Why Climate Literacy?
Doesn’t everybody already know about climate change?
Whenever I am asked what sort of action by governments (of rich countries) is needed now, to address the climate and ecological emergencies, I list three things: 1) Shut down the fossil fuel industry on a rapid, fair, and binding schedule; 2) Create an extensive social safety-net that includes guaranteed jobs/income and housing so that no one is left behind during the massive economic transition that will result from #1; and 3) Educate everyone (including decision-makers and teachers) about why #s 1 & 2 need to happen, through a far-reaching climate literacy campaign. But to make 1 and 2 happen, we need to roll out #3 first to build support and community for a mindful, practical just transition.
So what do I mean by ‘climate literacy’? It is similar to language or mathematical literacy- a person needs to know the alphabet, grammar, and vocabulary in order to communicate in a language; one must know what numbers mean, as well as basic addition, subtraction, etc., in order to do household math. It seems obvious that people need to use language and numbers, but why should we be climate-literate?
Because the climate and ecological emergencies are the biggest existential threats to humans and the natural world that we have ever faced; and they require immediate collective action to give us a chance at a livable world in the coming decades. It is imperative that every citizen in a wealthy democracy understands the scale and urgency of the actions that need to be taken, and what is at stake, so that we are able to judge whether the ‘solutions’ offered to us are appropriate - if they are enough to mitigate catastrophe. It is equally important to understand that humans still have some control over our climate future.
What do I mean by climate literacy?
To be climate-literate requires a basic understanding of the science behind the present climate and ecological crises, of how science ‘works’, the social/political/economic causes of these and allied crises, and a willingness to continuously learn about the existing and rapidly evolving science and practical responses to these crises. It turns out that this is very difficult to do on one’s own because there are few practical avenues through which busy adults can access reliable, integrated information and empirically-based and justice-informed analysis about the climate and allied crises, and how to meaningfully respond to them. As a result, most people whom I engage with on climate have an overall sense of doom and helplessness, like there is nothing meaningful that they can do about it. This feeling is totally understandable. It, like the worst-case scenarios of climate breakdown, is also avoidable.
Over 50,000 peer-reviewed papers in a wide range of disciplines were published last year about ‘climate change’, and only about 4% of them were covered by major news outlets including more ‘liberal’ organizations like NPR. The vast majority of those news stories focused on the negative, disaster- headline stories. For example: a major conference this May involving more than two-thousand researchers on post-economic growth scenarios, sponsored by the European Union, was not even covered by the BBC or any major news outlet in North America. It is no wonder then that busy people with full-time jobs and/or families are not up-to-date on the climate science and what to do about it. I see this all the time in my interactions with the public on climate.
The following are four points that every climate-literate person should know:
1) The climate emergency is very serious - worse than you probably think (or maybe not). The IPCC reports, on which the COP negotiations are based, are founded in doubly-peer-reviewed science - it is as solid as it gets. However, the science-based recommendations are tempered by government officials and industry gatekeepers in the final published Summary for Policy Makers report. Paired with the cautious language and procedure that are central to scientific research, this tempering results in IPCC recommendations that are the bare minimum of what the world should aim for. But it isn’t game over yet (see #2).
2) The latest climate science consensus says that the climate will stabilize very quickly- on the order of years instead of decades or centuries- if humanity stopped emitting greenhouse gasses. Yes, this is hypothetical, but the model shows that if we made a strong effort now, we’d experience a tangible, meaningful slowing of climate heating in our lifetimes, and could even stabilize the climate. This is amazingly good news- and it is somehow left out of most dialogues about climate mitigation, perhaps because once understood, one must admit that we have the means right now to stop the climate from degrading further, yet choose not to do it. I’ll repeat that: We could stabilize the climate right now if we chose to. We could avoid passing tipping points in the climate system. This is not the time to give up or look away.
