As you might have (almost certainly didn’t) noticed, it’s been quiet around the Gravity Is Gone hallways the last year-plus. Just to catch you up, that’s because after spending the bulk of my career as a freelancer, I have now been on staff as a climate reporter for DC-based media startup Grid, starting back in September 2021. The site launched almost one year ago now, and well, I think we’re doing okay!
Anyway, it was an interesting year, and definitely a change of speed. I just wanted to say hello — I likely won’t bother you much from this newsletter in 2023, but I may find something here or there that is worth jumping in on. Thanks and happy new year!
Over at his Slow Boring site, Matt Yglesias has a bit of a screed against the “climate left.” He argues, basically, that the activist groups (like the Sunrise Movement) pushing for transformational action on climate change are ignoring political realities, are muddling up too many other issues along with climate, and are in fact acting as a deterrent to some of the incremental progress that the Biden administration is attempting to achieve.
I have a few thoughts. First of all, I think there are two arguments in here that are actually more separate than Yglesias allows. One is that the climate left is ignoring political reality in such a way that will actually slow progress on climate change; and the other is that the left’s messaging approach—essentially, repeating very loudly to both Republicans and Democrats that climate change represents an existential emergency and accepting half-measures is tantamount to failure—is counter-productive, given the public’s general lack of willingness to sacrifice toward truly solving the problem.
I recognize that divorcing the arguments is more or less an attempt to ignore the first, in that the messaging approach does in fact exist inside a world where political reality stands in the way of progress. But if you are willing to take a step back then it gets at a sort of unanswerable angle to this that I think of as a sort of anthropic principle (it’s not a perfect analogy at all but whatever my brain has decided to stick with it) of climate change.
“Climate groups seem to be operating in a reality where there is massive public support for much more dramatic action on climate change and the only thing standing in their way is a need to sweep aside the power of corrupt and timid moderate Democrats,” Yglesias writes. He cites some polling suggesting the public just doesn’t care enough about climate change. But the more moderate approach to the topic has dominated Democratic efforts on climate for, well, ever, and the “climate left” as a voluble entity just isn’t all that old. And yet here we are, with polling suggesting the public just doesn’t care enough about climate change. We did what we did and ended up here—how is the resulting argument to just keep doing what we did?
Yglesias thinks the protests at the White House should stop because the various bills the Biden administration is pushing do in fact contain some climate solutions stuff, from funding to public transit to upgrading the electricity grid, and the climate left should turn to being “politically helpful.” A more popular Biden, and a more popular Democratic Party, the argument goes, are what is necessary to improve the outlook for real progress on climate. (As a quick aside, as I’ve argued before, the issue of timing is different for climate than almost any issue in history, in that it is functionally irreversible, and thus while things like a more friendly federal judiciary are certainly important to protect progress in the long run it is hard to see them as core to the basic, incredibly urgent need to reduce emissions.) But Yglesias also acknowledges another truth, that there is “just no way you’re going to get a massive climate bill without an engaged grassroots movement demanding one.”
His argument is that such a movement does not presently exist, with the current climate left too scattershot and muddled, in his view, to achieve the goal. But it seems oddly defeatist and even somewhat circular to act as though no such movement will exist. Again, the climate left is relatively new, and the last few years have been confusing; maybe these are the stutter steps toward a true grassroots movement that really can make a big difference—demanding that the nascent groups suddenly defer to the moderate center-left because there is some money for rail travel in a bill seems somewhat premature. I’m no grassroots organizer of course, but neither is Yglesias, and I’m just not sure that quoting a few Gallup polls is a case-closed sort of argument on this.
And about those polls. Yes, in pre-election polling climate change was behind various other issues in terms of voter concern. But if you’re making arguments about the best way to convince the public and push politics your way, I feel like trends are important too. In 2010, fewer than 30 percent of Americans said dealing with climate change should be a top priority for the government, per Pew; last year, that number was 52 percent. Gallup’s 2001-2014 average for people worrying a great deal about global warming was 32 percent; in 2019 it was 44 percent.
I wouldn’t pretend to know exactly what this says about the climate left—maybe it means the more moderate approach was working, though perhaps too slowly, and the left is standing in the way now; or maybe it means the issue has just slowly crept further into public consciousness as the media (also slowly) picked up coverage of climate, and now is the time for that large grassroots movement to make its push. I don’t know!
