Here’s one thing we don’t often want to admit: it is too late to stop many of the harshest and most destructive aspects of climate change from materialising. We’re out of time. Superstorms, droughts, floods, disappearing islands, coastlines and lost species are already here.
We need to face the fact that the climate crisis is upon us, and that the greenhouse gases we’ve already emitted have locked in even worse that’s yet to come. The mass deaths in Haiti and the evacuation of 1.5 million people from the Florida coast in the wake of Hurricane Matthew is just the kind of weather-related event that we can expect to happen more frequently in a warmer world.
So what do we need to do? Run and cower in the corner? Accept futile half-measures? No, courage is what the movement fighting climate change and fossil fuels needs most now. Lack of courage by western governments is having devastating consequences, and in the case of America, one of them is fracking. This is the unacceptable “solution” to the climate crisis that the US has been pushing all across the world. The decision by the British government last week to overturn Lancashire’s rejection of fracking shows that the UK, too, seems to be falling for it.
Our movement and our scientists, by contrast, do have the courage to identify what needs to be done. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, estimates that we have 17 years to replace all fossil fuel infrastructure with renewable energy. That means no new fossil fuel projects. Period. We burn down what we have, and we build renewable energy sources as fast as we can. That means no new pipelines, no new fracking fields, no new offshore drilling, no new tar sands or coal mines.
That would mean no new fracking in the US or the UK. You cannot be a climate leader and support fracking: it is a new form of climate denialism. One only has to look at the brave stand people all across the world are taking to fight fossil fuel developments to see the kind of courage our governments lack but that the future will demand. Britain has seen protests in Balcombe in West Sussex, and in Blackpool, while in the US we have had brave pipeline fighters in Nebraska and Standing Rock reservation, North Dakota.
The neoliberal promise that we can both prevent catastrophic warming and allow energy companies to get rich extracting and burning more fossil fuels, including shale gas, is a fallacy. We can’t. Yet the US State Department’s shale gas initiative is seeking to expand fracking to other countries, even when their citizens don’t want it. The UK’s Institute of Gas Engineers and Managers, IGEM, cites it as a model for the world, and now Britain is seeking to import its own US-style fracking boom.
The Lancashire decision will have to be fought off with passion, enthusiasm and courage. This means putting ourselves and, yes, sometimes our bodies on the line to stop this march of fossil fuel madness.
Last week, even as superstorm Matthew bore down on America’s east coast, Barack Obama said at the premiere of Leonardo DiCaprio’s new climate change film that keeping fossil fuels in the ground isn’t practical, and that we have to accept fracking as a way to cut emissions because “we have to live in the real world”.
The real world, I assume, is the one that science is describing – that says we cannot develop more fossil fuels. The world Obama is referring to is something else – a bubble – in which fossil fuel lobbyists obscure the will of the people under their superstorm of campaign cash and political influence.
We can’t afford to dig up the fossil fuel deposits we’ve already developed, let alone develop new ones, especially shale gas. Some peer-reviewed research finds that shale gas is worse for the climate than coal or oil, because fracking and transporting it emits massive quantities of methane, which is over 80 times more powerful a warming agent than carbon dioxide over 20 years.
Those are the same 20 years in which we must replace our fossil fuel infrastructure with renewables to have a fighting chance against catastrophic warming. I recently filmed activists in China risking their freedom to speak out against coal; indigenous people deep in the Amazon confronting the ravages of oil companies; Pacific Climate Warriors blockading coal tankers with canoes, chanting: “We are not drowning – we are fighting!” We all need their courage and inventiveness now. The climate movement can prevail against the odds if it has enough bravery, community resilience, creativity, awareness of rights, and love. Luckily these are the things climate can’t change.
Josh Fox is a film director, playwright and environmental activist. His 2010 documentary, Gasland was nominated for an Oscar award. His new film is How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change.