Fanning the Flames of the Green Fire
One mom who is playing her role is Kristin Mink. You may have heard about her 2018 confrontation with Donald Trump’s EPA administrator Scott Pruitt in a Washington, DC restaurant. Holding her 2-year-old son in her arms, Mink boldly walked up to Pruitt and said: “This is my son. He loves animals. He loves clean air. He loves clean water. Meanwhile, you’re slashing strong fuel standards for cars and trucks for the benefit of big corporations. You’ve been paying about 50 bucks a night to stay in a D.C. condo that’s connected to an energy lobbying firm, while approving their dirty [tar] sands pipeline. We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, somebody who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all of us, including our children. So, I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.” Pruitt did resign–three days later–after a video of the confrontation went viral. Many activists and organizations collectively contributed to Pruitt’s ouster, but the video of Mink’s courageous callout was likely the straw that broke the camel’s back. One brave mom showed us, through the power of her example, how to confront those who are endangering our kids’ lives. We all possess the power to speak truth to those in power. Despite their impressive sounding titles, high government officials are just people like you and me. Never forget that they work for us, not the other way around.
Moms like Kristen Mink are not alone. In 2019, on International Mother’s Day, a UK-based group of parents, Mothers Rise Up, took to the streets in London to demand a climate emergency response. Here are excerpts from an open letter they published: “We are terrified at what the growing climate crisis means for our children and millions of children across the globe… The global scientific community has warned we have just eleven years to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown.” Echoing my own feelings, they wrote: “We are inspired by the young people who are striking for climate action, but we can’t leave it to our children to fix the mess that past generations have created… Together with worried parents across the globe we are calling on governments to declare a climate emergency.” That same fall, 81-year-old actress, mother, and grandmother Jane Fonda, inspired by Greta Thunberg’s leadership, temporarily moved from Los Angeles to Washington, DC to do what she could to sound the climate emergency alarm. Leveraging her considerable celebrity, and focusing her loving fearlessness as a grandmother, Fonda launched “Fire Drill Fridays,” two months of weekly civil resistance protests on Capitol Hill calling on Congress to pass a Green New Deal. Her success in recruiting a number of other well-known celebrities to join her in getting arrested sparked significant media coverage of the worsening crisis.
But one of the fiercest forms of nonviolent climate resistance appeared on the scene in late 2018, when thousands of citizens of conscience in the UK, organized under the banner Extinction Rebellion, occupied five London bridges to peacefully protest entrenched government climate denial. The mass action resulted in at least 85 arrests, with the group promising more actions until the UK government agreed to “tell the truth about how deadly our situation is.” By early 2019, more than 1,000 Extinction Rebellion citizens of conscience had been arrested for engaging in nonviolent climate resistance to ensure our continued existence, prompting the UK Parliament to declare a national “climate emergency.” This growing international, non-partisan grassroots movement, which has expanded to the U.S., is committed to “using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.” You don’t have to support all of their tactics to support their underlying mission of persuading governments to act. Inspired by Extinction Rebellion, a group of scientists called Scientist Rebellion was launched in 2020. The group is committed to engaging in nonviolent civil resistance to demand emergency decarbonization and degrowth. In the spring of 2021, more than 100 scientists in 15 countries participated in direct actions to highlight the urgency of the climate emergency. In the spring of 2022, more than 1,000 scientists in more than 25 nations engaged in nonviolent climate protest.
2023 witnessed another bright flame of the green fire rising when a youth group called Climate Defiance burst onto the scene. Committed to peacefully using “mass-turnout, peaceful direct action to force our politicians to take action at the scope and speed necessary to avert the worst impacts of this crisis,” the group is guided by a 3-prong vision: “Racial justice. Economic equality. A Planet that sustains life.” In an effort to hold President Biden accountable to his 2020 campaign promise to end drilling on public lands, Climate Defiance protested the 2023 White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, DC. Walking their racial justice talk, their direct action featured two political profiles in courage–Tennessee State Representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones–two brave young Black men who were undemocratically expelled from the Tennessee House by racist GOP lawmakers for giving voice to their constituents’ outrage over the gun violence epidemic. In spite of the terror driving the young members of Climate Defiance to rise up, the group is guided by a pledge to “take care of each other” and to “bring joy, love and laughter to our actions,” two things too often found wanting in social movement spaces.
This might surprise you: a 2021 Yale survey found that 29% of U.S. registered voters are willing to “support an organization engaging in non-violent civil disobedience.” More promising still, the survey found that a full 15% of U.S. registered voters “definitely would” or “probably would” themselves “engage in non-violent civil disobedience (e.g., blockades, sit-ins, or trespassing) against corporate or government activities that make global warming worse.” In other words, potentially tens of millions of Americans are open to the idea of putting their bodies on the line if asked by a person they “like and respect.” Perhaps more will be moved to direct action by Pope Francis’ 2023 Apostolic Exhortation on the climate crisis, Laudate Deum (“Praise God”), in which the Pontiff rises to the defense of protesters “negatively portrayed as radicalized.” The Holy Father reminds us that “they are filling a space left empty by society as a whole, which ought to exercise a healthy ‘pressure’, since every family ought to realize that the future of their children is at stake.”
