WORLDFIRE - Chapter 18, Part III

Mobilizing to Rescue Civilization

Roosevelt had a gift for bringing out the best in the American people, but he wasn’t alone in saving democracy. FDR had an equal partner in the Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, whose tireless wartime leadership also provides invaluable lessons for climate leaders today. Psychotherapist and climate blogger Rosemary Randall writes about how Churchill’s wartime speeches could show the way for public figures to effectively communicate about climate anxiety today: “Telling the truth without producing unbearable anxiety is a difficult act but, when done well, it is undoubtedly effective, as anyone who is familiar with the speeches of Winston Churchill will know. Following the defeat of the British Expeditionary Force in France, on 4 June 1940, he gave what is now known as the ‘We Shall Fight on the Beaches’ speech. It was Churchill’s truth-telling about the scale of the defeat, accompanied by a refusal to blame, that allowed him to argue with conviction that the British people remained able to face and overcome the crisis before them.” In a related commentary, climate writer Jeremy Deaton shares: “That is remarkable when considered in the dim light of 1940. That year, France fell to the Nazis, and for the next several months, German aircrafts [sic] pummeled English cities and towns, killing tens of thousands of civilians and demoralizing millions more” who expected a German invasion at any time. “This, Churchill said, was Britain’s darkest hour. But Churchill did not shy from the darkness. He previewed the difficulty that lay ahead with honesty and courage. ‘We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering,’ he said. If we fail, he warned, ‘then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.’ He did not dwell on the darkness, however. Instead, he issued a call to arms.” And Great Britain survived.

Today we find ourselves in another dark hour, one that demands similar honesty and courage. World War II was not won with meek political appeasement or timid economic tinkering. It was won with audacious political leadership and bold economic investments. So must it be with the wartime mobilization needed to rescue civilization today. In the face of cascading climate chaos, we need unshakable commitment to the cause of humanity’s survival. Neither man was perfect, but where now is our fearless FDR? Where is our climate Churchill? Who today is brave enough to gaze into the abyss and speak the terrible truth of what they see? Who will pledge their “blood, toil, tears and sweat” to the cause of humanity’s defense? Who will issue the call to climate arms? I believe the American people are ready. They are just waiting to be led. All who are old enough to understand them need to heed the words of Churchill, who once famously declared, “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Let the history books show that we found the strength and honor within ourselves to make the next chapter in America’s story one for the ages. Let ours be the generation that declares the time for climate capitulation is over and the time for climate courage is at hand. Given the stakes, any candidate for public office who lacks the 20/20 vision to see that civilization is under attack is not fit to lead in the era of climate consequences. Where would we be today if the world had listened to those who said during WWII that Hitler could be appeased? Fossil fuel industry climate saboteurs cannot be appeased. They must be challenged, fought, and vanquished.

One politician in DC displaying climate courage is U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Spurred on by The Climate Mobilization in Iowa, Senator Sanders became the first major party presidential candidate to call for a World War II-scale climate emergency response when he said during a nationally televised debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016: "We have a global crisis… we have got to stand up and say right now, as we would if we were attacked by some military force, we have got to move… urgently and boldly… in 1941, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we moved within three years… to rebuild our economy to defeat Nazism and Japanese imperialism. That is exactly the kind of approach we need right now." But that is not all Senator Sanders did. What follows is the story of something that unfolded behind the scenes during the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign. While few people read them, most have at least heard of the Republican and Democratic Party Platforms. This story involves the Democrats. Defined as “the ideas and beliefs that govern our party as a whole,” the Democratic Party Platform is ratified every four years at the Democratic National Convention.

You may not know this, because the party establishment isn’t real big on talking about it, but in the summer of 2016, the Democratic Party formally adopted into its party platform a bold solution to the climate crisis more aggressive even than what much of the U.S. climate movement was advocating at the time.

Among those whom Sanders appointed to the Party’s Platform Committee was my friend, climate emergency artist and activist, Russell Greene. Unsurprisingly, the majority of the committee, most of whom were appointed by the DNC/Clinton campaign, rejected aggressive amendments calling for a carbon tax, a moratorium on fracking, and a ban on new fossil fuel drilling on federal lands and waters. All were high profile amendments, so party insiders had ample time to take careful aim and shoot each one down in turn. They approved the too timid goal of “getting 50 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources within a decade” and the too late goal of “reducing greenhouse gas emissions more than 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.” But there was one amendment they didn’t really see coming because it wasn’t drafted until the last minute. That amendment, offered by Russell, called for a World War II-scale national mobilization to combat the climate emergency. I referred to it earlier in this book.

