This article was published in the April Issue Centerspread as part of a Head-to-Head with Contributing Writer Toby Sillman. Read Sillman’s opposing piece on the Opinions page.
Many people think of me as a climate activist. And they’re not wrong. I helped draft multiple PSB sustainability policies. I served as chair of the Massachusetts Schools Climate Action Network. I served on the Brookline Composting Advisory Committee and the PSB Sustainability Taskforce. I’ve organized climate walkouts at school and spoken at Earth Day marches. But I’m here to tell you to stop participating in climate activism.
In this column, I’ve written extensively about what effective activism looks like. Increasingly, I feel that climate activism is inherently ineffective, and therefore, we should focus our energy on issues where we can actually make meaningful progress. Let me explain.
Over the last number of years, there have been massive efforts by many activists to cut down on human fossil fuel use. And they’ve been somewhat successful. In recent years, we’ve seen some decline in the proportion of the world’s energy coming from fossil fuels. The thing is, global warming is not the kind of problem that we solve by reducing the proportion of energy we get from fossil fuels. It’s a problem that needs to be solved by reducing fossil fuel use outright.
Even as clean energy production increases around the world, global fossil fuel use is reaching new heights every year. So yes, we’re using more solar panels, but we’re also using more oil because we’re using more total energy.
Many environmental efforts center around trying to convince people to ride their bikes or drive electric cars. But getting individual people to change their lifestyles is not an effective strategy for combating climate change. We will never be able to change people’s habits faster than people reproduce those habits. In order to make meaningful change, we need to campaign against the companies that emit carbon, and we need to pass laws to restrict their emissions. But realistically, we can’t show up to Exxon and ask them to stop using oil, even if they are one of the biggest menaces to the climate, because they’re just so big, we can’t win. We need smaller, more winnable campaigns to start, and we can build momentum from there.
But what are the smaller, more winnable campaigns we can turn to with climate change? Plastic bags? Straws? Local bike lanes? The problem there is: Whereas campaigns against fur or foie gras make a tangible difference in the lives of some animals even if the meat industry is the biggest animal abuser, campaigns against plastic bags or straws, even local bike lanes, have little effect on the tens of millions of barrels of oil produced every day.
Even if we view campaigns against plastic bags and pushes for local bike lanes as stepping stones towards taking down Exxon, it will take decades to build a movement that powerful. By then, it will be too late.
So, shouldn’t we demand that the government regulate Exxon? Current administration aside, that’s a tough sell. Even Biden, who campaigned on an ambitious climate platform in 2020, approved huge oil drilling projects. When we elected Biden in 2020, we elected the most environmentally minded president in history, but even he did not float the idea of stopping fossil fuel use. In a country with a huge fossil fuel economy, such a suggestion on a national level is practically political suicide.
What about laboratories of democracy? What about using state and local policy to reduce fossil fuel emissions? Surely, the people of Brookline or of Massachusetts would be supportive of such measures. And they are, it turns out. Both Brookline and Massachusetts have passed ambitious climate legislation. What’s the problem then?
Climate change is a uniquely snowball issue. It is the culmination of hundreds of thousands of smaller carbon emissions and individual actions, none of which have much of an effect by themselves, but all of which have a huge impact together. That means that even if Brookline or Massachusetts achieves net-zero carbon emissions, without Texas or Alaska on board, the snowball is still so big that it will crush us all. Even if America achieves net-zero emissions, without China, India or Russia, the snowball still has enough mass to crush everyone. Even those who didn’t contribute to its size.
But let’s say we did find a way to get everyone to shift away from fossil fuels. Even if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions today, the global average temperature would continue to rise for another few decades as our excess atmospheric carbon lives out its half-life. Still, even in progressive Massachusetts, state leaders aren’t planning to reach net-zero carbon emissions for another 25 years.
I have so much respect for people who fight climate change. I spent five years doing it myself. Students like Toby Sillman have done incredible things for this community. I bike to school every day on bike lanes he advocated for. But increasingly, climate activism feels like swimming against a riptide: it leaves me feeling tired and defeated, and we only end up further from shore.
I don’t mean for this to be a depressing piece. I mean it to be realistic, even hopeful. I’m not saying give up. I’m saying shift the focus.
Two summers ago, I went to an exhibit at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science, a raptor rehabilitation center in Quechee, VT. They had an exhibit on the history of birds. You may have heard that birds are dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid struck the earth, triggering the fifth mass extinction in our planet’s history. The event wiped out much of the life on earth, including the T-Rex and Stegosaurus. But not birds.
Today, some people refer to anthropogenic climate change as the “sixth mass extinction.” And yes, this one is different from the previous five because humans are causing it. But it’s important to remember that the world as we know it exists after five mass extinctions. All life on this planet—every tree, every vine, every mouse, every whale, every human—exists in a world that has undergone five apocalypses. Every forest, every river, every moment I’ve ever lived and every feeling I’ve ever felt—everything in this world—exists after five apocalypses. Climate change will not be the end of the earth. It will not be the end of life on earth. It may be the end of human life. But if you ask me, maybe that’s karma.
The end of the world as we know it is a scary thought. But I think we need to come to peace with it. We’re not going to stop it from happening. To me, it feels human-centered to fight to keep the world the way it is right now.
I feel that all the time I’ve spent trying to stop climate change could have been better spent fighting for animal rights or economic justice—trying to make the world a better place before it burns. Do we really want to fight to prolong our existence when so many animals are in cages and slaughterhouses, so many kids go to bed hungry and so many people live in war zones or on the streets? Can we really justify to those people that we’re not helping them because we’re fighting a futile fight to protect our not-yet-born grandchildren?
I’m done trying to postpone the day when the world inevitably will burn. I’m ready to spend the limited time I have trying to help the individuals who are with me on this planet right now.