Privileged humans in wealthy countries do not have much time to dramatically change our course to lessen the “atlas of human suffering” that the coming decades will see- but we do have time, and that is key. Climate heating is caused by cumulative greenhouse gas emissions- the more GHGs in the atmosphere, the worse the heating and the higher the chances are of passing tipping points that will accelerate it. The sooner we stop, the less bad things will be by orders of magnitude, and we have the means to do it quickly. The only thing missing is political will, so we all have to become politically involved.
3) Climate is not the only problem, but all of the big planetary problems have the same ‘solutions’. Human industrial activity (including agriculture) has caused 6 of our 9 planetary boundaries to be breached, including that for a stable climate. If we take into account the fact that a very small minority of Earth’s human population are responsible for the vast majority of these interconnected problems, and want to account for that, then privileged folks in rich countries have passed 7 out of 8 Earth system boundaries for a just and physically stable world. But crossing these boundaries is literally not the end of the world- we can get back within them on timescales relevant to a human lifetime, to live well within safe planetary operating space and preserve the possibility of peace and sufficiency for our future generations. How? All of these boundary breaches are caused by the same thing: overproduction and consumption by that same minority of people above, at the expense of the rest of humanity and the natural world.
There are a lot of very smart people out there with plausible, practical blueprints for meaningful change. And there are ample examples of other ways of organizing society and living through cataclysmic changes in non-dominant cultures. The only thing lacking is the political will to support transformative change. To date, no country has passed or enacted policies to get human industrial activity back in line with what the scientific consensus says is necessary to mitigate dangerous climate heating - not even close to the Paris agreement - and most are moving in the opposite direction. We need to be much braver and bolder.
4) Massive change is coming anyway- our only way through it is to embrace it. It is almost cliché now, but it is impossible to have a continuously-growing economy on a physically finite planet. Period. Our global economy is dependent on extracting and using up fossil, mineral, and biological materials that we see as resources. Those are all either running out or being destroyed. Get used to the idea of having, consuming, using, and wasting, a lot less stuff. Technology, whether tied to the decoupling of production from environmental damage (green growth), or betting on a future wiz-bang invention, will not ‘solve’ these crises. Each of us needs to understand that the world we grew up in is gone, and we cannot use our own life experiences to inform us about how to prepare for the future. What replaces the old system, and how we get there, is up to us: either a controlled descent and a soft landing, or a hellish crash, into a new low-consumption world.
Climate literacy is essential for a functioning democracy, and we do not have that right now in the majority of wealthy countries. This is not to say that there is an information deficit amongst the general public that ‘climate change’ is real, and that we must do something about it. Capitalism keeps most people so busy with their everyday lives that the best most can do is to acknowledge that it is real, worry about, and then drive the SUV to the grocery store, or the old banger to the second job so that bills can be paid. We live in a state of passive hope or passive denial, and that is totally understandable, because there are few tangible social or political signals that we are facing emergency, and plenty of structural obstacles to addressing it.
So when mainstream news outlets declare the latest COP conference a landmark success because they finally put into writing the need to ‘transition away’ from fossil fuels, but did not commit to phasing them out, some of that hope may dissolve into worry and fear, or anger. Or when the president of the COP announces his firm’s new investments in fossil fuels three days after the conference ends, some people might find that reasonable. Others may have already rejected all efforts to work within or to try to change our present system, maintaining that it is too late and the only thing left to do is to watch everything fall apart.
However, if a clear majority of people (especially in wealthy nations) understood clearly what the climate science consensus requires that we do to avoid a hellish life for our kids, we would know who to trust, which one of those emotions to feel, and would be more likely to act beyond our middle-class comfort zone on their behalf.
Our present course of climate inaction, or insufficient action, would not be possible with a climate-literate public, supported through the emotional fallout of that literacy in community. We cannot possibly know where to aim, what is necessary to avoid the worst impacts of climate and ecological breakdown, or know if our leaders are responding proportionately to these existential threats, if we don’t have the tools to understand what the latest climate science, news sound bite, or pundit word salad means. The least we can do, as caring, responsible, relatively privileged people on this finite planet at this extraordinary time in human existence, is to learn.
