By David Helvarg
For over 30 years I’ve traveled the world reporting on climate disasters from hurricanes and wildfires to coral bleaching, coastal flooding and penguin colony collapse in Antarctica. But now I don’t need to travel because climate disasters are coming to a neighborhood near me (and you). For every truly natural disaster like Morocco’s recent earthquake there are far more climate-linked catastrophes such as the fires of West Maui that destroyed the city of Lahaina or the flooding and dam failures in Libya that killed thousands. Wildfires have grown into mega-fires in Russia, Australia, Greece, Canada and California, and for the first time in recorded history almost half the ocean (which is two-thirds of the planet) experienced simultaneous marine heat waves this summer.
It’s also certain that at the end of 2023 NOAA will announce that the past 9 hottest years in recorded history will have become the hottest decade. For years I reported on scientists warnings that without serious policy action to get us off fossil fuels a dangerously destabilized climate could become a civilization-threatening shift in the climate regime.
I believe we’ve now entered that catastrophic phase of climate disruption which means it may also be time to put our eco-optimism and faith in green tech solutions aside and adopt the attitude and practice of doctors and medical workers on the frontlines of today’s major and horrific wars in Europe and the Middle East, that being Triage, evaluating who and what we can save while there’s still time to act. As I recently wrote in The Progressive magazine’s special fall climate issue:
Climate scientists studying ice core samples in Antarctica dating back 800,000 years realized that while we had long thought of geological climate change as being like a thermostat happening gradually over centuries and eons, more recent science has shown it’s more like a light switch that can change everything in a few decades.
It’s too easy to look back in anger at the opportunities that we had to avoid tripping that switch. As far back as the 1970s there were policy options that could have driven a rapid transition from fossil fuels to cleaner, less polluting energies. These along with other initiatives in the ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s were blocked by the fossil fuel industry and its political operatives in the U.S. Congress, the White House, and in governments around the world.
Last year, the Biden Administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act (with zero Republican votes), the first serious climate legislation in U.S. history and a law that would have worked wonders had it passed in 1988, the year NASA scientist James Hansen warned the U.S. Senate, in televised and widely-publicized hearings, that climate change was a clear and present danger.
Still, incentives and innovation in legislation and large energy markets such as California have helped scale up clean energy so that today wind and solar are cheaper power sources than coal, oil, and gas, according to research by BloombergNEF and others.
Combining the traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous communities with Western science is also helping find solutions for restoration and carbon sequestration. These include prescribed and cultural fires in high-risk wildfire zones in the western United States. I recently reported on the world’s largest dam removal on the Klamath River in northern California led by the tribes who’ve lived along that river since time immemorial. But even as they were removing 4 dams that will restore 400 miles of salmon habitat and help fight the extinction crisis tightly linked to the climate disaster, they were also having to adjust their work, travel and annual sacred ceremonies due to unplanned wildfires raging through the area. So I found myself reporting on a solution within a larger disaster and not for the first time.
Last year I led a media workshop at a coral restoration summit in Florida that was interrupted on its second day by Hurricane Ian. From here on forward we’ll all have to start making sure our climate solutions are resilient enough to survive our self-inflicted disasters.
Unfortunately, the most comprehensive twenty-year climate action plan remains a work of fiction—2020’s The Ministry for the Future, a novel by utopian science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.
In an interview for my ‘Rising Tide Ocean Podcast’, Robinson suggested his book is “a tapestry of possible solutions, obvious problems, and also the macro-story: How are we going to pay for all this stuff?”
“The story of the twenty-first century is going to be the story of dealing with climate change,” he explained. “What I worry about is people are going to give up or think ‘well, it’s already game over, why not just party,’ but it’s never really game over. You always just have to keep doing the work from the point you’re at.” It’s called triage.