to do it is not in symbolic moonshots at national office. The best you can do there is nothing. Send your “third-party” candidates to local and state races. The might win and can make a real difference even in “small” offices–which they can use to springboard onto bigger things. But for the presidency? If you can vote in Republican primaries, vote for the front runner who isn’t Trump. If he wins the nomination anyway, vote for the leading contender who isn’t him in the general. I’m serious.

And between now and then, use your money, your voice, your hands, and your feet to support voter access efforts and get-out-the-vote efforts. Only a minority of Americans really want Trump. If everybody who doesn’t votes, he can be defeated. This isn’t going to be about convincing anybody to like a candidate they don’t–it’s about getting everybody to vote.

This might be our last chance.

March

Photo by Glen Carrie on UnsplashPhoto by Glen Carrie on Unsplash

This past weekend, my mother and I returned to New York City for another climate march. The idea was to put pressure on President Biden to show stronger leadership on getting off fossil fuels, but the specifics mattered let to us than showing up for the planet.

For the big climate marches I’ve been to before, both in New York and in DC, it’s been obvious, at least on the subway and even once on the road that Something Big was afoot—more people moving, and many of them carrying signs or wearing costumes. This time we spotted no such indications until we came out of the station a block or so from the assembly point and were greeted by an organizer in an orange safety vest.

“Climate march, that way,” she repeated at intervals so that everyone coming up the stairs would know.

Then we did see other marchers, coming together carrying signs and banners and so forth, moving in multiple, gradually combining streams. The day was fine, cool but sunny, and the mood of the crowd felt festive and familiar. Mom bought and ice cream cone. We jumped in to the human flood.

Standing for Climate

My mother says that a good part of a march is always more of a stand, and the bigger the march, the long the stand must be. Of course, participants must wait until the pre-arranged starting time to get going, but also the people at the back can’t start moving until the people in front of them get out of the way, and they in turn can’t start until the people of them do…. Movement propagates gradually from the front of the group towards the back, and although the delay from one person in line to the next is only a few seconds, if the line is long enough, that can add up.

The last time we attended a climate march in this city, the movement didn’t reach back to us until forty-five minutes after the scheduled start time—and we weren’t even close to the back. But that was a much bigger march than this one. Even from our own limited point of view, we can see that the crowd is narrower and much less dense, and the way the march has been organized also suggested a smaller expected turn-out.

Anyway, we do have to stand around for a while. We chat with our immediate neighbors and look around at the signs and banners and so forth. The sights and sounds are familiar—the same signs, the same chants, the same small bands of people playing upon drums made of empty five-gallon plastic drums hung by strings around the players’ necks…. I do not smell cannabis (until later), but do catch whiffs of coconut and, faintly, patchouli. Gender variance, though not dramatized in any particular way, is seen and accepted without question. There are babies in backpacks, large and friendly dogs, elders who probably began protesting in the 1960s and never stopped…. Well over half the crowd appears to be women.

There is a contingent carrying XR flags. There are some signs from Riverkeepers. There are a number of people carrying monarch butterfly signs as well as someone carrying a huge butterfly puppet on her back. There is a group shouting about the importance of vegetarianism. Someone’s got a t-shirt calling for the freedom of Julian Assange. A man gives me a card warning me that “they” are going after our right to boycott and our first amendment rights. And on and on.

“I get the feeling that all liberal and progressive marches are actually the same march,” I tell my mother. “Same issues, same signs, same chants, regardless of the plans of the organizers. Each march is just another temporary assembly of March Nation.”

She agrees.

An organizer with a megaphone shouts some call-and-response chants, and I join in on a few.

What do we want?

Climate justice!

When do we want it?

Now!

If we don’t get it?

Shut it down!

If we don’t get it?

Shut it down!

If we don’t get it?

Shut it down!

If. We. Don’t. Get. It?

Shut. It. Down!

“I’m not really comfortable shouting ‘shut it down’ if I don’t know what ‘it’ is,” says Mom. I opine that while the chant would never do as a legally enforceable policy statement, I find it vague but not incomprehensible.

