Power Struggle: decision trees in climate emergencies
“Our common sense has begun searching for language to speak about the shadow our future throws.”
Power in its myriad forms is at the heart of the climate emergency – and key to mitigating its deadly effects.
How, what, and where power is produced; when clean-power and efficiency alternatives become available, affordable, and equitable; and where decision-making power is centered as all these choices are made will determine our future and therefore our fate.
I’ve been thinking about these questions for most of my working life.
In 1988, at the beginning of my first real journalism job, I spent an afternoon in a small Mexican village on the slopes of the Sierra Madre with theologian, philosopher, and historian Ivan Illich. Illich, who was 62 at the time, was the author of seminal books including Energy and Equity and Tools for Conviviality.
Known in many quarters as a founding thinker of the modern ecology movement, Illich’s radical critique of industrial society foretold man-made misery – created in no small part by the industries, institutions, and products originally designed to improve material circumstances and eliminate toil and suffering. In other words, to protect the common human from the elements modern industrial society was taking a wrecking ball to the environment.
Illich scared the hell out of me with his intense gaze and big brains. I hadn’t understood half of what he’d written in the books I’d read to prepare for this conversation. Was technophagic even a word, I wondered? It wasn’t in the dictionary and this was 10 years before Google burst forth upon the planet but as he used “technophagic” to describe those who “feed on the waste of development,” I sensed that he was onto something.
(There are so very many examples, billions really, including that of the journalist who hops on a CO2-spewing plane and travels a thousand miles for an interview. But consider for kicks the recent and headline-grabbing example of the senator from a coal state, who has taken more money from the oil and gas industry than any other member of Congress, holding the U.S. and the world hostage on meaningful climate legislation until he secured expanded oil and gas drilling on public lands.)
During the course of our conversation all those years and politicians ago, Illich was asked why he thought world leaders like George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, and Mikhail Gorbachev had finally begun worrying publicly about the heating of the earth’s atmosphere.
By way of explanation, he said that, finally, “our common sense has begun searching for a language to speak about the shadow our future throws.”
Three-plus decades on, I can say with confidence that common sense did not prevail. Between 1990 and today, we have emitted as much global CO2 as in all of history before that time.
According to the European Institute for Environmental Policy, which graphed this exceedingly depressing data point, “The year 1990 is often considered the latest dividing line after which policymakers can reasonably be considered to be aware of the dangers of human-induced climate change and thus clearly responsible for containing it, particularly in countries responsible for the bulk of emissions until then. Indeed, significant civil society mobile[z]ations were already underway by that time, and change was possible then.”
It just didn’t happen.
I’m going to call 2022 as the year that major news coverage stopped dangling the hope that we could change our catastrophic trajectory and avoid climate change’s worst-case scenarios. This summer, as drought and extreme-heat waves broil parts of the globe while flooding of biblical proportions terrorize and kill in different locales, the language used to describe the shadow our future throws emphasizes “adaptive solutions,” “mitigation,” and immediate-term life-saving tips for surviving the deadly threats.
To my knowledge shadows do not have silver linings so the best I can do is amplify the fact that mitigation and resiliency strategies can be deployed locally. Cities do not need an international treaty to plan, finance, and execute life-saving and life-enhancing measures.
At the Los Angeles County level, there are serious efforts underway to grapple with the climate emergency, some of them visionary.
Fortified by the leadership and aggressive climate goals set out in Mayor Eric Garcetti’s 2019 LA Green New Deal, government agencies, academic institutions, and community organizations have begun grappling with the complexities of equitable disaster preparation and mitigation.
The “Equity-Focused Heat Adaptation Strategies for Los Angeles County” was published by the county’s Office of Emergency Management and UCLA’s School and Public Affairs and The Luskin Center for Innovation.
LA County’s Sustainability Office produced a Climate Change and Health Equity report.
The LA County Board of Supervisors unanimously adopted the OurCounty Sustainability plan, which “sets forth a bold, people-centered vision for making our communities healthier, more equitable, economically stronger, and better prepared for the future,” and directed the preparation of the Climate Vulnerability Assessment.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power commissioned a multi-year study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory about how to reach 100 percent renewable energy reliably, affordably, and equitably (apparently by 2035).
The Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate Action and Sustainability (LARC) and the Los Angeles County Department of Health have recently launched a social media campaign to inform residents of the risks of heat-related illness.
And, in June, Mayor Garcetti named the city’s first (and only the nation’s third) “Chief Heat Officer” to create new warning systems and long-term strategies to reduce dangerous heat exposure.
Marta Segura, who already directs the City of LA’s Climate Emergency Mobilization Office (CEMO), will fill the new role. She is the right pick. Last spring under her leadership, CEMO launched “Climate Equity LA: Virtual Workshop Series,” deftly recentering power by privileging the stakeholder engagement of historically under-resourced and (therefore) currently socially-vulnerable populations.
Graphed on a continuum from “enlightened” to “enervating,” several of the Los Angeles climate efforts mentioned above emphasize equity in report titles and introductions but in short order veer off the equity path, suffering from what the author of The Ministry for the Future would archly call “cognitive errors–a wheel of mistakes including…choice framing, context segregation, [and] cause/effect asymmetry…”
At the outset of these reports and analyses, the origins of marginalized communities are rightly explained within the historical context of racism and redlining. Also noted early on is that these communities today suffer an undue burden when it comes to climate change: they are generally hotter than affluent and historically privileged communities, for starters; they lack infrastructure, shade, and greening elements – not to mention the kind economic resilience that could help individuals personally protect themselves from climate threats. More, the effects of climate change can worsen existing health disparities.
But as the decision trees in these reports branch off into primary, secondary, and tertiary policy recommendations, equity becomes so segregated from its historical and contemporary context (i.e., reality) that the once-rightfully highlighted needs of frontline communities recede as priorities – too costly and inefficient to rank as an urgent or even second-tier goal in the final analysis.
A thrilling exception was the Climate Equity LA series, which aimed to allow community members to help shape policy goals that include:
· Addressing structural racial inequities;
· Mitigating against “green displacement” (gentrification) as building and public infrastructure improvements take hold;
· Participatory budgeting, which empowers people to decide together how to spend public money; and
· Foregrounding hyper-local resilience while ensuring that there are resources to implement things like climate-resilience hubs and microgrids in low-income neighborhoods.
If all goes according to the mandate of its convener, CEMO will remain steadfast in recentering power by centering equitable climate policies.
Urban Renewable refers to such a holistic approach as “integrated sustainability.” Health, housing, economic stability, environmental stewardship, history, culture, politics – they’re all factors in how well and equitably we will fare beneath the shadow our future throws.
The Climate Emergency Mobilization Office is currently analyzing the data and community input from the spring and summer’s Virtual Workshop Series. Its mandate is to create an Equitable Climate Action Roadmap that will then be brought to the LA City Council for consideration.
This is a beginning. This is how power shifts.
