Glimmers in the gloom: 10 signs of climate progress

It is easy (and pretty apt) to get depressed about the climate situation. As records keep tumbling and feedbacks kick in and polluters continue to throw their political weight around, the momentum on our trajectory into ever greater disaster can feel overwhelming. Yet it is also apt at times to remember some glimmers of good news amidst the gloom. Here are the ten signs that most encourage me about places where progress that has been made since this image was taken a handful of years ago.

•  In five years, the value of the four largest US coal companies has plummeted from $45b to $200m, a drop of more than 99.5%. A string of major financial institutions have declared the coal industry to be in structural decline.

• For the last two years, China has reduced its coal consumption without being in recession. This included shutting down hundreds of smaller, dirtier coal mines.

• For the last few years, new renewable electricity generation capacity has exceeded new fossil fuel + nuclear capacity. Both wind and (especially) solar have seen their costs drop dramatically in the last 5-7 years.

• ExxonMobil faces the possibility of real legal consequences for their decades of lies and misinformation. And by extension, other fossil companies too.

• Fossil fuel divestment continues to expand rapidly, with now trillions in funds under management having divested in part or whole, or having committed to doing so.

• Mass civil disobedience against the causes of climate disruption is increasingly becoming a reality. Australian efforts such as the #LeardBlockade and #PilligaPush and #BentleyBlockade and #LockTheGate have seen the largest campaigns of civil disobedience since the Franklin River in the early 80s.

• Leaders with large followings in the UK and US are speaking openly and repeatedly about corruption, plutocracy, inequality and corporate hegemony - and drawing the links to climate change.

• Public opinion in the English-speaking world on the need for taking climate action is at its highest for almost a decade. While fickle and related most closely to recent weather as much as anything else, this nonetheless presents new opportunities.

• The compromised and weak Paris Agreement nonetheless represents the most ambitious step forward in international negotiations thus far, with every nation signing on to the need to participate in emissions cuts to keep warming to less insane levels.

• The US Republicans - the only major party in the developed world to embrace an official policy of climate denial - look increasingly likely to nominate an unelectable and divisive figure who could demolish their gerrymandered Congressional stranglehold on his way down.

• The most recent papal encyclical, Laudato Si', was a stirring call with implications that were nothing short of revolutionary, whose effects continue to reverberate throughout the global Catholic (and catholic) church.

And the final encouraging sign is that I sat down to try to write a list of ten and came up with eleven.

Reform vs revolution: visions of social change

There is a dispute or tension at the heart of most attempts at addressing injustice: should we seek achievable incremental change to make a broken system slightly less damaging to those who are victims of its injustice or risk more ambitious change that attempts to shift some of the fundamental reasons for that injustice?

For instance, the recent Paris Agreement, viewed through the incrementalist model was an outstanding semi-miraculous success, yet viewed through the lens of justice, was a further entrenching of the power of the systems that have caused the problem and which show little inclination of doing anything like what is necessary to avoid suffering on a grand scale.

Expressing the latter perspective, Slavoj Zizek says (and I've never managed to discover if he is quoting someone else at this point), "the worst slave owners were those who were kind to their slaves", that is, some attempts at incremental improvements to the worst aspects of an unjust system can simply be part of maintaining that system by making it more palatable to the consciences of those who are the system's beneficiaries.

Yet a similar charge gets levelled against the idealists: by demanding more, the possibility of making real tangible improvements to the lives of suffering people is sometimes lost. Oliver O'Donovan praises the virtue of compromise, which means being willing to do "the best that it is actually possible to do", that is, to avoid making the best the enemy of the good.

But the tension here is not always destructive. We are not always necessarily faced with a choice between token improvements that inoculate against further change or demands for impossible systemic change that suck the energy from incremental reforms. Sometimes, strategic piecemeal reforms can help to express, build and solidify public opinion regarding values that ultimately lead to more ambitious changes. And sometimes, demands based directly in ideals reveal the truth of an injustice with a clarity that enables much-needed reforms to occur.

But the reason that this tension is perennial in all movements for change is that this dispute between reformers and revolutionaries cannot be decided a priori. In O'Donovan's language, "what is possible" is itself highly contested. Who is to say that what currently seems impossible might not become thinkable under the pressure of a sustained radical social movement?

Such judgements about what is indeed possible must be made according to close attention to the particulars of the situation, while also being informed by a vision of divine providence being capable of doing more than we ask or imagine; hard-nosed assessments of political openings must be combined with a strong sense of historical contingency, cultural malleability and the omnipresent possibility of repentance.

Put another way, reformers ought to be strategic in seeking reforms that will heighten rather than lessen the visible tension between reality and justice. Where there is a choice between improvements that tend to make the powerful feel more comfortable and improvements that help to further reveal the injustice of the present order, then pick the latter. And revolutionaries ought to articulate visions and select strategies based on a credible (if ambitious) path towards change, where the next step is comprehensible as movement on a journey towards justice.

Of course, this doesn't mean antagonism between reformers and revolutionaries will cease, or that all will agree on where the convergence between competing strategies might lie, but hopefully it can help in avoiding some of the more egregious dead ends.

So was the Paris Agreement a miraculous unprecedented step towards international cooperation or a woefully inadequate further betrayal of future generations and vulnerable lives everywhere that further reinforces the power of the perpetrators?

Your perspective probably reveals where you lie on the spectrum between reformer or revolutionary. For me: it is both.
Image credit unknown.