Everything Has Changed

01 Everything Has Changed

Books That Shaped the World

A retrospective look at the influence of Naomi Klein's book & how the world has changed since its release.

Issue #1 thereview.com →

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Everything Has Changed — A retrospective look at the influence of Naomi Klein's book & how the world has changed since

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The fight against climate change is a sinister game Of cOrpOratiOns versus civilians; of capitalism versus the climate.

It is a game of Xs and Os. If we the civilians don't win this game, everyone loses.

Thrift grows tenacious at the tide’s reach.

What is that reach when the water is rising, rising?

Our melting, shifting, liquid world won’t wait for manifesto or mandate, each warning a reckoning.

Ice in our gin or vodka chirrups and squeaks dissolving in the hot, still air of talking, talking.

talking.

— Still Life with Sea Pinks and High Tide

by Maura Dooley

COntents Part 1: This Changes Everything About Naomi Klein This Changes Everything The Impact of the Book

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Part 2: Everything Has Changed The Year that was 2020 COP26 Future Outlook

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About Naomi Klein

Introduction

This Changes Everything

FOrget everything yOu think yOu knOw abOut glObal warming. It’s nOt abOut carbOn — it’s abOut capitalism.

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About Naomi Klein

Introduction

This Changes Everything

Naomi Klein is a well-known Canadian author as well as a prolific climate and social activist supporting left-wing politics, criticism of corporate globalization and capitalism.

Klein is also an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and international and New York Times bestselling author of ‘The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism’ (2007) and ‘No Logo’ (2000) and the focus of this issue; ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’ (2014).

Klein’s books have been published in over 30 languages.

‘This Changes Everything’ won the 2014 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and was nominated for multiple other awards as well as appearing on the New York Times bestseller list and a New York Times Book Review ‘100 Notable Books of the Year.’ It also featured in Pavillion’s 2018 book "100 Books that Changed the World" by Scott Christianson and Colin Salter as the last entry to appear on the list. To add to the success of the book, in 2015, the feature documentary of This Changes Everything, directed by Avi Lewis, and narrated by Naomi, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.

However, Klein is not just a regular media commentator in print. She also regularly makes radio and television appearances around the world, appearing on such shows as BBC Newsnight, The Colbert Report, and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. She has been interviewed and profiled in hundreds of magazines, newspapers and podcasts including a major profile in The New Yorker magazine where she was called “the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago.”

After This Changes Everything was published, Klein’s focus was putting its ideas into action. She was one of the organizers and authors of Canada’s Leap Manifesto, a blueprint for a rapid and justice-based transition off fossil fuels endorsed by over 200 organizations, tens of thousands of individuals, which inspired similar climate justice initiatives around the world. She became a cofounder of The Leap, a climate justice organization developed from the Manifesto that existed to inject new urgency and bold ideas into confronting the intersecting crises of our time: climate change, racism and inequality.

In 2015, she was invited to speak at the Vatican to help launch Pope Francis’s historic encyclical on ecology, Laudato si’. She spoke at NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s 2018 press conference announcing New York City’s plan to divest from fossil fuel investment.

Photo from Naomiklein.org

In 2016 she was awarded Australia’s international award for peace, the Sydney Peace Prize for: “exposing the structural causes and responsibility for the climate crisis, for inspiring us to stand up locally, nationally and internationally to demand a new agenda for sharing the planet that respects human rights and equality, and for reminding us of the power of authentic democracy to achieve transformative change and justice.”

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Naomi Klein

The Book

Naomi Klein’s fourth book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate was published in September 2014 and was an instant New York Times and international bestseller. The New York Times Book Review called it “The most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring.”

In 2014, the book won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Canada’s most prestigious award for non-fiction as well as being named Observer Book of the Year and a New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year and Margaret Atwood chose it for The Guardian’s Best Books of 2014 list.

Apart from winning so many prestigious awards, ‘This Changes Everything’ is a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.

Climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, reimagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

We have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. We have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies.

We have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight for the next economy and against reckless extraction is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain.

Nothing except that climate change changes everything.

And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.

Either we leap—or we sink.

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.

Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism.

The most profound threat to humanity is the war our economic model is waging against life on earth. Yet we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system into something radically better. Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate.

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This Changes Everything

This Changes Everything film poster

Naomi Klein

In Review

This Changes Everything

"Eight years ago, Richard Branson, the tie-loathing adventurer (as his Twitter feed has it) and figurehead of Virgin Atlantic airlines, Virgin Galactic space travel and so on, pledged to invest around $3bn (£1.85bn) in green technologies by 2016. A $25m investment went into the Virgin Earth Challenge, a prize for inventing something to suck up all the planet-wrecking carbon emitted by gasguzzling industries like his own. Some goes into developing low-carbon fuels. Some pays for the snazzy Carbon War Room, a sort of green-tech Dragons' Den. "Gaia capitalism", Branson has called his vision. "We have to make it a winwin for all concerned."

Klein argues that humans don't cause climate collapse, and nor does carbon. The problem is a particular arrangement of these elements – in other words, capitalism, the whole point of which is to find resources and exploit them.

It's a habit of mind, if you like, a form of behaviour. As such, it can be changed. Except that most of the time we cannot see this, because we are "locked in, politically, physically and culturally" to the world that capital has made. "We lack the collective spaces in which to confront the raw terror of ecocide," is how Klein encapsulates the problem. Lucky for everybody then that opening up such spaces is exactly what Klein does best.

That 2016 deadline is fast approaching. How much, Naomi Klein asked Branson, will he have put into his pledge by then? "I suspect it will be less than $1bn right now," he confessed. He has been busy elsewhere in the meantime, launching Virgin America airlines, V Australia airlines, Virgin Atlantic Little Red airlines, and investing heavily in Virgin Galactic, perhaps because – as he has started saying – he has a plan to move to Mars. Klein doesn't necessarily follow the people who see Branson's green shenanigans as "a cynical ploy" to build his brand and confuse his critics. But you can grant him his good intentions and still think all this greenwash doesn't make a lot of sense.

I'll never forget the interview with her in the Guardian after the publication of her first book, No Logo (1999).

Quietly and sensibly you scarcely noticed, she completely shifted the terms of the anti-corporate argument, and the one about what politics in the 21st century is for. Speaking on her own development, from shopping addict to activistintellectual: "The only way I got consumerism and vanity into a sane place in my life … was by becoming interested in other things." On why she won't judge you if your shoes were made in a sweatshop. "This is not a consumer issue, it's a political issue … Products are just stuff." Shopping or not shopping is neither here nor there: politics is about law and democratic structures. If politicians aren't doing what people think they should be doing, it's up to those people to find a way of getting them to change.

There can be no doubt that climate change is happening; it has already started wreaking damage, and is set to do much more. Temperatures have risen by nearly 1C since the industrial revolution, and in 2012 the World Bank predicted a rise of 4C by 2100, bringing "extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity and life‑threatening sea-level rise". And yet coordinated international response is completely missing.

The 2009 Copenhagen climate summit settled for a halfhearted 2C target, then failed to secure commitment even on that. Obama seems stuck, as the US fracks and drills its heart out and Canada tears up Alberta in the race for tar. Climate, politics and business are caught in a vicious triangle, and at the moment it's the climate that is getting squeezed.

