Averting Climate Crisis

One month before Earth Day — on March 20 — the United Nations released its most dire climate report ever. “World is on the brink of catastrophic warming,” the Washington Post’s headline read. But there’s still a short time for dramatic action to make a difference.

“It will take a quantum leap in climate action,” said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. “Our world needs climate action on all fronts ­ everything, everywhere, all at once.”

“The choices we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years,” said Hoesung Lee, who chairs the UN’s climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Perhaps the most basic choice is to frame our thoughts, policies and actions differently — not in the backward-facing terms of those who have accumulated wealth and power by causing the problem, but in the forward-facing terms of creating a just and sustainable future for all. Some striking examples of how to do that have appeared in the last few months, which cast into sharp relief the retrograde forces that stand in the way, as well as the corrosive cost of continued ambivalence.

A human rights framework
A first example of framing things differently came from Hawaii’s Supreme Court on March 17, when it recognized an affirmative human right “to a life-sustaining climate system.” Similarly, a second example came twelve days later, when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution to bring climate change litigation to the world’s highest court, seeking an advisory opinion on the obligations of states with respect to climate change, and the legal consequences “where they have caused significant harm,” specifically to “particularly vulnerable” small island developing states, as well as “individuals of the present and future generations affected by the adverse effects of climate change.” The World Court’s response could in effect establish the Hawaii decision as a worldwide precedent, if it adopts a human rights framework.

The UN resolution was initiated by the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, which engaged in a year-long support-building campaign, along with more than 1,700 civil society and youth groups across 130 countries. It had 105 national co-sponsors when adopted. A decade earlier, Palau and the Marshall Islands spearheaded a similar effort, but it failed due to strong political opposition.

Clearly, a lot has changed since then. The climate strike movement, started by Greta Thunberg in August 2018, has mobilized millions of students around the world, pressuring governments at all levels to respond urgently as never before. The fossil fuel divestment movement has grown from half a dozen college campuses in 2011 to 1560 institutions today, representing $40.5 trillion. And the “Environmental, social, and corporate governance” (ESG) investment framework — which includes climate impacts — has grown dramatically more influential, now being used to manage about one-eighth of professionally managed U.S. assets. There’s even an S&P 500 ESG index. Vanuatu succeeded where Palau and the Marshall Islands failed because it took maximum advantage of how the world had changed; as a result it will change even more.

Local resonances
The specifics of the Hawaii case resonate with local concerns. Hawaii’s Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, rejected a proposed project because it would be a significant net-emitter of greenhouse gasses for its first 25 years — two years beyond Hawaii’s 2045 zero emissions target.

“The reality is that yesterday’s good enough has become today’s unacceptable,” Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins wrote in the court’s unanimous opinion. “The PUC was under no obligation to evaluate an energy project conceived of in 2012 the same way in 2022. Indeed, doing so would have betrayed its constitutional duty.”

Similarly, California’s climate commitments have evolved. In August 2022, the California Air Resources Board approved a rule requiring 100% zero-emission vehicles by 2035. For California agencies to act as Hawaii’s PUC did, they would have to stop approving projects that would flood the state with fossil fuels beyond then — projects such as the Phillips 66 Marine Oil Terminal and Wharf Improvement Project at Berths 148-151, which would “nearly double crude oil throughput at the Phillips 66 terminal,” as a group of eight organizations wrote in their comments last year, when The Port of LA first tried to approve the project with the most minimal level of environmental review.

Homeowner local activists Janet Gunter and Peter Warren both reflected on Hawaii’s example.

“The Hawaii case directs a spotlight on how honesty and prudent behavior can and should be practiced in our government,” said Gunter. “We are consistently hearing governments at most levels and, of course, our own ports, make verbal promises of a strict policy of ‘zero emissions,’” she noted. “This sad reality is most recently reflected in the Port of LA’s Marine Terminal Improvement Project for Phillips 66. It will provide a 40-year lease, and increase oil tanker calls from 17 to 75 ships annually. By doing this, the port boldly commits to the promotion of petroleum for another 4 decades! This … despite the port applauding itself regularly as the ‘environmental leader’ and the nation’s ‘greenest’ port!”

“The Hawaii Supreme Court gets our predicament,” said Warren. “The burning of fossil fuels is, right now, killing and sickening workers and residents who simply breathe the air where we live. Worse, the continued free-market driven abuse of fossil fuels will harm the vast majority of people on Earth in this century. Those things will be here before oil companies willingly curb their profits.”

Transforming transportation
But even if the ports, and California as a whole, followed Hawaii’s example, that alone wouldn’t be enough, because renewable energy creates environmental challenges. A third example of framing things differently tackles this problem head on: a January report, “Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining,” from the Climate and Community Project. As it explains, lithium is “the most non-replaceable metal for EV batteries,” and if current EV demand is projected to 2050, the U.S. demand alone would require triple the current worldwide production. But this demand can be limited “by reducing the car dependence of the transportation system, decreasing the size of electric vehicle batteries, and maximizing lithium recycling.”

The report compares lithium requirements of four pathways to zero-emissions: an electrified continuation of the status quo and three increasingly ambitious scenarios that support public and active transportation. The most ambitious scenario reduces lithium demand by up to 92%. “This can be done by employing three key policy interventions: decreasing car dependency, right-sizing EV batteries, and creating a robust recycling system.” There are other benefits as well: “Reordering the US transportation system through policy and spending shifts to prioritize public and active transit while reducing car dependency can also ensure transit equity, protect ecosystems, respect Indigenous rights, and meet the demands of global justice.” There’s already precedent for this: car use in Paris declined nearly 30% from 2001 to 2015, and it fell by nearly 40% in London from 2000 to 2014.

