The state of the climate movement
This is the text of a talk I gave today at Save the Children as part of their #changehistory series, organised by Campaigns Director (and fellow GlobalDashboard contributor) Kirsty McNeill. Kirsty’s opening talk in the series is here; see also @changehistory on Twitter.
I.
It’s the afternoon of 28 June 1988. NASA scientist Jim Hansen is testifying on global warming to Congress. Outside, it’s an oven. Temperatures are sweltering to an unheard-of high of 38 degrees Celsius. The legislators and journalists in the room are close to fainting.
It’s one of those moments when it all comes together. Next day, climate leads the New York Times. By September, 58% of Americans have heard of the greenhouse effect. Two months after that, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is set up. Global climate policy is born.
Now it’s 1990. In Geneva, the Second World Climate Conference is taking place. Margaret Thatcher – herself a chemist – is lavishing praise on the IPCC, which has just published its First Assessment Report. And as if to anticipate the Stern Review 16 years later, she’s interpreting the IPCC’s findings very much through a rational lens of self-interest – telling leaders that “it may be cheaper or more cost-effective to take action now than to wait and find we have to pay much more later”.
Already, the terms on which climate policy will play out over the next two decades have been set. This is to be a technocratic agenda. Climate change will be owned by a ‘priesthood’ of experts, with its own language, rituals, gatherings, and assumptions. NGOs can be admitted as members, but only if they’re willing to adopt the priesthood’s worldview and profess its creed.
As for the public, their job is to listen to the experts and then remember to turn out the lights. It’s certainly not to participate, much less wield power.
