I interviewed the American climate activist and writer Bill McKibben five years ago. I liked the essays he wrote in the New York Review of Books, and persuaded an editor that his books about environmental science and politics merited a profile. I had been a candidate for the Green party in local elections in London earlier that year, and with hindsight I think I was wondering, what next? McKibben knew far more about green issues than I did (his first book about climate change, The End of Nature, came out in 1989). So I asked him: if a person is really worried about global warming, what should they do?
I may also have mentioned lightbulbs. As in: should this worried person change all the lightbulbs in their home to energy-saving ones first, or give up flying? I left the question out of the published article, though I admitted feeling inspired by McKibben in a paragraph that now makes me cringe. I’ll come back to that cringe, but what he said, very clearly, is that a mass movement of people is the only way to beat “the raw power of the fossil fuel industry”.
I believed him then. I still do, and the Guardian agrees: Keep it in the ground, the campaign launched this year by outgoing editor Alan Rusbridger and continued by Katharine Viner, is all about trying to mobilise our readership against coal, oil and gas – and in favour of renewable energy. But just how mobilised, or politically active, should one aim to be?
I feel chastened writing this, even a bit low, because the truth is that although I understand catastrophic climate change to be a certainty, I haven’t been doing a great deal. I went on last month’s climate march in London, and discussed going to Paris for a weekend of street protests during the UN summit. I’ve written some more interviews with environmentalists, such as New Zealand actor and activist Lucy Lawless, aka Xena the Warrior Princess, because I thought they deserved the attention. I marvelled at the heroism of the Arctic 30, imprisoned after they attempted to board an oil rig in 2013, and donated to Greenpeace.
But I’m not an environment reporter and I write about other things as well. Meanwhile, in my own time (of which I have more than many people because I don’t work full time), I helped a Green party councillor get elected in 2014, which was brilliant, not least because the result was so close that every hour’s canvassing felt worth it. But since then, much of the time when I’m not working or with my family has been taken up by the non-party-political community council I helped set up in my area.
I said I would come back to that cringe – I’ll call it the climate cringe. The truth is it’s impossible not to cringe from the coming disasters – by which I mean floods, droughts and heatwaves, melting ice caps, sea-level rises that will drown parts of our world and turns millions of people into refugees. This will happen. It is happening. But the embarrassment I feel when I reread myself vowing to be greener is something else. You pious twit, says a voice in my head. This is another form of climate cringe – the cringe that inhibits us even from trying, and shames us for efforts that are bound to be inadequate and riddled with contradictions (call yourself an environmentalist, and you drive a car/eat meat/have four children!).
The problem is that we are all – in the rich west – addicted to carbon and, like all addicts, we are ambivalent about anyone else giving up. Hydrocarbons (coal, oil, gas) formed from rotting vegetation and laid down over millions of years, have made us richer than our cave-dwelling ancestors could have imagined. Now carbon dioxide pollution threatens to cause irreparable harm, and may kill many of us off – the poorest people, who haven’t even benefited from the hydrocarbon boom. Such planetary-level injustice is hard to comprehend. But in our own daily lives, our addiction gives us so much pleasure (cheap flights! fast cars! plastic toys!) that we can’t bear to imagine life without it – and when others try to cut down, we are torn between support and irritation.
If I were 25, or didn’t have young children, I hope I’d be up for some direct action. At 44, I’m looking forward to next year’s London elections. Our city needs a green mayor. To anyone else – anyone, that is, who feels they are in a position to do anything – what can I say? It’s helpful to shrink your carbon footprint, but political engagement (which means pressure groups and local initiatives as well as Westminster) matters more. Read up, decide: do you believe the science or not? Then panic, but don’t cringe or despair. We have too much to lose, and still some time.