The “it” is whatever’s causing the hold-up. The “it” is whatever must be boycotted, blocked, or—quite possibly—broken in order to get the climate justice we demand. The chant is a close cousin to another (which I do not hear at this march but have heard at others); know justice: know peace. No justice: no peace! It’s an open promise to flex the muscle of we, the people.

I hear this sort of quasi-militant optimism at every assembly of the Eternal Progressive March, and I have yet to see anything shut down in a more than brief and symbolic way. The Ents cry in grief and shock “but these trees were my friends…the Ents are going to war!” And then, here in real life, they don’t, and meanwhile Sauruman just keeps making more uruk-hai. It may be true, as in the popular chant, that The people! united! will never be defeated! But the people don’t unite very often.

Onward!

Ahead, we can hear a vast, throbbing beat and occasional singing, shouting, or rapping. People mill about, waving signs and chanting. There’s no telling how many people may be ahead of us, but we do seem to be very near the back. My mother will almost certainly have to stop and rest along the way, so while the march as a whole waits stationary, we move ahead so that when we stop we won’t be left behind.

Moving, we pass through different neighborhoods of the Nation, as it were, new signs, new costumes, new chants, but always the same march. The music is coming from a pink bus with a small but very full dance floor on top from which a woman DJ calls out to the crowd. “Glinda the Good Bus” is written upon its side. Finally, everybody gets moving.

We don’t know what the route is or how long it might be. Being in the middle of a big march means basically not knowing what’s going on. You’re just within March Nation. Sometimes we stop and then go again, and we don’t know why—eventually, we realize that traffic police occasionally stop our progress at street-crossings so that cars can get through. Pigeons sail overhead.

It seems from many of the signs that President Biden is the adversary of the moment, the person to whom our demonstration is most specifically addressed, though he is not the hold-up—while his policy goals might not be as aggressive as we need, his political rivals have been blocking even many of the changes he’s tried to make, and it is those blockages, not Mr. Biden, that is the proper target of protest. That being said, most of the signs addressed to Joe Biden seem basically friendly, an encouraging kick in the pants rather than anything blatantly critical.

“Life is short, Joe, be a hero!”

and

“Find your spine, Joe, and we’ll back you!”

When the march moves, we try to keep up or stop a while to rest. When the march stops, we move forward. We pass, or are passed by:

• a band featuring drums, horns, flutes, but I can’t see where it is
• a man dressed in a rubber Trump mask and an orange jumpsuit
• another man dressed as a polar bear
• a blue and green Earth globe some ten feet across
• a skull four feet tall covered in computer innards and topped by smoke stacks and cooling towers
• giants hands made of white cloth held aloft on twenty-foot poles and trailing yards of white fabric
• a black tube, evidently meant to be an oil pipeline, forty feet long being carried on various shoulders and ending in multiple long necks, one with a snarling, dragon-like head, the others headless and trailing cut-out pieces apparently meant to symbolize dripping oil or blood—a hydra.

Under a tree stands a musical group with microphones plugged in to amplifiers, singing and playing on guitars some of the hippy peace-movement songs I was taught as a child at my hippy little private school.

Pete Seeger would be proud.

Approaching the End

Eventually, we notice that a trickle of marches are carrying their signs in the other direction. They must have reached the end and are now headed back. Soon we reach the end ourselves, the end being a gathering billed as a rally, though most of the attendees just seem quiet and tired, not rallied up.

A woman is talking from the stage, but the sound-system is such that when I can hear what she’s saying, she’s so loud as to hurt my hears, but when I’m far enough away to protect my hearing, I can no longer tell what she’s saying. There is no happy middle ground.

When I can hear her, what she’s saying is that that Joe Biden is a hypocrite who uses Black people for politically expedient photo-ops without actually doing anything for them, and that he does not care about climate at all. There is no friendly-kick-in-the-pants here, only open hostility.

I’m not in a position to judge whether the President walks his talk as far as his Black constituents go. Perhaps he does not. But it sounds as though this woman is holding Mr. Biden solely responsible for the shortcomings of the government as a whole—as if he were not just one part of a government with checks and balances but actually a totalitarian dictator. This happens a lot. A disturbingly large proportion of US citizens not only seem under the impression that we live in a dictatorship, but they appear not to mind—their main concern seems to be that the dictator isn’t performing well. Anyway, the woman compounds her error by asserting that she lives the climate crisis, with kids in her community getting asthma and cancer, and that President Biden ought to come into her community and find out what that’s like.

