A Coalition of the Unwilling

Climbing Out of the Climate Web

But wait: There is also some good news amid the alarmism. If a single trend is connecting both sides of the Atlantic now, it's the grand revival of grass-roots environmentalism. "You know climate concern has gone mainstream when sororities get on board," Bill McKibben wrote last month in highlighting an Alpha Phi sorority in Texas that joined 600 other student groups in a weeklong string of U.S. campus actions ranging from letter-writing campaigns to winter "beach parties." "Photos petitions" are now showing up in congressional offices, while paintings of hermaphroditic polar bears and apocalyptic coastlines are traveling between the galleries of London and New York. What ExxonMobil did for the misinformation industry, young people and artists are doing for this budding climate insurrection, exchanging denial and addiction for an experiment in transnational cooperation.

Beth Raps, professor and co-director of the Adaptation Network, noted that demands for the democratization of climate change policy is a key part of the new environmentalism. "Widening the circle of participation in deliberation and policymaking is vital -- not just 'nice,' but a sine qua non for collective survival," she insisted. Raps worries that those who have the most at stake in the crisis -- "poor people, urban dwellers, people without health insurance, and people who live in areas without clean air or water" -- have only just begun to get their voices heard. Youths and communities of color figure strongly in this vision. And that's why climate activists are increasingly branching out beyond the marble steps of Washington; on April 14, for example, activists of all stripes in at least 47 states will rally simultaneously at different locations as part of a new campaign called Step it Up, demanding that U.S. carbon emissions be reduced by 80 percent over the next 40 years.

More than a few rosy signs indicate that this momentum is moving uphill to the level of local governance. As Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research said: "In the U.S., there's an emerging state-led desire for new forms of climate policy, including a huge volume of investment into new forms of energy.... California can lead the world to places that the UK never could, since we're stuck behind the EU cape." America's cities and towns are also taking the reins, much like their British CRAG counterparts. In Carmel, Ind., for instance, the mayor has promoted hydrogen-powered cars and embarked on a massive tree-planting crusade; in Austin, Texas, local leaders plan to harness wind energy and sponsor plug-in hybrids.

As America inches closer to the European consensus about the state of climate emergency, the motives for action at various societal levels are less relevant than the actions themselves. "There is certain to be movement in the U.S. over the next three years," David Demeritt, the climate change expert, said, "even if it's not done in the name of saving the planet, but instead on the grounds of energy security, ending foreign oil dependences, and the belated efforts to conquer or liberate Iraq." Even so, the enemies of Demeritt's uncharacteristic optimism are also growing by the day; recall America's Faustian levels of carbon addiction, national leadership failures and corporate pigheadedness that I've just done my best to catalog. The clock, no doubt, is ticking. In the wake of the IPCC report and the apocalyptic Stern Review, I'm now keenly aware that a sun-kissed Christmas isn't worth the harsher storm seasons, parched cities and global famines that environmental complacency promises. My recent move to Britain has taught me a lesson that all Americans need to hear: Ignorance is bliss until you step out of the carbon-guzzling garden; then it's just downright embarrassing.

But what would it take to find a new home in the Green Revolution? Even the British rhetorical tradition of environmental stewardship, which problematically implies that humans are the Earth's caretakers rather than its guests, is largely that: mere rhetoric. Front-page headlines are not enough to save us. Nor are paintings, or toothless international treaties, or calls for a technological messiah that may never arrive. To break free from the sticky web of climate peril will require radical transnational leadership, but also a philosophical realignment away from free-market fundamentalism and toward -- gasp -- a new regime of environmental regulation along with personal and collective sacrifice.