The only way to resolve this is with tough, fair, world-level regulation. But instead we have a vacuum, into which pours all manner of noxious nonsense. Climate-change deniers, luxuriantly astroturfed. Charities cosying up to fossil-fuel interests, including one, Klein has discovered, that has put oil and gas wells on its own bird reserve. Clever chaps who should know better – Stephen Hawking, the lads from Freakonomics – with their fantasies of terraforms and geo-engineering. Eddying little markets in non-solutions: carbon offsets, emissions trading, organic nappies.

What's wrong with us that we've let this happen?

And yet, as The Shock Doctrine (2007) made plain, Klein also knows that what she's up against is extreme. Capital has learned lots recently about using disaster as a cash cow, from Katrina to Baghdad. "And there are plenty of signs that climate change will be no exception" is how she starts this book. Her task is to take a potential catastrophe of unimaginable reach and to be calm and welcoming, drawing new people in. She does vast amounts of travel and research and thinking, then crafts all of it to the scale of her own voice: the voice of a pleasant, funny, unthreateninglooking woman with layerings and lowlights, a husband and a baby, living in Toronto in what US Vogue, in its current issue, calls "a middle-class brick home". (You can access the Vogue piece from Klein's website, and it's worth reading. As are what Klein calls her "two issues" with it: that they mentioned her recent treatment for thyroid cancer, "not a subject I would have chosen to be public about", and that a promise was broken not to identify the brand of shirt she's wearing in the pictures – "Lots of people make nice white shirts.")

Capital, Klein argues, has been separating humans from the world around them since the discovery of steam.

But it is what she calls "our great collective misfortune" that just as leaders started waking up to the emissions 4

Naomi Klein

In Review

problem in the early 1990s, they were also establishing the World Trade Organisation, and with it, a "new era" of hyperactive deregulation, tax-cutting and privatisation of public space. When historians look back, as Klein says, they'll see the two processes in parallel, each pretending not to know about the other: the climate movement, "struggling, sputtering, failing utterly" and corporate globalisation, "zooming from victory to victory".

The climate movement needs to think harder about capital, if it is to have a chance of getting real.

But it's difficult to spot climate change as it happens, because it moves so spasmodically and is by its nature "place-based". What do I know about the mines of Nauru or gas flares on the Niger Delta? What can I do about flooding in the Maldives or New Orleans? "Sacrifice zones" is what Klein chillingly calls the places most depredated: "Poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lack political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language and class." But even in the rich world, most people don't notice the dwindling of nature in their parks and gardens; or if they do, they are so sickened, they have to stop noticing right away. Which is why Klein sees the living wage as a climate issue. The main reason so many people are so careless is because they are worn out.

Her own eureka moment came, in 2009, she writes, over lunch with the Bolivian diplomat Angélica Navarro Llanos.

"Using chopsticks as props," Navarro Llanos explained how tough international climate action might mobilise what she called "a Marshall Plan for the Earth". For the first time, Klein saw that climate change is not an abstract, sciencey matter, and that it's far too important to be left to the knit-your-owns. Her proposals for what she calls "a politics based on reconnection" involve real, ordinary, active humans, working in properly modern, complex societies.

Green industries, such as renewable energy and public transport, are all much more labour-intensive than their fossil-fuel equivalents. "Climate action is in fact a massive job creator as well as a community builder and source of hope."

Klein hopes this book will be read by people who don't read climate-change books (such as me). So it's probably my duty to warn you that it is quite wordy, and sees things from a North American angle, and is a bit more vague about renewable energy than I'd like. But so what – it's an unavoidably difficult and complex subject. The argument is signposted throughout with striking buzzwords: Extractivism, Big Green, No Messiahs, Blockadia.

Not to mention the brilliant title – an executive summary in itself.

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This Changes Everything

There's one especially good bit, that completely stopped me dead. If you follow the climate science, you'll have heard the talk about how change doesn't happen incrementally but touches sudden "non-linear tipping elements", which may at any moment run completely out of control.

Klein also discusses a paper called "Is Earth Fucked?" by the geophysicist Brad Werner, which models the likely progress of "earth-human systems" towards various unpleasant outcomes, unless one remaining node of unpredictability is activated: "people or groups of people" who resist. Klein has timed her book to come out the week before the 2014 UN climate summit opens in New York City, and is on the board of 350.org, the group planning the People's Climate March that will greet it. We can only wish her and her fellow campaigners all the very best."

Review of 'This Changes Everything' for the Guardian written by Jenny Turner

Naomi Klein

In Review

This Changes Everything

The climate mOvement needs tO think harder abOut capital, if it is to have a chance Of getting real.

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Naomi Klein

The Book

Either we leap

This Changes Everything

Naomi Klein

The Book

This Changes Everything

or we sink.

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Naomi Klein

The Impact

The impact of this book cannot be understated. Klein has reached out and inspired many thousands of individuals.

She has outlined the facts surrounding the relationship between climate change and capitalism. What makes the book appealing and keeps readers reading is partly due to the way it is written. It is not confrontational and startling, but in a calm manner with an underlying urgency, Klein explains and outlines the unfortunate truths, and for many, the surprising facts so many of us were unaware of.

However, this book was not meant to be read and then stored on a shelf never to be looked at or thought about again. This book was created to inspire action. And it did.

According to NaomiKlein.org, the impact projects that came out of This Changes Everything include: Beautiful Solutions: An interactive space for sharing the stories, solutions and big ideas needed to build new institutional power and point the way toward a just, resilient, and democratic future.

Climate And…: An interactive and educational gallery where you can explore the links between climate change and issues like debt, migration, Indigenous rights, and more, illustrated with images and quotes from the This Changes Everything book and film.

The Leap: The Leap was a climate justice organization that ran from 2015 until closing its doors in 2021.

The Leap’s mission was to advance intersectional solutions to the overlapping crises of climate change, racism and inequality. We developed projects that built solidarity and relationships between climate and other movements.

And we boosted them with cultural and media work that built popular support for our allies’ struggles, advancing a vision of the world we are fighting for.

The Leap Manifesto: A fifteen-point roadmap for how Canada can transition beyond fossil fuels while upholding Indigenous rights and creating a more just and caring country. The writing of the manifesto was initiated in the spring of 2015 at a two-day meeting in Toronto (see below) attended by representatives from Canada’s Indigenous rights, social and food justice, environmental, faith-based and labour movements. It made national headlines when it launched and shaped the debate around Canada’s energy transition for years to come.

This Changes Everything Study Guide: A free guide for the book and film targeted at grades 9-12, to help users look critically at the idea of how our economic system’s push for continual growth impacts both the environment and quality of life for all people.

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This Changes Everything

Toronto Conference: We convened this two-day meeting in Toronto in 2015 to move beyond saying “no” to the worst attacks on our rights and environment, and to dream together about the world we actually want and how to get there. Representatives from Canada’s Indigenous rights, social and food justice, environmental, faith-based and labour movements came together to draft the text of what became The Leap Manifesto. This document describes the rollout of both days in Toronto and the exercises and prompts we used through the gathering.

UK Conference: On the 28th of March 2015, one thousand people gathered in Central London to discuss some of the most urgent questions facing our generation: what crises do we face? What would a fair and sustainable alternative to those crises look like? What kind of movement will it take to put that alternative in place? The resulting event, named This Changes Everything UK, was coordinated by an independent group of around twenty activists.

