What's this sudden optimism?

Did something just change?

Buddy was okay researching facts with me. But he preferred to curl up and listen to us read fiction.

I’m getting blown away as I compare climate scenarios from five or ten years ago to those that are appearing today.

YESTERDAY’S CLIMATE FICTION
Over the past decade I’ve enjoyed reading upbeat fiction. In the face of dire predictions for the future, these books told the story of how the world gets its act together and saves itself.

Guy Dauncey One of my favorites is Journey to the Future, written in 2015, set in 2032. Dauncey’s characters say things like:

In developed societies we are allowing ourselves to be completely distracted by negative events, gloomy outlooks and deniers of every kind, while right in front of our eyes are a multitude of solutions begging to be noticed and implemented.

I have come to think of culture in terms of its central DNA. In the decades leading up to the 2020s the DNA in most Western countries said, ‘Be an individual. Go out and make something of yourself. Get what you can out of life.’ It sounds great, but the individualism foster selfishness, greed, and a consumer culture. The new DNA sends a different message. It says, ‘Care for each other and for the planet. Help other people, and they will help you.’ It’s a fundamental change, and it feels so much better. [Journey to the Future]

Jonathon Porritt Another good read, The World We Made, is a fictional history, looking back from 2050 and spotlighting how 50 different climate and related challenges were successfully met during the preceding decades.

In 2000 (the year I was born), the rich world had committed itself to a number of so-called Millennium Development Goals, to be achieved by 2015. Come 2016, the scorecard still looked pretty depressing. Whatever their persuasion, politicians looked cornered, exhausted, incapable of addressing the world as it was, rather than the world as they still wanted it to be. Fundamentalism of every description - political and religious - had begun to fill the space vacated by the mainstream.

Once we realized we could only combat the threat of runaway climate change by working together, as one human family, we discovered something extraordinary: we were never ‘hard-wired’ by our genetic inheritance to kill each other off. ‘A war of all against all’ is not the natural state of humankind. In fact, we’re actually hard-wired to work together, to make better lives for ourselves and our families, for our friends and our ‘tribes’, and then, when we can, for everyone else. We’re every bit as cooperative as we are competitive, every bit as altruistic as we are selfish. If we are predisposed to anything, we’re predisposed to empathy.

Most people seem to think that we’re through the worst. In effect, we witnessed a momentum turning away from the model of progress that threatened to drag us all down with it. [The World We Made]

These were among the few encouraging but hard-to-discover stories a few years back.

CURRENT WRITINGS ON THE SUBJECT
These days I’m reading some of the same thoughts about how the world gets its act together to save itself. There’s a big change. Then it was fiction, Today it’s beginning to be . . . REPORTING!

Ezra Klein and Bill McKibben are telling each other . . .

Over the past two years, the Biden administration and the Democrats passed a huge series of climate bills. The Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. It’s about $450 billion in climate investment. Those bills and that politics has been a signal to the private sector which is investing, to lots of young people who are going into climate tech and climate activism, to members of the building trades who are reorganizing, retooling and retraining to know how to electrify, to weatherize.

The good news is we don’t need to be burning stuff anymore. In the last decade, engineers have brought down the price of renewable energy about 90 percent. The cheapest way to generate power on planet Earth is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That’s an extraordinary breakthrough.

That’s where the climate movement and anyone working on climate is now. Enough bills have passed. Enough money has been set aside. Enough technologies have been created or are being created that we really do have a chance. It’s remarkable. We really do have a chance to avert the worst of global warming.

People who looked radical begin to look incremental. But at the same time, instead of the change they imagined just being hypothetical, it begins to happen in the real world. Real people’s lives are made better. New groups and power centers join their coalition. It’s big. What has to happen in the coming years is big. [Ezra Klein interview with Bill McKibben last week]

Then there’s the author in 2017 of The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells writing this week to say:

“Just a few years ago, climate projections for this century looked quite apocalyptic, with most scientists warning that continuing “business as usual” would bring the world four or even five degrees Celsius of warming — a change disruptive enough to call forth not only predictions of food crises and heat stress, state conflict and economic strife, but warnings of civilizational collapse and even a sort of human endgame.

Now scientists believe that warming this century will most likely fall between two or three degrees. What those numbers suggest is this: Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of renewables, a truly global political mobilization, a clearer picture of the energy future, and serious policy focus from world leaders, we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years.” [David Wallace-Wells in the NY Times]

The first two authors—only a few years ago—had to imagine fictional events bringing the world to safety, while today more and more commentators have no need for fiction to envision the climate progress that’s beginning.

WHAT WE CAN DO
We can certainly be encouraged. Instead of relaxing, however, we should redouble our efforts to make these new scenarios even better. And we can hope. These new assessments were added to my Thanksgiving thoughts yesterday. I hope they sweeten yours.

---

READ, THINK, ACT

• The novel by Guy Dauncey, Journey to the Future, was coincidentally published exactly seven years ago today. Its young protagonist visits Vancouver in 2032. The city is brimming with innovation and hope. It’s where the climate crisis is being tackled. With lots of links and footnotes, it’s a readable, thought-provoking reference manual on the challenges and solutions to get the changing climate—and other social challenges—under control.

• Jonathon Porritt’s The World We Made, published in 2013 but set in 2050, is a timeline of progress from 2014, with dozens of entries—2025 International Court for the Environment established, 2031 European Supergird completed, 2032 Global Food Riots, 2035 Final evacuation of New Orleans—plus the resulting improvements.

• David Wallace-Wells, a best-selling author and editor at New York Magazine and is very much on top of the climate crisis. He also writes a newsletter about the climate, health, children and other topics for the New York Times, to which we can subscribe.

• In 1989 Bill McKibbon wrote the first of his many books and called it The End of Nature. Over the years he has been a professor at Middlebury College, and is best known to most of us as the leader of the climate campaign group 350.org. He tells us these days that “decarbonization technology, climate legislation and the climate movement itself are going to have to change in this new era, and change because of success, not because of failure! Partly that’s been the work of movements that we’ve built over the last decade. Part of it’s been the ongoing educational efforts of mother nature who keeps hitting us upside the head with the two-by-four.”

• Ezra Klein is the most cogent reporter I have found on a range of topics, including climate change. He writes for the New York Times, and his writings and podcasts are available through Vox, the explanatory reporting website which he co-founded.

• To get trustworthy information, with perhaps an uplift here and there, we would do well to follow Wallace-Wells, McKibben, and Klein closely over the coming year or two.