Say what you will about the President’s policy goals or executive and political skill, he knows exactly what it’s like to lose a beloved child to cancer. This woman either does not know or does not care what the target of her criticism really understands, is capable of doing, or wants to do. In blaming Mr. Biden for problems largely if not wholly caused by other people, she lets the real villains off the hook.

Anything valid that woman may have had to say is lost in her foolishness.

Disgusted and tired and getting hungry, my mother and I leave the rally and go off to find a subway station.

Thoughts

Later that evening, my mother and I digest our experiences of the day. We are both glad to have gone on the march, but we had both noticed it was less enthusiastic than all of the other marches we’ve been on. Not that there was no enthusiasm, but—it’s a subtle thing, but telling, that that the chants were started only by megaphone-wielding organizers, and each chant was taken up only by those who could hear the megaphone. I’m used to chants being started by pretty much anyone and propagating up and down the march in waves along with shouts, cheers, boos, and sometimes hand-gestures, each taken up by the next section of marchers in turn so that nobody knows how anything started but everybody takes a turn in a benign form of mob mentality. This time, the happy mob of March Nation never quite formed.

The more obvious problems are that publicity for the march was minimal—most of our friends hadn’t heard about it.

“Maybe it’s because the organizers were so young?” Mom suggests.

The organizers were young (though most participants appeared not to be), but so was Alexander the Great. So were the organizers of the various marches of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Anyway, if this was an occasion of young organizers not quite doing all that could have been done, then why aren’t older, more experienced activists putting together big, well-attended, well-covered events? There just don’t seem to be many anymore.

We had around 75,000 people. That’s not too shabby, though I’ve been to marches that had far better publicity and were far larger. As it turned out, news coverage was pretty good, but we were initially concerned because we saw few news teams at the march, and there was no helicopter flyover. Also, frankly, news coverage of both marches and civil disobedience actions have been poor in recent years. The name of the game of protest marches and the kind of civil disobedience XR has been practicing is, of course, getting noticed. These events are supposed to demonstrate to political leaders and fellow citizens alike that a given issue has popular support. That only works if there is extensive media coverage. So, that night after the march, we were worried. We had a long talk about what might be going wrong in the movement.

Knowing now that we did get the coverage, does that mean we were worried for nothing? I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that the curse is broken, that we have been heard, and that climate action will proceed at last. I’d like to think so—but I don’t.

I’ve seen too many half-hearted or ill-publicized demonstrations, too many demonstrations that didn’t happen at all. Has a decision been made that these events aren’t worth doing? If so, what else are we doing? And if the leadership of the various activist groups still believe in marches, why don’t we have more of them? Why are so many of those we have had in recent years essentially not publicized?

Or is it that something—or someone—is gumming up the works? Deprioritizing us on social media and Google, perhaps even deprioritizing us in some news media?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting a conspiracy per se. Most nefarious types are not that organized. But there are people with a lot of power who do not want climate action and have the ability to undermine us, should they want to do so.

I’ve come to believe that it is a grievous mistake to pretend we have no adversary.

What I do know is that we’re not winning. And gathering the tribe together periodically to practice optimistic chants is not going to turn the tide all by itself—nor are any of the other things we’ve been doing. As they say, if nothing changes, nothing changes. We need to do some focused research, find out what the problem is, and do something about it.

Personally, I’m starting to think it’s time for the Ents to go to war.

Since My Birth

My birthday is coming up, so I’ve decided to do a birthday post for myself. The following is part of a post I wrote some years ago–I’m repurposing it. Please note that I am no longer forty years old. Time marches on….

I was born in 1977, meaning that my first winter included the famous Blizzard of ’78. Later, when I noticed winters getting less snowy, my parents pointed out that I’d been biased by an unusually snowy first experience. They may have been right. Climate change does not necessarily mean less snow–often, it means more of the white stuff, actually, as long as winter temps stay below the freezing point. Climate change brings floods, and some floods happen to be white and fluffy, is all. But yes, I was thinking about the issue. I knew.