This page provides the breakdown of the day, the workshops and the materials used.

— While these are the only impact projects listed on Klein’s website, the extent of action taken in the year of the book’s release, 2015, should also be noted. Leading up to the Paris Climate Summit which took place in 2015, thousands took to the streets across the globe calling for climate action and notable change. Similar scenes of protest, most notably by the younger generations, flooded news sources led

by Greta Thumberg and other climate activists around this time with tens of thousands attending worldwide to show their support for a movement they care so deeply about.

However, while it is undoubtedly true that Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ is of great value and has had influence on the climate action movement, the world has changed drastically in the years proceeding 2015 and in a sense, everything has changed.

Naomi Klein

The Impact

This Changes Everything

The impact Of this bOOk cannOt be understated.

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This Changes Everything → Everything Has Changed 2014

2021

EVERYT HAS CHANGED

THING CHANGED 'This Changes Everything' was first published in 2014.

That was long before covid became a word we use daily and before wearing masks was nothing more than a fashion statement. But it was not just a pandemic that has changed our world. More and more we have witnessed the affects of the rich getting richer as more than once, billionaires flew themselves to space as the rest of the world witnessed more and more the devastating impact climate change is having on the poorest communities.

While it is undoubtedly true that Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’ is of great value and has had influence on the climate action movement, the world has changed drastically in the years proceeding 2015 and in a sense, everything has changed. It should be presented to new and future audiences as an influential piece of writing that helped inform people at the time of its release.

It is still relevant in its ideas but the world has changed drastically since, and so other factors must now also be considered.

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The World in Review

A Timeline

Everything Has Changed

The world after this changes everything Climate change is an issue that is becoming more and more prevalent

Naomi Klein releases her book 'This Changes Everything'

Climate protests fill the streets and the news headlines

climate protests 2015

This changes everything 2014

In 2014, in Lima, the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) 20 was held.

World leaders met to discuss the current state of affairs relating to climate change and what they could do within their own boarders to combat their impact. However, back in 2014, COP20 didn't make many international headlines

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In 2014, Naomi Klein releases 'This Changes Everything' and does not mince her words as she shows how our lives of wealth and grasping for more wealth is contributing to climate change. She insists that our capitalism must change in order to slow global warming. She has good suggestions for how this might be done. But it will annoy those who love their air conditioning and cars and air travel. It is not an easy read, but it highlights our current capitalist habits and leaves us with no choice but to become more aware and attentive.

In 2015, Paris hosted COP21 as well as becoming host to one of the largest climate protests in the world.

Hundreds of thousands of people have marched worldwide to demand action to stop climate change, the day before a UN summit starts in Paris. One campaign group says more than 570,000 protesters took part in marches on all the main continents.

Activists want action at the Paris talks to limit the rise in the average global temperature to 2C (3.6F) above preindustrial levels. In Paris itself, more than 200 demonstrators were arrested after clashes.

The World in Review

Great Thumberg leads a global climate strike movement

A Timeline

The coronavirus pandemic consumes the world over

Everything Has Changed

More false promises are made at COP26 in Scotland

Skolstrejk för klimatet 2018 UN cop26 2021

global pandemic 2020

Swedish pupil Greta Thunberg staged a protest in August 2018 outside the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), holding a sign that read "Skolstrejk för klimatet" ("School strike for climate").

A global strike on 15 March 2019 gathered more than one million strikers in 2,200 strikes in 125 countries. On 24 May 2019, in the second global strike, 1,600 events across 150 countries drew hundreds of thousands of protesters. Likely the largest climate strike in world history, the 20 September strikes gathered roughly 4 million protesters, many of them school children, including 1.4 million in Germany.

It’s safe to say 2020 is a year none of us will forget anytime soon and for very good reasons. While it was responsible for the pandemic and all of the horrors that entailed, it also brought about change in the way we view the world and for so many, refocused our priorities and the things that matter most to us. During lockdowns, people spent more time outside walking around their local communities and appreciating the nature that had gone unnoticed for the most part due to busy work schedules and pre-pandemic life.

‘When will leaders lead?’. The summit was held in Glasgow from Oct 31, 2021 – Nov 12, 2021. Hopes were high for many as they awaited to hear finally after two very difficult years, how their leaders were going to stand up and take responsibility for climate change action. Unfortunately, like so many COPs previously, we witnessed again leaders failing to take responsibility and instead boasting to their peers the progress they have made and stating very obviously false promises.

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The Year that Was

It’s safe to say 2020 is a year none of us will forget anytime soon and for very good reasons.

While it was responsible for the pandemic and all of the horrors that entailed, it also brought about change in the way we view the world and for so many, refocused our priorities and the things that matter most to us. During lockdowns, people spent more time outside walking around their local communities and appreciating the nature that had gone for the most part unnoticed due to busy work schedules and pre-pandemic life. Unfortunately, it is only when we are directly impacted by something or witness something a the right time that we are most likely to act. On walks to escape the confines of houses and apartments, people began to appreciate more and more the environment they live in and in combination with headlines of air pollution at a siginificant low, many have since reconsidered their living habits and indeed their appreciation for the nature that provided relief during an intensely stressful period.

With this new found appreciation and deeper understanding of what is most important to us, more people began to question the current action or indeed lack of such that was being carried out to combat climate change. With COP26 approaching many were asking ‘When will leaders lead?’. The summit was held in Glasgow from Oct 31, 2021 – Nov 12, 2021. Hopes were high for many as they awaited to hear finally after two very difficult years, how their leaders were going to stand up and take responsibility for climate change action. Unfortunately like so many COPs previously, we witnessed again leaders failing to takeresponsibility and instead boasting to their peers the progress they have made and stating very obviously false promises.

One speech that stood out among the rest however was that by Sir David Attenborough. He spoke clearly and honestly about the current state of the planet and the urgency with which we need to act in order to sustain life. We cannot address these problems and repair our planet seperately as nations or individuals, however, as Attenborough states; "If working apart, we are force powerful enough to destabilize our planet, surely, working together, we are powerful enough to save it. " see page 23 →

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2020

Everything Has Changed

The Year that Was

2020

Everything Has Changed

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The Year that Was

2020 was heavily defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to global social and economic disruption, mass cancellations and postponements of events, worldwide lockdowns and the largest economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Geospatial World also called 2020 "the worst year in terms of climate change" in part due to major climate disasters worldwide, including the major bushfires in Australia and the western United States, as well as extreme tropical cyclone activity affecting large parts of North America. A United Nations progress report published in December 2020 indicated that none of the international Sustainable Development Goals for 2020 were achieved. The year was also nominated by Time magazine to be one of "the worst years to be alive" 17

2020

in modern history. This is the story of a year you’ll never want to revisit.

"There have been worse years in world history, but most of us alive today have seen nothing like this one.

You would need to be over 100 to remember the devastation of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic; roughly 90 to have a sense of the economic deprivation wrought by the Great Depression; and in your 80s to retain any memory of World War II and its horrors. The rest of us have had no training wheels for this–for the recurrence of natural disasters that confirm just how much we have betrayed nature; for an election contested on the basis of fantasy; for a virus that originated, possibly, with a bat only to upend the lives of virtually everyone on the planet and end the lives of roughly

Everything Has Changed

1.5 million people around the world.