Yglesias readily concedes that the incremental progress currently on the table isn’t remotely enough given the actual scope of the problem, but I think insisting the climate left jump all the way on board sort of under- and overestimates their power at the same time. If they’re a useless movement that is far too toothless to achieve their transformational goals, how are they powerful enough to submarine even the baby steps in the bills now under discussion? What evidence do we have that their protests, the occasionally muddled messaging, and so on are actually standing in the way of progress, rather than just annoying Matt for a perceived lack of coherence?
Again, movements don’t happen overnight, though in this case sooner would be better; if the incremental approach continues to offer incremental progress regardless, and if politicians are actually free to ignore them anyway without evidence of serious consequences, then I would be inclined to say that in terms of sheer potential the presence of a climate left is better than the absence of one.
Two bits of news from yesterday: A senior ExxonMobil lobbyist was caught on camera more or less explaining how the company has spent decades fighting against climate change action; and former Secretary of Defense and Forever War architect Donald Rumsfeld died at 88. These are not completely unrelated.
“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes.” That was Keith McCoy, the oil company lobbyist, in a call with what he thought was a head-hunter looking for lobbying help but was actually someone with Unearthed, the investigative arm of GreenpeaceUK. “Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true.”
As reported by Channel 4 News, McCoy went on to explain his “fishing” techniques for reeling in susceptible lawmakers, the ways in which his company have watered down or fought against legislation—including the still-pending infrastructure bill—and even how they use industry groups as “whipping boys” to take the public punishment instead of ExxonMobil itself. None of the techniques in question should come as any sort of surprise, but hearing them so casually laid bare by their perpetrators is at very least jarring.
To Rumsfeld: The man who is responsible for more suffering over the last two decades than all but a handful of other people in the world also gifted us a bit of rhetorical maneuvering that, though it was wielded back in 2002 on an entirely different topic, has come to be used over and over again in climate discussions. This, of course, is the concept of “known unknowns” versus “unknown unknowns.”
For years, scientists and policy makers have argued that climate change’s biggest threats lie in realm of those unknown unknowns. “Rumsfeld had a point,” reads one New Scientist piece from 2008. “Yet the really alarming changes are those that come completely out of the blue—the unknown unknowns that we never even imagined.” More than a decade later the term still rang out, with a New York Times op-ed titled “Climate’s Troubling Unknown Unknowns” arguing that the field may be “strewn” with such issues. “They pose daunting tests for how we face the future,” it read. Other examplesabound, and you can almost hear the phrase’s echo in McCoy’s cavalier revelations.
When he says that the company has fought “aggressively against some of the science,” he is positioning the oil industry in a specific space within the known/known-unknown/unknown-unknown continuum. The bread and butter for the industry and denier politicians has always been to hype the uncertainty (so much so that the technique got an entire chapter in my book)—basically, they skip past the knowns (or just lie about them, but that’s another story) and don’t bother with the unknown unknowns, spending decades and countless dollars convincing people that because we cannot see with intricate precision how high the sea will be in 2070 that strong action is futile. They take advantage of the fact that science is more than willing to admit and discuss what things we don’t know to make them seem unknowable. A clear gap in knowledge becomes a vacuum that their disinformation and obfuscation can fill.
Interestingly, it was Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon that produced one of the earlier calls from the military to take climate change seriously (they have since been among the only parts of government to consistently sound the alarm). A secret report in 2004 outlined a worst-case scenario where abrupt climate change more or less throws the world into chaos by 2020—in some ways an attempt to take stabs at the unknown unknowns and what they might look like.
Obviously, this most dire possibility (the report deemed in unlikely but “plausible”) did not come to fruition, but the unprecedented heat wave currently baking big chunks of the country is a fairly solid symbol of just how big a failure the seventeen years since that report have been. The ExxonMobil sting operation stands in equally well as an explanation for why that failure occurred—entrenched, powerful companies, “fighting aggressively against the science.” The tactical specifics of oil industry lobbying against climate action could be considered its own form of a known unknown—we were already well aware that they were doing this sort of thing, but every bit of sunshine on the details might help put an end to it eventually.