I remember the moment I learned about climate change. I don’t know why I remember–I learned about a lot of things as a child, without remembering the actual lesson, but that one stuck out. My Dad and I were standing outside, on the edge of our parking lot, near where the grass began and the yard went back and back. Being a scholarly sort, my Dad was always reading things and passing on the ideas that interested him. A group of scientists had made a chicken embryo grow teeth by turning on the latent dinosaur DNA still in the bird genome. Bird feathers contain no blue pigment; feathers that appear blue have microscopic structures that bend light. Ginkgos are the only trees that make sperm that swim. And, on that one day, he said the planet is getting warmer because of pollution, and in about ten years, the difference is going to start getting noticeable. If it gets warm enough, the ice at the poles will melt and the sea level will rise. If ALL of it melted,our house would be under water and we’d have to come visit it in a boat, with SCUBA gear. He seemed to like that idea, visiting the house in a boat. I guess the vividness of the example appealed to him as a writer.

I understood the boat thing would not likely happen–melting would take time, more time than individual human beings have. But I also understood that the world that I knew would change and that I would watch some of the changes. “When I grow up,” I remember thinking, “I’m going to move to the North Pole, so I can still have winter.”

I was six, I think. Somewhere in there. That would make it around 1984.

Growing up, I noticed that winter seemed to be getting warmer, a kind of “bottoming out,” where fall and spring would seem normal, but the cold stretch in the middle wasn’t reliable anymore. I have no idea if that was even a real local pattern, not my imagination, and it probably wasn’t related to climate change because signal can’t be separated from noise with as few data as my experience gave me. But I thought I was seeing it, and it scared me. I interpreted the heat waves of 1998 as climate change, too, but there I’m on somewhat firmer ground, as that was a particularly fierce El Niño, and no one yet knows the connection between El Niños and climate change. There could be a connection. But while I wasn’t really able to see the signs myself, the global climate was changing.

The last May whose temperature fell below the 20th-century average occurred before I was born, but I lived through the last time we had any month below average–it was a February, and I was seven. I don’t expect to ever have another. The sea level rose globally, a subtle thing, but enough to make a difference in coastal floods–it adds up to just over two and a half inches since my birth. Precipitation in the Northeast, my region, has increased by 8% since 1991, relative to the first half of the 20th century, though it’s hard to say how much of that is climate change-related. I wonder how much that has to do with the local increase in mold and mildew. When I was a kid, summers were humid, yes, but in the last ten years or so, my mother has had to use a dehumidifier, not simply for personal comfort, but to prevent the walls from molding. That was never necessary before.

Personal observation is suspect, relative to trends–that why we invented statistics, because human beings naturally look for trends, but most of the ones we find unaided are imaginary. I know climate change is happening, not because I’ve seen it, but because researchers whose methods I trust, and to some extent understand, have measured it. But I’ve lived it. I’m forty years old. Climatologists look for changes over large blocks of time, and the minimum-sized block is 30 years. That I live in a different climate than I did that day my Dad and I spoke can now be confirmed by science.

I’m also old enough that my generation is fast becoming another generation that didn’t do anything about climate change. The future is becoming the past. It’s time to treat this as the emergency it is and act with the urgency of a person whose hair is on fire.

Independence

Happy American Independence Day.

The following post is a slightly edited re-post from some years ago. Donald Trump is no longer president, and some of his policies have been reversed, but the movement he represents has not been fully repudiated–and is, in fact, still capable of winning elections. And Mr. Trump himself has not yet been convicted of anything. So while some of the details of the following are no longer current, the overall thrust of my warning still stands.

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The best of America has always been an ideal to which reality aspires in an irregular and sometimes ambivalent way. Our principle of equality has always been marred by racism, sexism, and various other interrelated isms, and yet the principle itself is valuable as a stated goal—and for much of our history, we have enjoyed a more egalitarian, and more participatory political and legal system than much of the rest of the world. It is not true that anyone can be anything if only they work hard, but hard-working people do have more latitude here than they might, as the flow of economic refuges to our borders attests. We are not the bastion of democracy that we should be, but we are the imperfect bastion that we are.