After shepherding the amendment through to the July Platform Committee Meeting in Orlando, Russell had to push back against attempts to have the amendment withdrawn, but he ultimately prevailed upon team Sanders to keep it in. Then he and a fellow Committee member passionately rallied almost the entire Platform Committee to sagely embrace this language from the “Global Climate Leadership” plank as the official position of the Democratic Party:

Climate change poses an urgent and severe threat to our national security, and Democrats believe it would be a grave mistake for the United States to wait for another nation to take the lead in combating the global climate emergency… Democrats recognize the catastrophic consequences facing our country, our planet, and civilization… We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II. In the first 100 days of the next administration, the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.

This was historic. It not only put the Democratic Party on record declaring that we are in a climate emergency. It committed the Party to mobilizing a World War II-scale climate emergency response. The platform language also provided the climate movement with unprecedented leverage to hold every Democrat running for office–from local mayor to U.S. President–accountable to this party plank, if only they had used it. Regardless, its adoption into the party platform made it part of the national conversation. No longer are just a few calling what we face a “climate emergency.”

My point in sharing this story is don’t ever doubt that you can influence something even as significant as a major party platform. I did and I’m not even a Democrat! The key is to recognize rare opportunities for what they are if they come knocking on your door. Mine arrived in the form of a rushed phone call from Russell asking if I wanted to help him and our mutual friend, Paul Alexander, craft party platform language. The three of us only had a few short days to draft our amendments, and we didn’t get in everything we wanted, but we got in enough, including the “climate emergency” and “World War II” scale “national mobilization” language I drafted and Russell’s language committing the party to a “first 100 days” climate summit.

Just as the Second World War in many ways brought out the best in the American people, so does a national climate mobilization today have the potential to become the most heroic and unifying endeavor in the history of humanity. Given that the alternative is quite possibly the end of humanity, who among us would refuse conscription in such a grand and noble cause? Who among us does not want to be remembered as a member of the Next Greatest Generation? For make no mistake: the climate beast clawing at our door is not just threatening our annihilation. It is challenging the moral fiber of our nation. By this, I mean our greatness as a people will be measured by how we respond to this existential threat. By this, I am saying that each of us has a responsibility to do our part. Will we just continue to passively appease the lords of yesteryear and silently watch the world burn, or will we use the freedoms and privileges we enjoy as Americans to disarm the destroyers and save civilization? When it comes my time to die, if I have helped ensure that our response is the latter, I will consider my life to have been one richly lived.

But currently we are losing the climate war, hobbled by a conspiracy of silence rooted in rank political cowardice. In stark contrast to World War II, when defending democracy from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was never far from the minds of the American people, few politicians have until recently even been willing to acknowledge that we are in a climate war. Fewer still are willing to speak the truth about the speed and scale of the response required for our collective survival. When European cities were being leveled by death dropped from the sky during WWII, the horror of this reality dominated the attention of political leaders, the media, and the citizenry until the purveyors of that death and destruction were vanquished. When U.S. cities are drowned by a different kind of death dropped from the sky during the climate war, the horrors of this reality are cynically marginalized as a partisan “issue,” with the corporate purveyors of that death and destruction feted as upstanding members of society.

The last time a U.S. president tried to mobilize the nation was during the Carter era. I will never forget as a teenager watching President Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech on TV. Several weeks after having solar panels installed on the roof of the White House, President Carter said to the American people: “I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our Nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel-from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the Sun.” While it is easy with hindsight to be critical of Carter’s emphasis on fossil fuels and synthetic fuels, his enthusiastic embrace of solar was sound: “I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this Nation's first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.” Then he said: “To make absolutely certain that nothing stands in the way of achieving these goals, I will urge Congress to create an energy mobilization board which, like the War Production Board in World War II, will have the responsibility and authority to cut through the redtape, the delays, and the endless roadblocks to completing key energy projects.” But Carter was not able to get his Energy Mobilization Board through Congress.

Had we successfully mobilized in the 1980s, incremental change might be enough today. But we chose then not to heed Carter’s energy crisis warning, with revolutionary change now required. The tragic consequence of our shortsighted decision is we are going to lose a lot what we love at this point no matter what we do. But we must not further compound those losses by waiting even longer to act. We don’t get a redo for the decades we needlessly squandered, but we can minimize the misery by refusing to waste more decades by acting boldly and bravely now. By mobilizing to rescue civilization, the American people can conquer what Carter called “the crisis of the spirit in our country” and “rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future, and give our Nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose.” We can remedy our climate crisis of confidence, but only by being honest with each other about the true magnitude of the challenge we are facing.

The antidote to despair is to prepare, and in the absence of federal leadership, local communities are starting to prepare. Cities and counties coast to coast are declaring climate emergencies. In 2017, an unassuming Los Angeles City Councilman, Paul Koretz, made history by becoming the first elected official of a major U.S. city to call for a “World War II-scale mobilization” to achieve carbon neutrality by 2025. Declaring the need to mobilize, however, is not the same as mobilizing. Two years later, the City of Angels would become the world’s first governmental body to back up their emergency declaration with a climate emergency response by creating a staffed and funded Climate Emergency Mobilization Office to oversee the active development of the city’s mobilization plan. When last I looked, more than 2,000 local government councils globally had declared climate emergencies, along with the state of Hawaii; the European Parliament; and the nations of Japan, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, and New Zealand. For every emergency that is declared, we need comprehensive emergency mobilization plans to match.