2023 also saw more than 75,000 people converge in the streets of New York for a March to End Fossil Fuels. In stark contrast to the aforementioned 2014 People’s Climate March that lacked any specific demands, this one smartly and strategically demanded that President Biden step up and become the climate president America, and the world, needs. Marchers assigned blame, named names, and issued crystal clear demands. Held in the lead-up to a UN Climate Ambition Summit, the more than 700 organizations endorsing the march (including my consulting firm, Climate Crisis Solutions) demanded that President Biden:
“1. Stop federal approvals for new fossil fuel projects and REPEAL permits for climate bombs like the willow project and the mountain valley pipeline.
2. Phase out fossil fuel drilling on our public lands and waters.
3. Declare a climate emergency.
4. Provide a just transition to a renewable energy future.”
The flames of the green fire were further fanned in the form of an exciting new initiative “calling for national governments to negotiate and ratify a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty to stop expansion, phase out fossil fuels and ensure a global just transition for all.” Launched in 2020 and modeled after the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, this treaty has the potential to flank forever failing UN climate conferences. The visionaries behind this initiative are calling for international cooperation to phase out fossil fuel production and fast track society’s transition to safer, more economical solutions via “non-proliferation, global disarmament and a peaceful transition.” Prominent treaty endorsers already include the European Parliament, the World Health Organization, the state of California, and a growing list of the world’s island nations.
The courts are yet another arena where the flames of the green fire are being fanned. In 2021, a Dutch court responded to a lawsuit brought by Friends of the Earth Netherlands, allied groups, and more than 17,000 individual plaintiffs by ordering oil giant Shell to cut its carbon emissions 45 percent by 2030 in line with the goals of the Paris climate accord. A historic first, this sets a precedent for more accountability to come for rogue oil corporations. In 2023, in another historic ruling expected to provide a dramatic boost to similar court cases, 16 Montana youth–aged five to 22–won their lawsuit against the state for its promotion of pro-fossil fuel policies that violated their constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.” In 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Switzerland is violating the rights of older women by failing to act to protect them from the health threats of climate breakdown. Brought by the group Senior Women for Climate Protection (representing more than 2,500 women aged 64 and older), the ruling makes it the first international court decision confirming that countries have a legal obligation to cut greenhouse gas emissions to protect their citizens.
In the last chapter, we examined the exciting promise of the burgeoning legal rights of nature movement. I am also keeping my eye on a group called Stop Ecocide International, launched by the late Earth warrior Polly Higgins, to hold climate saboteurs accountable through ecocide law. Higgins’ group defines ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.” According to the group, which seeks to have ecocide added to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court: “Ecocide law is intended for the prosecution of persons of superior responsibility - the directing minds in a given situation where the crime of ecocide has been committed. These persons may be ministers of state or CEOs/senior officers of corporations or other bodies responsible for decisions that could lead to ecocide.” In 2019, Pope Francis joined the call for ecocide to be added to the international statute as a crime against peace. Other prominent backers include UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Jane Goodall, Greta Thunberg, and Paul McCartney.
The Way Forward
So where do we go from here? I believe our path forward will become clear if we heed these profound words, penned by my friend and colleague Russell Greene:
“Everything we live and work for is under siege right now – but we don’t see it. It’s ephemeral. Vague. We relegate the climate emergency to a surprise attack, even though it’s not a surprise. We are under attack right now, yet we look away, and return to other things – to our daily lives. And the days pass, and the carbon rises, and the earth heats, and the future holocaust becomes more and more impossible to hold off. Our priority must be to stay focused, steadfast, relentless and honest… to use our tremendous capacity to think and to feel–to reckon with the whole truth–with courage. Like a parent fighting for the life of their child, we cannot turn away, we cannot flinch… We must step inside... Imagine your children’s lives. Step inside that. Become your child – not today – but in 30 or 40 years. And, as your child – ask yourself–‘Mom? Dad? What happened? Why didn’t you do something?’ Can you step into that? And, can you stay there? Because if you do – if we do, if we step into that truth, and stay there – we’ll know what to do.”
I believe Russell is right. I trust we will know what to do, but first we must step inside the terror many young people are feeling of not being able to live out their full lives. We must sit with the pain our children will face decades from now until the heart-wracking truth of how we are failing them ignites a fierce green fire inside of us. Then we must wield the force of that fire by rising up in all our loving fury to fearlessly fight for their future. Maybe your green fire is already lit. Maybe you know what is yours to do. In the words of Earth defender and writer Terry Tempest Williams: “The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.” I feel the haunting gaze of those eyes boring into me daily. Do you?