Our most debilitating threat this year was a sense of helplessness, and it ran unchecked. Gaslighting has been a major feature of American civic life since 2016, but in 2020 it reached new heights of outlandishness, making many of us feel as if we’d been pushed to the other side of the looking glass. We spent countless hours stuck at home and connected to the often untrustworthy hive mind of social media, wringing our hands and pointing out injustices, only to end up feeling even more paralyzed by the very people who are meant to protect us. The enemy sought to divide us, and succeeded.

And COVID-19, it turns out, was the greatest gift that the enemy could have hoped for. Helplessness met its evil twin, a partner in crime that

The Year that Was

would only magnify its mad power: isolation. By March, the world was locking down as a defense against the virus, those who could work remotely figured out how to do their jobs at home. So many didn’t have that privilege and lost their jobs, with no means to pay their rent or mortgage and no way to feed their families. Hunger became a major theme of 2020, presenting challenges even in countries with the means to assuage it. At the same time, parents across the world, no matter their means, hustled to take care of–and homeschool–their kids.

Meanwhile, essential workers, from grocery-store clerks to transportation professionals to hospital nurses and physicians, continued to show up for duty. We’d see clips of health care workers in the news, their faces marked by hours of wearing PPE,

2020

their eyes leaden with weariness.

Sometimes unable to hold back tears, they’d describe a new addition to their daily routine: watching patients die when they could no longer keep them alive. At a designated time each evening, many of us leaned out of our windows, armed with pots and wooden spoons or just our oddball cacophony of human voices, and raised a ruckus in support of those workers. It was the least we could do, at a time when we had no idea what to do.

That began in March, the onset of a period in which most of us felt encased in our own lonely snow globes, looking out at a world that seemed to be falling apart.

Realistically, the world had started falling apart long before: horrific Australian bushfires had been raging

Everything Has Changed

for months and would not be quelled until midyear–just in time for wildfire season in the American West, with its own brazen cycle of devastation.

Pictures from either of these scenes– unsettling orange skies in normally paradisiacal parts of California, aerial views of doomy plumes of smoke covering the Australian landscape– would feel apocalyptic in any year.

But in 2020, with so many hunkered down inside, it was particularly alarming to reckon with the fragility of the natural world. To think of it burning away–not least because we humans have failed it with our poor stewardship–invites despair.

Because face it: humans can often be terrible, making rash, selfish decisions at best and murdering one another at worst. Through most of 2020, to be locked inside and 18

The Year that Was

2020

looking out was to feel peculiarly powerless. And even as we grew to feel more remote from the world as individuals, it also seemed that individual nations had begun to curl in on themselves, motivated by misguided notions of their own power and self-sufficiency. What does an “America first” agenda mean in a country that fails its own citizens when it comes to protecting them from a deadly virus? In the worst months of 2020, we were a nation that could barely take care of itself, let alone help anyone else through a crisis. Worse yet, we were on our way to becoming a nation that didn’t want to help anyone else, even when it was in our own interest to do so.

And democracy–not a badge you can earn, Scout-style, but a practice and a discipline that needs careful tending– came to seem wobbly and fragile even in places that have long professed to believe in it. As if it were a previously fashionable fad we’d all become tired of.

The pages on this strange calendar just kept turning, with the menace of the pandemic bleeding through all of it. Public figures who meant so much to us all – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Boseman – were wrested away. And in May, the sensless killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police ignited righteous anger not just across the country but around the world. The ruthlessness of that act revived attention to similar outrages earlier in the year, particularly the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. It also reminded us how often, throughout history, Black people had suffered similar injustices, with no recourse, no means of changing the status quo. And then in August, even with the whole world watching, police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot and partially paralyzed another Black man, Jacob Blake, as three of his children watched from the backseat of his car.

The toxic traditions of injustice and inequality in America are no secret. A sequence of tragic events finally caused more white people to wake up. Whether this heightened awareness of the racism that has plagued our country since its founding translates into actual change remains to be seen. That’s just one of many question marks waiting for us in 2021 and beyond. After a year of so many changes, will we change radically too?

We learned a lot in 2020–but what, exactly, did we learn?

The bromides are already flowing freely: We slowed down.

We learned what was important. We played board games and did jigsaw puzzles and really talked and listened to our children. All of those are undoubtedly good things, and we nod in solemn agreement when our neighbors enumerate those little blessings. But do any of them capture the 19

Everything Has Changed

What exactly did we learn?

We slOwed dOwn. WE learned what was important. microtexture of what our lives were like this year? In our cities, when we were told we shouldn’t go out at all except for occasional exercise, walks in the sunshine became the thing we hung onto. How lucky we were to be able to do that, at least! In the suburbs, our restricted routines opened new routes of creativity: we might drive out of our way to catch a spectacular sunset, or finally tackle a hiking trail we’d always meant to explore. Then came the time when it became possible to meet a friend for a takeout glass of wine–this became the summer of lukewarm and acidic rosé in a plastic cup, but it represented a privilege and pleasure that, in earlier months, we weren’t sure we’d have.

When museums finally reopened, carefully limiting capacity, we were able to reacquaint ourselves with paintings we love, with golden objects that had been placed in the tombs of kings 3,000 years ago, with vessels that our ancestors used for simple but essential tasks like toting water from here to there. To step close and examine a 400-year-old brushstroke connects you with the human who put it there. It bears remembering that the Renaissance came into being even as the Black Death decimated much of Europe. Michelangelo and Rembrandt painted in its shadow; the plague that took Titian’s life. Our lives may be hard–this week, this month, this year–but look at what

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others did during eras of hardship. The trail of vitality and beauty they left behind is enough to make us cry, and sometimes we do–we can give them that much, at least.

For that reason, perhaps many of us have felt through 2020 that it’s easier to connect with old art than with new.

All manner of amusements have been streamed right into our homes, some of them quite wonderful. Because nearly all of our movie blockbusters and big year-end spectacles were canceled, we spent more time watching stories about human beings talking to one another rather than chasing down a bunch of magic stones from a bejeweled glove.

Will it hold? Americans are inherently optimistic. It’s why our allies like us, even if they secretly mock us behind our backs–but we don’t care! We’re a nation with our thumbs perpetually stuck in our suspenders. Our optimism is our most ridiculous trait, and our greatest. It can’t always be morning in America. Sometimes we have to get through the darkest hour just before. The aurora bides its time."

But even so, very little of what we watched helped us make sense of this moment. We’re bored, we’re anxious, we’re overworked or, worse, unemployed: We’ve had lots of time to get to know ourselves better, which often leaves us more bewildered and less trusting of our judgment. We are drained. We give up and watch The Office again, though there are worse things. This isn’t the time to be hard on ourselves for not knowing exactly what we want, except to continue to remain healthy and alive, and to do what we can to make sure the same goes for our neighbors and loved ones. Amid the pandemic’s worst days of New York’s first wave–those days in April when the number of cases and deaths continued to climb, when refrigerated trucks lined up to keep corpses from rotting, when we had no idea how, or if, this horror could be stemmed–one of my neighbors stepped out onto his fire escape during the evening cheer and re-created Jimi Hendrix’s “The Star Spangled Banner” on his guitar. The notes wailed and withered, swelled and crested, a story we’d heard a million times yet somehow needed to hear right then. Those of us listening from our windows– perhaps, out of laziness or depression, still in our pj’s at 7 p.m.–clung to its ragged majesty. Why didn’t our forebears choose a more singable national anthem? Because they were waiting for the invention of the electric guitar.