Back in January, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave a speech about climate change on the floor of the Senate. He had done so for the previous 278 weeks the Senate was in session as well, dating back nine years. And then he stopped.
The impetus for starting that streak of so-called “Time to Wake Up” speeches, he has explained, was frustration with the Obama administration’s timid approach to climate legislation. The impetus for continuing it, one can assume, is that over those nine years the country did not exactly wrap itself in climate-solutions glory. The impetus for stopping the run, clearly, was the new administration’s vocal commitment to flipping that narrative entirely.
“All the present signs suggest optimism is justified,” he said, again back in January, though not without some hesitation. Those “present signs” included a raft of executive orders from the Biden White House aimed at reducing emissions (and rolling back some of the absurdities unleashed by the previous administration), appointments like John Kerry as a Special Presidential Envoy on Climate and former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy as the first-ever White House National Climate Advisor, and, later on, the inclusion of substantial climate-related measures in the massive infrastructure bill unveiled at the end of March.
Whitehouse went on to say that climate has more or less fallen out of the stalled infrastructure discussions, that climate groups and advocates are engaged in what he considers counterproductive infighting, and that the corporate world continues to be AWOL on the issue. (“All the major corporate trade associations suck—all of them.”)
The slowed momentum is obviously concerning, but I think one mistake here is to assume there is even a “corner” to turn when it comes to climate. That idea has dominated the narrative since at least 2009, when the UN meeting in Copenhagen was supposed to represent the world’s climate fix launch party—until it very much didn’t. We’re constantly supposed to believe that this issue which has stymied humanity for decades now is just about to crest the top of the roller coaster, as if all the coordinated opposition to action will somehow melt away once they all finally just get it.
Here are two stories from CNN and the BBC, eight years apart, and trust me when I say I could have found one for every year in between:
Understanding the scope of the climate crisis almost requires a hope that we will in fact crest that roller coaster, because a fits-and-starts approach certainly feels like it means catastrophe. (Well, more of it.) But the better way to think about it is simply to extend the metaphor: the roller coaster has more than one rise, and more than one fall, and a whole bunch of twists and turns.
Just this year, along with all those reasons for optimism laid out above, climate advocates threw a party over a victory in a Dutch court against Shell, and the loss of Exxon board seats to a supposedly pro-climate action “activist hedge fund” (which, I dunno, have you met hedge funds?), just to name a few. It seemed like a pretty good year! But then the infrastructure talks went off the rails, companies started logging some of the last old-growth forests in British Columbia when instead we should be planting a trillion trees, and the Biden administration failed to block a Russian natural gas pipeline that environmentalists have called a “climate policy cul-de-sac.”
There is no corner to turn, not really. It’s too big a problem, with too many tentacles, and too many people and corporate and national interests, for some switch to suddenly flip. (Let’s just assume that I’m mixing metaphors on purpose to demonstrate the point.)
“A new dawn is breaking,” Senator Whitehouse said in his last climate speech. “And when it’s dawn, there is no need for my little candle against the darkness. My little ‘Time to Wake Up’ pilot light can now go out.” And then he finished with a literal mic drop:
Fine theater, so far as it goes (I think I could hear two people clapping; Senate floor speeches are almost never attended by other Senators). But I’m just not sure how you can look at the last thirty or forty years and assume that a few days of good news means we’re in the clear. To his credit, Whitehouse did say: “Instead of urging that it’s time to wake up, I close this long run by saying now, time to get to work.”
Even if his subsequent despair a few months later is justified with climate-infrastructure talks floundering and the issue waning from public view somewhat, taken together it seems to be taking too much of a short view in general. Imagine the infrastructure bill passes, replete with climate-friendly provisions; the next UN climate talks in Glasgow somehow go perfectly and produce brand new international commitments; Biden continues executive order-ing the hell out of the issue, producing demonstrable results; and throw in whatever other pet climate policy you’re into these days. Even with all that, there will still be stubborn industries and ignorant politicians and giant steps backward. Yes, weirdly enough for me, this is sort of an optimistic take, if a backhanded one: even non-linear progress is still progress.
