Amid all the cheering over the landmark climate agreement reached in Paris last weekend, there were also criticisms that it did not go far enough, including from many environmental advocates who had been working for years to push climate change onto the world’s stage and inspire collective action.
At least by one measure — helping to raise the profile of climate change as an urgent problem — those advocates have succeeded. So what is next for them?
Climate activism group 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben posted photograph after photograph from Paris on Twitter celebrating the marches and protests after the deal and wrote: “This agreement won’t save the planet. It may have saved the chance to save the planet (if we all fight like hell in the years ahead).”
In an interview via e-mail, McKibben wrote that the environmental movement would be supportive of the Paris plan, but would expect to see results.
“We’ll take them at their word, at least for now, and ask them to prove it,” he wrote.
The focus of activism would shift to ensuring that the stated goal of allowing temperatures to rise no more than 2oC, or even 1.5oC, is taken seriously by governments, he wrote.
His group spearheaded opposition to building the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
After Paris, “there’s a long list of things that they can’t build going forward,” he wrote.
The group would continue to focus on government policies and practices with a goal to “keep it in the ground” — the motto about fossil fuels that 350.org popularized.
“You’d have to end fossil fuel subsidies tomorrow, and not even think about lifting the oil export ban,” he wrote. “Offshore drilling? Forget it. Leasing coal in the Powder River Basin? No dice. And the same story all over the world.”
“I think it’s going to be highly energizing for the climate movement,” McKibben wrote.
The spread of worldwide advocacy over climate issues has been remarkably rapid. Activists have marched in groups numbering in the hundreds of thousands and dangled from a bridge to block an icebreaker headed to the Arctic for oil exploration.
A push that began just a few years ago on college campuses to urge institutions to remove fossil-fuel stocks from their investments has grown into an international movement, with Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and the Church of England among institutions that have dropped coal or all fossil fuels from portfolios controlling an estimated US$3.4 trillion in total assets.
The campus protests continue. Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have spent more than 50 days engaged in a sit-in at the office of the school’s president to protest the institution’s refusal of student divestment demands.
The climate accord from Paris does not change the need to protest, Fossil Free MIT leader Geoffrey Supran said.
“Between homework and lab work, sore backs and tired eyes, trust me, none of us wants to be here,” he said. “But our administration has left us no choice.”
The divestment movement, “is helping to reframe the climate change narrative at the highest levels,” and the influence is reciprocal he said.
“The promises made at Paris not only vindicate our movement, they light a fire under it,” he said.
However, the center of action might shift, said Tom Steyer, who is a hedge fund billionaire, major climate activist and donor to the US Democratic Party.
He spent a week in Paris during the talks and said that what impressed him the most was not just the historic agreement among the nations of the world, but the additional commitments from regional and local officeholders, led in part by California Governor Jerry Brown and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as from major businesses and donors such as Bill Gates, who announced a billion-dollar clean energy fund at the talks.
“I am totally supportive and admiring and respectful of the protesters,” Steyer said, adding that he believes they have a continuing role to play.
However, the fight against climate change now shifts from the activist community to “people doing things in the real world,” he said.
There is still more than enough for the movement to do — especially in the US, where much of the leadership of one of the nation’s two major political parties still denies that climate change is even occurring, Sustainable Solutions Lab executive director Bob Massie said.
“We have this [US] Congress, run by the political wing of the Flat Earth Society,” he said.
With the global deal in Paris, US lawmakers are now “totally disconnected from the rest of the world,” he said.
Activists would continue to push at the US federal, state and local levels, where attempts to adapt cities for the coming effects of climate change would be increasingly important, said Massie, who has been deeply involved in the divestment movement.
If a Republican is elected US president, “there will really be nothing from the feds” to advance climate goals, he said, adding “you will have a two-tier system or three-tier system, with one tier ignoring this and another tier moving forward.”
The institutions that have taken part in the divestment push would remain active as well, Wallace Global Fund executive director and a leader of the effort Ellen Dorsey said.
The agreement in Paris is “an epochal win” that would eventually render fossil fuels “as antiquated as the Polaroid, the horse and buggy and chattel slavery,” she said.
It would spur more effort, not less, from the activist community, she said.
“The movement that helped pave the way for an agreement in Paris, the movement calling for divestment from fossil fuels, must keep its foot on the accelerator,” Dorsey added. “Activists must still challenge the industry and its power to ensure near-term implementation of the agreement, while demanding dramatic investments in clean and safe energy access for the world’s majority.”
McKibben said he did not expect the pace to let up anytime soon.
“It’s definitely the right project to pick,” he said, “if your goal is something to keep you occupied for a lifetime.”
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