This appears in the December 14, 2020 issue of TIME.

We’re tired with good reason, but our flag is still there.

This virus attacks the weakest and most vulnerable and has thus disproportionately affected certain portions of the population. All the rules and restrictions have made us weary, yet it’s more important than ever to be vigilant.

When the U.S. COVID-19 death toll reached 200,000, the magnitude of that number seemed unimaginable.

Now it pushes toward 300,000, though the promise of several vaccines at least offers hope. For now, members of our families, friends whom we love dearly, people we’ve never met but whose work has touched us continue to die.

The virus is a blanket problem that hits all of us in painfully personal, targeted ways.

2020 Tested Us Beyond Measure. Where Do We Go From Here?

With reporting by Julia Zorthian/New York

— It’s safe to say 2020 is a year none of us will forget anytime soon and for very good reasons. While it was responsible for the pandemic and all of the horrors that entailed, it also brought about change in the way we view the world and for so many, refocused our priorities and the things that matter most to us. During lockdowns, people spent more time outside walking around their local communities and appreciating the nature that had gone for the most part unnoticed due to busy work schedules and pre-pandemic life. Unfortunately, it is only when we are directly impacted by something or witness something a the right time that we are most likely to act. On walks to escape the confines of houses and apartments, people began to appreciate more and more the environment they live in and combined with headlines of air pollution at a siginificant low, many have since reconsidered their living habits and indeed their appreciation for the nature that provided relief during an intensely stressful period.

With this new found appreciation and deeper understanding of what is most important to us, more people began to question the current action or indeed lack of such that was being carried out to combat climate change. With COP26 approaching many were asking ‘When will leaders lead?’. The summit was held in Glasgow from Oct 31, 2021 – Nov 12, 2021. Hopes were high for many as they awaited to hear finally after two very difficult years, how their leaders were going to stand up and take responsibility for climate change action. Unfortunately, like so many COPs previously, we witnessed again leaders failing to take responsibility and instead boasting to their peers the progress they have made and stating very obviously false promises.

One speech that stood out among the rest however was that by Sir David Attenborough. see page 23 → 20

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Percentage of people who agree that, in the long ter

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rm, climate change is as serious a crisis as Covid-19

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COP26

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David Attenborough Speech

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COP26

Your excellencies, delegates, ladies and gentlemen, as you spend the next two weeks, debating, negotiating, persuading and compromising, as you surely must, it’s easy to forget that ultimately the emergency climate comes down to a single number, the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere. The measure that greatly determines global temperature and the changes in that one number is the clearest way to chart our own story, for it defines our relationship with our world.

For much of humanity’s ancient history, that number bounced wildly between 180 and 300, and so too did global temperatures. It was a brutal and unpredictable world. At times, our ancestors existed only in tiny numbers, but just over 10,000 years ago, that number suddenly stabilized and with it, Earth’s climate. We found ourselves in an unusually benign period with predictable seasons and reliable weather. For the first time civilization was possible and we wasted no time in taking advantage of that. Everything we’ve achieved in the last 10,000 years was enabled by the stability during this time.

The global temperature has not wavered over this period by more than plus or minus one degree Celsius, until now. Our burning of fossil fuels, our destruction of nature, our approach to industry, construction and learning, are releasing carbon into the atmosphere at an unprecedented pace and scale.

We are already in trouble. The stability we all depend on is breaking. This is a story is one of inequality, as well as instability. Today, those who’ve done

David Attenborough Speech

the least to cause this problem, are being the hardest hit. Ultimately, all of us will feel the impact, some of which are now unavoidable.

Speaker 2: My world is melting.

Speaker 3: You think you have control. We actually have no control.

Speaker 4: I’m absolutely terrified to bring a child to this world.

Is this how our story is due to end?

A tale of the smartest species doomed by that all too human characteristic of failing to see the bigger picture in pursuit of short term goals. Perhaps the fact that the people most affected by climate change are no longer some imagined future generation, but young people alive today, perhaps that will give us the impetus we need to rewrite our story, to turn this tragedy into a triumph. We are after all, the greatest problem solvers to have ever existed on Earth. We now understand this problem. We know how to stop the number rising and put it in reverse. We must recapture billions of tons of carbon from the air.

We must fix our sights on keeping one and a half degrees within reach.

A new industrial revolution, powered by millions of sustainable innovations, is essential, and is indeed beginning.

We will all share in the benefits.

Affordable, clean energy, healthy air and enough food to sustain us all.

Nature is a key ally. When we restore the wild, it will recapture the carbon and help us bring back balance to our planet. And as we work to build a better world, we must acknowledge,

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no nation has completed development because no advanced nation is yet sustainable. All have a journey still to complete so that all nations have a good standard of living and modest footprint. We’re going to have to learn together, how to achieve this, ensuring none are left behind. We must use this opportunity to create a more equal world and our motivation should not be fear, but hope.

Speaker 6: Can we fix climate problem in one generation? My answer would be, yes, we have to.

Speaker 7: We need to not just to talk about what we can do, but to do what we can.

Speaker 8: This is a challenge that we should try to solve in a quick way, but with a long term vision.

It comes down to this. The people alive now, the generation to come, will look at this conference and consider one thing. Did that number stop rising and start to drop, as a result of commitments made here? There’s every reason to believe that the answer can be yes.

If working apart, we are force powerful enough to destabilize our planet, surely, working together, we are powerful enough to save it.

In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery. That desperate hope, ladies and gentlemen, delegates, excellencies, is why the world is looking to you and why you are here.

Thank you.