Achieving this transformation will require coordinated government action at all levels: state and federal investments in public and active transit options will be essential, while local governments “can promote transit options like bicycling and walking by increasing the availability and safety of bike lanes, sidewalks, and car-free streets; subsidizing bikes and e-bikes; facilitating car-share programs as an alternative to individual car ownership; and providing low- or no-cost options for bike shares.” In addition, “building codes, zoning, and land-use laws will need to be reformed to facilitate new housing in which residents will be able to live and have families without depending on cars for their daily transportation needs.”

If this sounds like far-reaching change, it is. But, the report notes:

“[M]ode shifts and land use changes more dramatic than those modeled in even our most ambitious scenario have already occurred in the US—although in the opposite direction. Through urban renewal programs, the construction of the interstate highway system, subsidies for suburbanization, and other policies, the United States largely destroyed and rebuilt its cities in the mid-twentieth century in ways that created highly racialized urban geographies characterized by segregation, car dependency, and urban sprawl … Our most ambitious scenario would entail a near inversion of this transformation over a similar time horizon. Such an inversion could bring manifold social benefits—as well as reduce harms from minerals mining and likely speed up the timeline of decarbonization.”

Red state resistance
Such change is clearly possible, and would have enormous benefits. But what stands in its way is two-fold: the continued power of the fossil fuel industry, and its integration into America’s culture wars, reflected in a striking divide between blue state and red state policies, as Ronald Brownstein highlighted in The Atlantic last year. The federal Energy Information Administration calculates how much carbon each state emits from its energy sector per dollar of economic activity within its borders. Of the 19 most fossil fuel reliant states, 18 voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020, while Republicans hold unified control of their governorship and state legislature in 15 of them. (Joe Biden won all 16 states that were least fuel reliant.)

“These fossil-fuel-reliant states are nearly all among those moving most aggressively to restrict voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights; to ban books; and to censor what teachers and college professors can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation,” Brownstein wrote. “Almost all of the states fighting the energy transition are expressing equally intense resistance to social change. In effect, they are fighting the future on both fronts.”

They’ve taken a wide range of actions to protect fossil fuel companies and punish renewables. But in doing so, they’re also punishing themselves. A 2021 International Monetary Fund report found that “Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in 2020 or about 6.8% of GDP [Gross domestic product].” America’s share was a staggering $662 billion. Only 8% were explicit subsidies, 92% were for “undercharging for environmental costs and foregone consumption taxes.” But these implicit subsidies cost 3.8% of global GDP, along with 900,000 air pollution deaths, in addition to the climate costs. Red states are willfully inflicting this damage on themselves.

Perhaps most strikingly, 19 states have enacted legislation to preempt local regulation of fossil fuels. There are also “critical infrastructure” laws that make nonviolent protest near oil, gas, electrical, and other forms of infrastructure a felony in 19 states “due to the efforts of the conservative legislators’ organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the meticulous lobbying of powerful oil and gas companies,” Bolts magazine reported.

In January, the Washington Post reported that Ohio passed an Orwellian law legally redefining methane (“natural”) gas as a source of “green energy,” which ALEC also plans to push in other states. This redefinition would allow it to pass muster with some ESG investors. But red states have also begun passing broader anti-ESG laws as well, under the rubric of fighting “woke capital.”

Straddling the Divide
This is how America’s culture wars imperil the whole planet’s future. Nationally, President Biden is trying to straddle this divide, coaxing red America over with his enthusiasm for big electric trucks, for example, first the Ford F-150, then the Hummer EV. “On my watch, the great American road trip is going to be fully electrified,” Biden tweeted out with a picture of him in the Hummer EV. As the Washington Post’s Shannon Osaka noted in January, as of right now, “a Hummer EV driven on the average power grid in the United States emits about 276 grams of carbon dioxide per mile; a Toyota Corolla running on gasoline, meanwhile, emits 269 grams,” so it’s not a net plus for the climate. But it is “an attempt to get people who aren’t remotely environmentalist to get on board the transition to a more climate-friendly world,” she concluded. “The question is whether it will be worth it.” And that depends on what’s done on a broader scale, as the Climate and Community Project describes.

Another example of Biden’s straddling was his approval of ConocoPhillips’ $8 billion Willow oil project on Alaska’s North Slope last month, directly contradicting his repeated campaign pledge. Ironically, the action was rooted in the Inflation Reduction Act — the most ambitious climate bill ever passed. But it only passed after West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin extracted massive concessions to support continued fossil fuel developments. Still, the Biden administration did not have to approve the project. They could have fought in court for years, while doing everything possible to accelerate the shift to renewables, so that oil drilling made less and less sense even in the narrowest of economic terms.

The Willow project echoes here locally as well, with the Phillips 66 terminal project. It’s not that Willow project oil will inevitably come here. Indeed, they say they don’t have South Coast Air Quality Management District permission to do so, Natural Resources Defense Council attorney David Pettit said. The permit “can be changed,” he said, “but I think that there would probably be CEQA [California Environmental Quality Act] consequences if P66 began a new, polluting use that was not analyzed in the current EIR [environmental impact report] proceeding.”

This doesn’t seem likely. But Biden approving the Willow project seemed far more unlikely when he was elected in 2020. What’s needed is a decisive shift in thinking: to make such decisions unthinkable, as opposed to unlikely, to follow the Hawaii’s Supreme Court’s example, and commit to the broad systemic changes outlined by the Climate and Community Project report. In today’s world, political forces are nearly evenly matched, but that’s not so for the world’s youth — even in red America. The fight to secure a just and livable future for all is inextricably embedded in the broader matrix of American politics.

“We are socializing risk and privatizing profits for the benefit of the goods movement and fossil fuel industries, while conservative ideologues claim our Constitution offers the people no recourse,” Warren said. “Hawaii shows a way. We need to move against the bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court that GOP dark money has built.”