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Last summer, a quote began circulating online, demonstrating once again the humanity and selflessness of America’s top infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci:
This was in the midst of… one of the pandemic waves, and because of course there was an ongoing national argument about mask wearing and distancing and whether or not you should attend massive motorcycle rallies. It was both a lovely sentiment, that this eminent physician carried in his core a desire to help others, and a rebuke to those still frolicking in Ozarks plague pools as if it didn’t matter. Fauci for the win.
Except, of course, he never said that.
This wasn’t Fauci’s fault of course, he had nothing to do with it. It was The Internet that spread the lie, as it tends to. The reason this happened at all is that this quote, whose origin we will shortly arrive at, was dramatically relevant to the masking and distancing and, maybe most importantly now, the vaccinating that we need to proceed apace.
But first, to credit. That quote actually originates from an author named Lauren Morrill. She tweeted it out back in 2017, on a totally separate topic, when the pandemic was barely a gleam in Ed Yong’s eye:
The fact that her sentiment got repackaged and repurposed multiple times since then (here’s a HuffPost piece that stole it and refused to give credit, even when authors/editors were supposedly asked repeatedly) is mostly evidence that it’s useful as a way to shame people engaged in uncharitable action. When it comes to the ongoing vaccine rollout, it has taken on yet more weight, since certain subsets of people can’t seem to internalize the idea that there are societal benefits to personal actions.
“I’m young and healthy so why should you care if I don’t get vaccinated” is like throwing a brick at a kid with leukemia’s head. And while it’s a pretty dark approach given the existence of immunocompromised children, it’s also missing the main point in this specific situation (versus, say, measles): the vaccines are not just for individual protection, but for mutation protection.
The more we stop the virus’s circulation, the less likely it becomes that another mutant strain emerges that, say, kills your vaccinated grandmother. A number of these strains have already emerged, of course; the CDC is currently monitoring five strains it categorizes as “variants of concern,” defined as follows:
A variant for which there is evidence of an increase in transmissibility, more severe disease (e.g., increased hospitalizations or deaths), significant reduction in neutralization by antibodies generated during previous infection or vaccination, reduced effectiveness of treatments or vaccines, or diagnostic detection failures.
The B.1.1.7 variant, which originated in the UK, increases transmission by fifty percent, but doesn’t seem to change much when it comes to vaccination. Lucky us. The B.1.351 variant from South Africa, though? It couples a similar fifty percent transmission bump with “reduced neutralization by convalescent and post-vaccination sera.” Meaning it might be able to “escape” the immunity the vaccines we’re getting has provided. And kill your grandmother.
Along with the five variants of concern, the CDC is tracking eight other “variants of interest.” If you ask the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, another sixteen variants are currently worth watching as well. Luckily, none of these has risen to the deeply ominous category of “variant of high consequence,” a scenario where the world would sort of find itself back at the start of all this.
All of which is to say, Dr. Fauci’s fake quote has a truly global degree of relevance right now, and the individualistic streak baked into American founding myths is gunning to kickstart a pandemic that vaccination is starting to get under control (in some countries). The more the virus circulates, the more variants will pop up, and eventually one might wander into the “high consequence” realm and truly mangle the ongoing recovery. The effort in right-wing circles to make everything a purely individual action—for no obvious reason beyond lib ownage, really—could end up being a far more impactful campaign than I’m sure they’re bargaining for.
At latest polling, more than a quarter of Americans said they would not get vaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy is far from unique, of course—polling done throughout 2020 suggested as many as one billion people around the world would refuse a vaccine if offered, clearly for very different reasons depending on the country—but other rich nations do have far lower rates of refusal than the US. More than eighty percent of people in countries as disparate as Sri Lanka, Egypt, Denmark, and Nicaragua say they would gladly accept a COVID vaccine. The most recent government polling in the UK shows acceptance is up to ninety-four percent.
The thing is, given the potential global scope of just kind of letting the virus keep flitting about, mutating with abandon, you can make the case that getting vaccinated does not even really require that anyone “care about other people.” Do you want the entire global economy to shut down again? No? Well, feel free to think entirely about yourself as the needle jabs in. Take comfort in knowing that you’re sticking it to Fauci and his annoying insistence—the internet told me, so it’s true—that you think occasionally about someone else.
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