Anyone who thinks that the United States is the greatest and most perfect country on Earth has not been paying attention. But anyone who cannot tell the difference between the US and a third-world dictatorship hasn’t been paying attention either.

So, with that caveat, I’ll get to my point: the US is not currently independent.

Russia did try to get Donald Trump elected. Whether their involvement was decisive is debatable—it’s possible he would have been elected anyway. That Candidate Trump himself actually cooperated with Russian interference on his behalf has not been proved and might not be true. Yes, his public joking, during the campaign, to the effect that Russian hackers should help him is not, by itself, a smoking gun that he actually expected him to do so, or that any quid pro quo arrangement was made between the American oligarch and any Russian counterpart. That other people connected to the campaign were actively working for, or trying to work with, foreign entities during the campaign is also not proof, nor is the fact that President Trump has some odd financial ties to foreign entities (the extent of which we don’t know because he won’t release his taxes) proof. The whole thing is suspicious as all get-out, but we don’t actually know.

But the fact remains that by attempting to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, President Trump is acting in the interests of Russia (and Saudi Arabia) and not those of the United States. Maybe he’s doing it out of the “goodness” of his own heart, a spontaneous volunteerism with no prior planning or thought of reward, but he is acting in the interests of a foreign power.

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I’ve argued previously that pulling out of Paris, and otherwise minimizing or reversing American action on climate, is the primary reason for Mr. Trump’s presidency, the true central plank of his personal platform. His rhetoric on the subject of the economy and American security, his dog-whistles to white nationalists, his consistent vocal abuse of women both individually and collectively, all of that can be chalked up to either personal proclivity or empty campaign promise. A wall on the border with Mexico would do nothing whatever to protect his constituents’ job prospects or personal safety, even if Mexico did pay to have it built. Getting out of Paris, though, is the one campaign promise he’s acted on and the only one that will actually help anyone.

It will help the owners of the fossil fuel industry.

I said that part already. What I did not point out before was the way in which acting on behalf of that industry constitutes selling out American interests in favor of those of other countries. It is true that Russia has powerful interests in oil, but so does the United States. While transnational corporations are, in some ways, independent of any country, Exxon, for example does have an American origin and the US still produces substantial amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas. It’s possible to tell this story as one of private, corporate interest, and many of the interested parties are Americans.

But the United States doesn’t need the fossil fuel industry. We have a fairly diversified economy, a highly diversified resource base, and we’re a net exporter of food. There is huge economic opportunity for us in a properly managed transition, and we’ll likely survive, or even come out ahead, as fossil fuel prices drop due to lessened demand. Russia is simply not as well prepared for the shift. Oil is its primary source of national wealth.

While I haven’t looked into what climate change will do for Russia, I don’t imagine that a rapidly warming planet is actually good for that country. And Russia did, in fact, sign the Paris Climate Agreement. But even if they don’t have less to lose that we do to a changing climate, certain elements within Russian society do have more to gain from hanging on to fossil fuel a little longer.

And we do have a lot to lose. Most of our major cities are coastal and thus vulnerable to sea level rise and a possible increase in hurricane activity. Much of our landmass is already capable of experiencing killer heat waves, and thanks to air conditioning, many of our most vulnerable citizens live in places that get dangerously hot (like Arizona and Southern Florida)—a problem that will only get worse. Increased drought and increased flooding will likely interfere with our agriculture. In many areas, our use of irrigation water is already unsustainable. The United States already gets more tornadoes than any other country on Earth, and while there is no way to tell whether climate change is increasing tornadic activity (there’s no reliable baseline data), it is a fair bet that it will. Political and economic instability in other countries caused by climate change represents a major threat to American security.

Mr. Trump is willing to risk all that for the sake of short-term economic gain—by people other than us.

I want to make very clear that I do not have anything against Russians as a people. Russia is not, at present, a free democracy, so I don’t hold its people accountable for what their leaders are doing. I also want to make clear that I’m not blaming Russia for America’s troubles. While it does seem clear we are under attack, our vulnerability to such attack is entirely home-grown. I’m only pointing out that our laws and government institutions are currently being used to protect a foreign government’s revenue stream at our expense.

247 years ago today, we told the world we weren’t going to let that happen anymore.