In 2019, the same year Oxford Dictionary declared “climate emergency” the word of the year, more than 11,000 scientists from around the world publicly added their voices to the climate emergency chorus, writing: “Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and to ‘tell it like it is.’ On the basis of this obligation… we declare… clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency.” In 2020, the largest climate survey ever conducted found 64% of the public in 50 nations believes we are in a climate emergency, with 59% saying “the world should do everything necessary and urgently” to respond.

Then it finally happened in Congress. Acting in my capacity as advisor to The Climate Mobilization (TCM), the second I learned that U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) was about to introduce a climate emergency resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives, I alerted my TCM colleague, Ezra Silk, who together with Russell Greene spent several months working with Rep. Blumenauer’s office–and later the offices of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)–to help craft the resolution language. I remember Russell and I objecting to a clause highlighting the IPCC’s too-late-to-matter 2050 timeline for zeroing out emissions, which Ezra was able to convince the offices to excise. Even more to their credit, the offices of Sanders and Blumenauer ended up incorporating language Russell and I drafted calling for an economically just phase-out of oil, gas and coal to “keep fossil fuels in the ground,” for there is no pathway to zero emissions that doesn't keep it in the ground. The resulting resolution expressed “the sense of Congress that there is a climate emergency which demands a massive-scale mobilization to halt, reverse, and address its consequences and causes.” Speaking about the resolution on a call with reporters, Sanders rightly declared: “There are many, many challenges facing this country. But at the top of the list must be the existential threat to our planet in terms of the damage that climate change is doing and will do."

None of this just happened. It happened because futurist Lester Brown had been beating the climate emergency drum for years. It happened because climate leader Paul Gilding added his own rhythm to that drumbeat. It happened because Philip Sutton and David Spratt, co-authors of Climate Code Red, added theirs. It happened because The Climate Mobilization worked to make it happen. I would later learn from Ezra that a similar climate emergency congressional resolution I had once drafted for TCM, the draft of which he shared with Rep. Blumenauer’s office, helped convince their office to engage with him. As my experiences with the group keep reminding me, if you don’t see immediate impacts from your work, don’t despair. Take a deep breath, step back, and watch for the long-term effects. This is one of the hardest lessons I have had to learn in the face of the climate emergency. It takes a superhuman effort to exercise patience when your house is burning down. But endurance is what is needed for an emergency that will last for generations.

This brings me to the most compelling case for climate truth I have ever read, penned by psychoanalyst Margaret Klein Salamon, co-founder of The Climate Mobilization. In “The Transformative Power of Climate Truth,” Salamon writes:

All of the great social movements throughout history have successfully applied the transformative power of truth en masse. The transformative truths of social movements are widely known before the emergence of the movement, but they are repressed, denied, and ignored. The institutions of society—the government, media, academy and religious institutions often collude in denying the truth, failing the people they are meant to serve. Successful social movements take the truth into their own hands and force individuals, institutions, and especially governments to reckon with, accept, and ultimately act on the truth…

That we are in an acute crisis, and need an emergency response, similar to how we mobilized to meet the emergency of World War II—is considered too hot to handle. Americans are considered too weak, ignorant, and ideologically rigid to be able to deal with it. Instead, messages are tested on focus groups and refined in order to achieve a desired level of comfortable acceptance…

We are in an emergency. We need an emergency response. We cannot possibly hope to achieve one without frank and brutal honesty. If there is a fire, should we coax people to leave the building through euphemistic half-truths?—“Its [sic] getting hot in here, let’s go outside where its [sic] nice and cool?”—Or should we tell them the truth, and direct them to safety?

Salamon is right that society’s institutions consider Americans “too weak, ignorant, and ideologically rigid to be able to deal with it.” But my story puts the lie to that lie. As I was discovering in state after state on my ride across America, the American people are none of those things. My heartland encounters convinced me that most Americans would willingly enlist in a generational mission to save civilization from collapse. They just have not been asked. Weigh these words by Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading, and most courageous, climate authorities: “I believe a World War II-scale Climate Mobilization is the transformational idea that can once again unify all of us, in a global effort to avert catastrophic climate change, and live sustainably on this planet.” The Climate Mobilization’s Ezra Silk even produced a draft Victory Plan advocating for such an emergency mobilization that could help guide this effort. We have a proud history of selflessly joining together in common cause during times of great crisis and we now face the greatest crisis of all time. History shows that when they are treated with respect, the American people can handle the truth, no matter how frightening it may be. The truth saved us once during World War II and it can save us again. With the alternative endgame being unthinkable, our only realistic option is to mobilize.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.