Before he died, Fred Branfman (who famously blew the lid off America’s secret bombing campaign of Laos) penned a strategy memo for The Climate Mobilization in which he wrote: “We need to ask people… to think how they would feel if they knew that as a result of their actions now their children, grandchildren and all future generations will be struggling for survival, be uninterested in any of our ‘accomplishments’ and curse our indifference to their fate. It is not a question we ask because no generation of humans before it has ever had to ask it before, and it is thus not part of our cultural cognitive framework which teaches that a parents' duties to their children are only to rear, house, feed, educate and, if possible, love them.” We didn’t ask for it, but climate chaos has added a new layer to our duty to our children, meaning Branfman’s question is one for all loving parents to cogitate. It is obviously no longer enough for parents to selflessly devote time, energy, and resources toward maximizing opportunities for their children’s futures if they are not also devoting time, energy, and resources toward ensuring that their children even have a future. It is time to make this part of our cultural cognitive framework.
That the bold goals of 100% renewables and zero emissions within ten years are finally being embraced by much of the U.S. climate movement is undeniable progress. That such goals are being seriously discussed as policy options within at least one of the two major political parties demonstrates even more progress. That the Green New Deal continues to gain societal traction as a way forward is better news still. The climate conversation has come a long way since the climate wake-up years of 2017-2018. Now comes the hard part: defending this clear-eyed vision, for the mindset of climate gradualism dies hard.
We will be told to be patient. We will be told that we are moving too fast. We will be told that breaking our addiction to fossil fuels is too hard. Despite their decades of dithering that have fueled the worldfire we must now contain, the political establishment will admonish us to be practical and pragmatic. Politicians who complain it is not “practical” for America to transition to 100% renewable electricity in less than a decade likely would have said the same thing about JFK’s bold goal of landing a man on the Moon in that same timeframe. Yet Project Apollo was accomplished in 8 years and 3 months. Political pundits who protest it is not “pragmatic” to transition to zero emissions at wartime speed probably would have said the same thing about FDR’s mind-boggling war production goals. Yet we won World War II in 3 years and 8 months. Unimaginative “political realism” did not land a man on the Moon or win World War II. American leadership did–in a combined span of less than 12 years.
A mighty clash is coming between what conventional thinkers with limited horizons think to be possible and what sober-minded realists know to be necessary. The planet could care less about politics. The science is screaming for a climate emergency response to be mobilized in years, not decades. In the face of a worldfire threatening to extinguish life on Earth, heroic action is required to rescue our children from a climate nightmare from which they can never awaken. Their safety hinges on our ability to reimagine how we live in the world. Their future rests on our ability to unleash the fierce green fire latent within each of us.
And so my story comes full circle. You may recall how it was 2050 timelines being touted by members of Congress that sent me into a tailspin of despair in 2010. A decade later, Democrats in Congress were still at it, trying to convince the public we have until 2050 to get our act together. The establishment climate legislation coming out of the U.S. Senate was the “Clean Economy Act,” sponsored by Senator Tom Carper (D-DE), which would give the U.S. until 2050 to zero out carbon emissions (by the time the goal is ostensibly reached, Carper would be 103 years old). The establishment climate legislation coming out of the U.S. House was the “CLEAN Future Act,” sponsored by Representative Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), a person I really like, which embraced the same laggardly 2050 timeline for phasing out carbon emissions. Both bills show that most politicians in Washington, DC still don’t get that we are in an emergency. Year after year, presidents announce goals, and Congress introduces bills, that fall delusionally short of what is needed to save civilization.
Even a leader as climate awake as Bernie Sanders–who I love, admire, and actively supported for president in both 2016 and 2020–gave credence to the too-late 2050 timeline when in 2017 he surprisingly co-sponsored Jeff Merkley’s “100 by ’50 Act” in the United States Senate calling for the U.S. to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2050. This was followed by my own then Congressman Jared Polis, who I also like, introducing a companion “100 by ’50 Act” in the U.S. House. As much as I wish we did, Mother Nature is screaming we don’t have until 2050 to act.
If there is one message I hope you take away from this book, it is that we do not have decades to respond to this crisis. That ship has already sailed. Too many dangerous climate tipping points have already been passed. Too many precious lives have already been lost. It is obvious to anyone paying attention that humanity does not have until 2050 to keep things from getting worse. The world must halt the ruinous rise of emissions now and safely draw them down. We must act as if countless human lives depend on it, because they do.
One might think given all that I have written here that I am less hopeful today about humanity’s prospects than when I launched my journey back in 2010. Despite the already long odds against us having grown longer in the intervening years, my hope has actually grown that the American people, once fully alerted to the urgency of the climate emergency, will rise to meet the threat head on. A fierce green fire of activism is already rising. This does not mean I am optimistic politicians will on their own willingly support a climate emergency response. There is no cause for optimism in the face of decades of U.S. political inaction. What it means is my hope has grown that the people of America will finally force the issue by demanding such a response. This is a moment for each of us to ask ourselves what is our role to play in bringing about this cultural and political shift. How can we best contribute to building the political pressure to the point that politicians can no longer ignore us. We’ve had enough raw deals. It’s time for a new deal–a Green New Deal–one that puts people, the planet, and our children first.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.
Great final chapter — also the first chapter in our urgent march forward to seize the opportunity right in front of us, thoughtfully, strategically and, yes, pragmatically. It’s on us; it’s always been on us. We fight and win every day for a better future.