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You heard the same message from world leaders last week, and now that they’ve left, here’s what we can report. Meaningful progress has tireless and his team. Thanks to your efforts here in Glasgow, we see the promise of further progress. What is also true is that collectively a that happens or not to a large degree is going to depend on you. Not just those of you in this room, but anybody who’s watching or reading a work that would give the world confidence in a low carbon future, an agreement where countries would update their emissions targets on help those nations that are most vulnerable to climate change get the resources they need to adapt, an agreement that would give businesse to create an agreement they gave our planet a fighting chance. That was our ambition. By some measures, the agreement has been a succes front a threat to the people of all nations. That seemed proof that for all the divisions in our world when a crisis threatens all of us, we can co other institutions, particularly in the private sector, would start raising their sights as well. Over the last six years, that is what’s happened. T the environment, but in many cases because it makes sense for their bottom line. More than 700 cities in more than 50 countries have pledg to align their work with the Paris Agreement. That’s meaningful. Now, back in the United States of course, some of our progress stalled whe determination of our state and local governments, along with the regulations and investment that my administration had already put in pla helped to jumpstart the clean energy industry in the United States and markets adapted and so did consumers. Even when the Trump adm chose to stay the course. They kept reducing emissions. They continued the transition to electric vehicles and energy-saving appliances. Th gy has dropped to the point where in some places clean energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. Around the world, scientists and entrepreneurs a that is healthier and more affordable. That’s all good news for the planet and it is also good news for people looking for a job. In the US alo entire fossil fuel industry. Despite four years of active hostility toward climate science coming from the very top of our federal government stayed in the deal. Now with President Biden and his administration rejoining the agreement, the US government is once again engaged an the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the US has to lead. We have enormous responsibilities and obviously we still have a manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines and batteries and electric vehicles and build out the first ever national network of charging s pass through Congress in the coming next few weeks. Here’s what it will mean when that bill does pass. That legislation will devote over h any legislation previously passed by Congress. Along the way, it will reduce consumer energy costs. It will invest in a clean energy econom 52% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. The US is back, and in moving more boldly, the US is not alone. Earlie put themselves on a path to carbon neutrality by 2050. Korea passed a Carbon Neutrality Act in September that requires the government to stones to hit along the way. Paris showed the world that progress is possible, created a framework, important work was done there, and imp despite the progress that Paris represented, most countries have failed to meet the action plans that they set six years ago. The consequen experienced weather events that were more severe because of climate change, stronger storms, longer heat waves, more intense flooding, around the globe. It’s one of the reasons why the US Pentagon and other agencies have said that climate change poses a national security t remember Paris was always supposed to be a beginning, not an endpoint of our joint effort to control climate change. Back in 2015, we knew temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius. And that’s why Paris was designed to be a framework for countries to constantly ratchet u now here to Glasgow. And just was as true with the Paris Agreement, there is good news and bad news about what has happened here this p and bad food, feeling sleepy. Because of you, countries around the world are recognizing this is a decisive decade to avoid a climate disaste emissions by 30% by 2030. As all of you know, curbing methane emissions is currently the single fastest and most effective way to limit warm name brands, some of the biggest businesses on this planet have agreed to help create a market for the technologies we need to transition to of climate change. President Biden announced that the US will be quadrupling its annual climate finance pledge over the next few years, to other countries agreed to stop publicly financing international fossil fuel development with limited exceptions. So these are significant acco we demand that the signatories to these commitments actually follow through. We have to track it. They’re not self executing. They’re going is partial. Most nations have failed to be as ambitious as they need to be. The escalation, the ratcheting up of ambition that we anticipated world’s largest emitters, China and Russia, declined to even attend the proceedings. And their national plans so far reflect what appears to advanced economies like the US and Europe leading on this issue, but you know the facts, we also need China and India leading on this iss on the sidelines. I recognize we’re living in a moment when international cooperation has waned. A moment of greater geopolitical tension a because of a lack of leadership on America’s part for four years on a host of multilateral issues. I understand that it’s harder to get internatio politics. And that is climate change. It’s not just that we can’t afford to go backward. We can’t afford to stay where we are. The world has to what seems politically possible right now? I confess I don’t have all the answers, as I’m sure is true for all of you out there. Those of you who somewhat bleak. There are times where I am doubtful that humanity can get its act together before it’s too late and images of dystopia star afford hopelessness. Instead, we are going to have to muster the will and the passion and the activism of citizens, pushing governments, com Even when we didn’t have much leadership on it. It wasn’t just elected officials or CEOs doing the right thing. It was ordinary Americans m others in their communities, people who put pressure on businesses and governments to do better. People who turn their passion into votes about science. This is about politics. It’s about culture. It’s about morality. It’s about the human dynamic. How do we work together to get a even more to fight climate change during my time in office, if I’d had a stable congressional majority that was willing and eager to take acti it takes to reward politicians who take this problem seriously and send out of office those who don’t. I am convinced that President Biden’s b He’s constrained by the absence of a robust majority that’s needed to make that happen. Both of us have been constrained in large part by th make climate change a partisan issue. Perhaps some of you have a similar dynamic in your own countries. Although generally speaking, th stop. Saving the planet isn’t a partisan issue. I welcome any faction within the Republican party in the United States that takes climate chan exist. President George HW Bush, a Republican was one of the first US presidents to officially recognize the threat of climate change, was a an opportunity to score political points. And for those listening back home in the US, let me say this. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republica nature, physics, science do not care about party affiliation. And what is true in the United States is true in every nation. We don’t just need th on other things. And what’s also true around the world, true in the US, true in all the countries represented here is that the most important e that’s why I want to spend the rest of my time today talking directly to young people who may be watching and wondering what they can do of all the stuff that gets thrown at young people these days. It’s not always easy being young today. And for most of your lives, if you’re in th while, you’ve grown up watching many of the adults who are in positions to do something about it either act like the problem doesn’t exist o you, no doubt, wonder if you’ll be able to be safe in the community where you’ve grown up, whether you’ll have to raise your own kids in a w sonal.” And that’s why my message to young people begins with acknowledging you are right to be frustrated. Folks in my generation have er used to give me. If I was feeling anxious or angry or depressed or scared, she’d look at me and she’d say, “Don’t sulk. Get busy. Get to wo ago, a 27 Swedish teenager named Greta Thumberg inspired millions of people to join the largest climate demonstrations in decades. A lot o getting to meet young activists from all over the world taking up the baton on climate change. You just heard from Sheila Babauta, from th people take the lead in the fight for human rights and climate action. I’ve met people like Juan Carlos Monterrey-Gómez from Panama aft

been made since Pa is. And the agreements made here in Glasgow, thanks to so many of you, including my friend John Kerry here, who is and individually we are still falling short. We have not done nearly enough to address this crisis. We are going to have to do more. Whether a transcript of what I say here today. That was true six years ago as well. And on Paris, our goal was to turn progress into an enduring framen a regular basis, an agreement that would help developing nations get the resources they need to skip the dirty phase of development and es and investors the certainty that the global economy is on firm path towards a clean and sustainable future. In other words, our hope was ss. For the first time leaders of nearly 200 nations, large and small, developed and developing, made a commitment to work together to conome together to address it. At the time, we also believed that if enough national governments showed they were serious about climate, then Today more than one-fifth of the world’s largest companies have set net zero emissions targets. Not just because it’s the right thing to do for ged to cut their emissions in half by the end of the decade and reach net zero by 2050. About a third of the global banking sector has agreed en my successor decided to unilaterally pull out of the Paris Agreement in his first year in office. I wasn’t real happy about that. And yet the ace, allowed our country to keep moving forward despite hostility from the White House. The $90 billion investment that we made in 2009 ministration rolled back emission requirements for automakers, along with regulatory changes and efficiency standards, many businesses he ball had been rolling and it didn’t stop. Meanwhile, science and technology continue to advance. Today the price of solar and wind enerare integrating abundant renewable energy, more powerful batteries, breakthroughs in fields like synthetic biology to invent a better future one, more than 3 million people now work in clean energy related jobs. That is more than the number of people currently employed by the t, the American people managed to still meet our original commitment under the Paris Agreement. Not only that, but the rest of the world nd prepared to take a leadership role. Everybody who’s been watching John Kerry run around here knows that we take that role seriously. As a lot of work to do. But last week, Congress passed President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill that will, among other things, create jobs stations so families can travel across the US in electric vehicles. I’m confident that a version of President Biden’s Build Back Better bill will half a trillion dollars to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over a billion metric tons by the end of the decade, at least 10 times more than my. It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and it will set the United States on course to meet its new climate targets, achieving a 50 to er this year, the UK government, our hosts, announced they plan to cut emissions by almost 80% by 2035. This summer, the European Union o cut greenhouse gas emissions 35% or more by 2030. The Canadian government has laid out a path to carbon neutrality by 2050 with mileportant work has been done here. That is the good news. Now for the bad news. We are nowhere near where we need to be yet. For starters, nces of not moving fast enough are becoming more apparent all the time. Last month, a study found that 85% of the global population has , crippling droughts. Parts of the world are becoming more dangerous to live in, triggering new migration patterns and worsening conflict threat for the US and for everyone else.… and for everyone else. But not only did we not hit all of the targets that were pledged in Paris, but w that even if the commitments made as a part of the Paris Agreement were fully met, we would still fall short of our goal of keeping global up their ambitions as they got more resources and as technology reduced the cost of transitioning to a clean energy economy. So we come past week. The good news, in large part, because of the efforts of the people in this room, the hours of work that you spent with weak coffee er and are setting some really important goals for 2030. More than a hundred countries this past week have committed to reduce methane ming. More than 100 countries have also promised to stop and reverse deforestation by the end of 2030. Businesses from around the world, o clean energy. Here in Glasgow, nations have also committed to help poorer countries move away from fossil fuels and deal with the effects $11 billion, including $3 billion dedicated to helping vulnerable countries adapt to the impacts of climate change and the US along with 20 omplishments. They are hard won commitments. You should be proud of yourselves, and we need to celebrate those commitments. Even as g to require effort, but let’s assume that we actually deliver. That’s significant. But once again, we also have to acknowledge that this progress d in Paris six years ago has not been uniformly realized. I have to confess. It was particularly discouraging to see the leaders of two of the o be a dangerous lack of urgency, a willingness to maintain the status quo on the part of those governments. And that’s a shame. We need sue. We need Russia leading on this issue just as we need Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil leading on this issue. We can’t afford anybody and stress in part because of the pandemic, in part because of the rise of nationalism and tribal impulses around the world. And yes, in part, onal cooperation when there are more global tensions, but there is one thing that should transcend our day to day politics and normal geoo step up and it has to step up now. So how is that going to happen? How do we close the gap between what’s necessary for our survival and o are steeped in this work, who are far more expert than me. There are times where I feel discouraged. There are times where the future see rt creeping into my dreams. And yet whenever I feel such despondency, I remind myself that cynicism is the recourse of cowards. We can’t mpanies, and everyone else to meet this challenge. That’s what allowed the US to do its part over the last few years to meet our climate goals. making their voices heard, making it clear we need to solve this problem, regardless of the obstacles. People who organized and educated s. That’s the kind of commitment we’re going to need going forward, because let’s face it. This is not just about raw numbers. This is not just big thing done? And it’s about participation and power. Thinking back on my own experience as president, I would’ve had the power to do ion. And for the bulk of my presidency, I didn’t have that majority. Gaining such majorities require an engaged citizenry, willing to do what build back better bill will be historic and a huge plus for US action on climate change. But keep in mind, Joe Biden wanted to do even more. he fact that one of our two major parties has decided not only to sit on the sidelines, but express active hostility toward climate science and he United States seems to have a more vigorous opposition to climate than in many other places. But my broader point is that that’s got to nge seriously. And that may be a rare breed right now, but keep in mind, such Republican elected officials used to be commonplace, used to a signatory to the Rio Accord. If we are going to act on the scale that’s required, climate change can’t be seen anywhere in the world as just an or a Democrat. If your Florida house is flooded by rising seas or your crops fail in the Dakotas or your California house is burning down, he Democrats or the Green Party or Progressives to be working together on this existential problem. We need everybody, even if we disagree energy in this movement is coming from young people. And the reason is simple. They have more stake in this fight than anybody else. And o to help.… you’re watching and wondering what they can do to help. I am the father of two daughters in their early 20s, so I have some sense hat generation, you’ve been bombarded with warnings about what the future will look like if you don’t address climate change. And meanor refuse to make the hard decisions necessary to address it. And that’s a source of real anxiety and real anger at older people. And some of world ravaged by extreme weather and climate migration and conflict. As one 16 year old said, “For us, the destruction of the planet is pernot done enough to deal with a potentially cataclysmic problem that you now stand in here. But I also want to share some advice my mothork and change what needs to be changed.” And luckily that’s exactly what young people around the world are doing right now. Two years of people now know about Greta, but the world is full of Gretas. One of the things I love most about our work at the Obama Foundation is 28 he Northern Mariana Islands. As an elected representative, Sheila is fighting to preserve natural resources on the island and helping young ter representing his country at the Paris negotiations. I think he was like 22. Juan then led an effort to amend the constitution of Panama.

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Future Outlook

It is clear the world has changed drastically since the release of ‘This Changes Everything’ back in 2015.

The results of climate change have become more deadly and more frequent, energy consumption during the past two years has skyrocketed leading to a newer form of pollution “internet pollution” and countries’ leaderships have changed hands. With all this change occurring it begs the question, what can we do now?

What was refreshing about Klein’s book was the calm yet direct way she spoke throughout. Climate change can be a very overwhelming concept and for this reason many of us choose to purposefully forget it is an issue that faces us all. So, how can we actually help?

In an article for the Guardian, Rebecca Solnit outlines ways the average individual can “confront the climate crisis without losing hope”:

THe future is nOt yet written. we are writing it nOw.

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"The world as we knew it is coming to an end, and it’s up to us how it ends and what comes after. It’s the end of the age of fossil fuel, but if the fossil-fuel corporations have their way the ending will be delayed as long as possible, with as much carbon burned as possible. If the rest of us prevail, we will radically reduce our use of those fuels by 2030, and almost entirely by 2050. We will meet climate change with real change, and defeat the fossil-fuel industry in the next nine years.

If we succeed, those who come after will look back on the age of fossil fuel as an age of corruption and poison.

The grandchildren of those who are young now will hear horror stories about how people once burned mountains of poisonous stuff dug up from deep underground that made children sick and birds die and the air filthy and the planet heat up.

We must remake the world, and we can remake it better.

The Covid-19 pandemic is proof that if we take a crisis seriously, we can change how we live, almost overnight, dramatically, globally, digging up great piles of money from nowhere, like the $3tn the US initially threw at the pandemic.

The climate summit that just concluded in Glasgow didn’t get us there, though many good and even remarkable things happened. Those people who in many cases hardly deserve the term “leader” were pulled forward by what activists and real leaders from climate-vulnerable countries demanded; they were held back by the vested interests and their own attachment to the status quo and the profit to be made from continued destruction. As the ever-acute David Roberts put it: “Whether and how fast India phases out coal has nothing at all to do with what its diplomat says in Glasgow and everything to do with domestic Indian politics, which have their own logic and are only faintly affected by international politics.”

Six months ago, the usually cautious International Energy Agency called for a stop to investment in new fossil-fuel projects, declaring: “The world has a viable pathway to building a global energy sector with net-zero emissions in 2050, but it is narrow and requires an unprecedented transformation of how energy is produced, transported and used globally.” Pressure from activists pushed and prodded the IEA to this point, and 20 nations committed at Cop26 to stop subsidies for overseas fossil fuel projects.

The emotional toll of the climate crisis has become an urgent crisis of its own. It’s best met, I believe, by both being well grounded in the facts, and working towards achieving a decent future – and by acknowledging there

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Future Outlook

are grounds for fear, anxiety and depression in both looming possibilities and in institutional inaction.

What follows is a set of tools I’ve found useful both for the inward business of attending to my state of mind, and for the outward work of trying to do something about the climate crisis – which are not necessarily separate jobs.

1. Feed your feelings on facts Beware of feelings that aren’t based on facts. I run across a lot of emotional responses to inaccurate analysis of the situation. Sometimes these are responses to nothing more than a vague apprehension that we’re doomed.

One of the curious things about the climate crisis is that the uninformed are often more grim and fatalistic than the experts in the field – the scientists, organisers and policymakers who are deep in the data and the politics.

Too many people like to spread their despair, saying: “It’s too late” and “There’s nothing we can do”. These are excuses for doing nothing, and erase those doing something.

That’s not what the experts say.

We still have time to choose the best rather than the worst scenarios, though the longer we wait the harder it gets, and the more dramatic the measures are required. We know what to do, and that knowledge is getting more refined and precise, but also more creative, all the time. The only obstacles are political and imaginative.

2. Pay attention to what’s already happening Another oft-heard complaint is “nobody is doing anything about this”. But this is said by people who are not looking at what so many others are doing so passionately and often effectively. The climate movement has grown in power, sophistication and inclusiveness, and has won many battles.

I have been around long enough to remember when the movement against what was then called “global warming” was small and mild-mannered, preaching the gospel of Priuses and compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and mostly being ignored.

One of the victories of climate activism – and consequences of dire climate events – is that a lot more people are concerned about climate than they were even a few years years ago, from ordinary citizens to powerful politicians.

The climate movement – which is really thousands of movements with thousands of campaigns around the world – has had enormous impact.

In the US, a lot is happening at the local, state and federal levels. Local measures can seem insignificant, but often

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they scale up. For example, a few years ago the Californian city of Berkeley decided to ban the installation of gas appliances in new buildings. Berkeley is one small city, so it would be easy to dismiss the impact – but now more than 50 California municipalities have followed suit, and all-electric could become standard far beyond the state.

In the UK, the group Insulate Britain has staged blockades while demanding that the government improve building insulation standards, which is something I never imagined people would protest about. But insulation is a survival and justice issue in this coming winter of rising fuel costs and scarcity, as well as a climate issue.

There are organisations, initiatives and legislation on various scales, and there is a scale that is right for everyone.

Sometimes it’s getting your college to divest, or your city to change building regulations, or your state to adopt an aggressive clean-energy plan (as Oregon did this summer) or ban fracking (as New York State did a few years ago) or protect an old-growth forest.

If some past victories are hard to see, it’s because there’s nothing left behind to see: the coal-fired plant that was never built, the pipeline that was stopped, the drilling that was banned, the trees that weren’t chopped down. As my friend Daniel Jubelirer of the Sunrise Project advises, if you find the sheer volume of data and issues overwhelming, join up, learn as you go and perhaps pick an area to master.

3. Look beyond the individual and find good people When I ask people what they’re doing about the climate crisis, they often cite virtuous lifestyle choices, such as being vegan or not flying. Those are good things to do.

They are also relatively insignificant. The world must change, but it won’t happen because one person does or does not consume something – and I would prefer we not imagine ourselves primarily as consumers.

As citizens of the Earth, we have a responsibility to participate. As citizens massed together, we have the power to affect change, and it is only on that scale that enough change can happen. Individual choices can slowly scale up, or sometimes be catalysts, but we’ve run out of time for the slow. It is not the things we refrain from doing, but those things we do passionately, and together, that will count the most. Personal change is not separate from collective change: in a municipality powered by clean energy, for instance, everyone is a clean-energy consumer.

If you live on a diet of mainstream news – which focuses on celebrities and elected politicians, and reserves the term “powerful” for high-profile and wealthy individuals – 30

A New World

Future Outlook

you will be told in a thousand ways that you have no role in the fate of the Earth, beyond your consumer choices.

Movements, campaigns, organisations, alliances and networks are how ordinary people become powerful – so powerful that you can see they inspire terror in elites, governments and corporations alike, who devote themselves to trying to stifle and undermine them.

These places are also where you meet dreamers, idealists, altruists – people who believe in living by principle.

You meet people who are hopeful, or even more than hopeful: great movements often begin with people fighting for things that seem all but impossible at the outset, whether an end to slavery, votes for women or rights for LGTBQ+ people.

Values and emotions are contagious, and that applies whether you’re hanging out with the Zapatistas or the Kardashians. I have often met people who think the time I have spent around progressive movements was pure dutifulness or dues-paying, when in fact it was a reward in itself – because to find idealism amid indifference and cynicism is that good.

4. The future is not yet written People who proclaim with authority what is or is not going to happen just bolster their own sense of self and sabotage your belief in what is possible. There was, according to conventional wisdom, never going to be marriage equality in Ireland or Spain, or a US president honouring trans visibility day, or Canada ceding 20% of its land mass to indigenous self-governance as Nunavut, or an end to Britain running on coal, or Costa Rica coming close to 100% clean energy. The historical record tells us that the unexpected happens regularly – and by unexpected, I mean unexpected to people who thought they knew what was going to happen.

In 2015, Christiana Figueres led 192 nations to a successful global climate treaty in Paris. But when she was first asked to take on the job, she blurted out that it was impossible.

She took it on anyway, and the night before the treaty was announced, people around me were still saying it was impossible, and preparing for failure. Then it succeeded – not in finishing the job, but in moving it forward.

The future is not yet written. We are writing it now."

For the full article, head to the Guardian.com

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Everything Has Changed

I was Born into a World I was born into a world Before recycling was a thing, Before oil wars, When the biggest world Threat was nuclear.

The only extinct thing Was the Dodo, We consumed and junked.

Then we were told about Droughts, and disappearing Rainforests.

About melting ice caps, And we fought Iraq For a second time, Like father like son, We needed our oil Because we didn’t want Those electric cars.

At one time there were Huge monsters that Walked where we walk, Nature swallowed them easy.

Or maybe you believe It all started with Adam and Eve, But they too were kicked From the garden As are we, With our poison beaches Run down towns And our atmosphere That kills.

I write a poem And preach to the converted.

We send out loud messages To ourselves, That our world is dying: 1984, Blade Runner, Armageddon, The Road.

I’ve yet to read a book, Or watch a film about a future I’d like to live in.

Fortunately for me, I’ll die before the earth, But I’d like a place for my Computer chip self To click and beep In bright, clean happiness.

— I was Born into a World

by James Franco

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Published in 2022 by O'Reilly Media Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway Sebastopol, CA, United States Tel: + 1 707 827 70 00 Email: info@oreillymedia.com www.oreillymedia.com Copyright © 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior permission from the publisher.

A digital version of this publication is availble through the website. www.thereview.com Text & cover design: Alanna Drury Printed in the US — With thanks to: Naomiklein.Org https://naomiklein.org This Changes Everything, https://thischangeseverything.org/ This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein – Review | Jenny Turner The Guardian, 2014 2020 Tested Us Beyond Measure.

Where Do We Go From Here?

With reporting by Julia Zorthian TIME, 2014 David Attenborough Speech at COP26, 2021.

Solnit, Rebecca. "Ten Ways To Confront The Climate Crisis Without Losing Hope | Rebecca Solnit".

The Guardian, 2021

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