On Taking Action and Collective vs Individual Action and Hope over Despair
In this edition of the newsletter I want to look into four points that show the value of hope as a tool for action and why it matters more than you might think
Point no. 1 - The status-quo is not as strong as it seems
Things are inevitable, inviolable and unstoppable - right up until the point when they’re not.
Let me give some small examples. Many years ago I picked up an anthology of short SF stories about the future of war. Written mostly in the 80s, the authors explored what they thought conflict might be in the near future. As you might imagine there were all the themes of Science Fiction conflict - fights in space, a battle on the moon, lasers and more. Most of the stories pitted the future USSR vs the future USA. Yet none of the authors envisioned the fall of the USSR because at that point in the 80s it seemed strong and inviolable. Yet inside it was rotten and brittle and a few short years later it had fractured and fallen.
Let us take a more recent example - the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. Despite almost being toppled by a popular uprising in the early 2010s it had clung on and then, with the backing of Russia and Iran, brutally pushed back the opposition and rebel forces into ever smaller enclaves. Global acceptance of this reversal in power seemed to follow years later as in 2023 Assad was welcomed at the Arab League summit inSaudi Arabia and embraced by a number of leaders there. A few months later he signed a China–Syria strategic partnership. The Assad regime was back and seemingly now unstoppable. Yet 10 months after signing that deal with China, the ‘inevitable’ Assad regime would collapse because inside it was rotten and its power was ephemeral.
Today as I write this it is easy to get into the mindset that our fossil fuel powered civilization is inevitable and inviolable and will power onwards until it bakes the planet dry. We have seen the election of Trump and globally there are a bunch of countries - gulf states, Russia, Venezuela to name a few - that want to keep us drowning in oil. What hope do those of us wanting change have? Yet the fossil fuel edifice they have built is brittle and rotten inside. The best encapsulate of the brittleness of the current system was written almost a decade ago and yet resonates still today:
Here’s something critical it took me a long time (and the patience of a few smart friends) to understand: the Carbon Bubble will pop not when high-carbon practices become impossible, but when their profits cease to be seen as reliable.
As it becomes clear that these assets will not produce profit in the future, their valuations will drop — even if the businesses that own them continue to function for years. The value of oil companies will collapse long before the last barrel of oil is burned; the value of beachfront hotels will collapse long before rising tides flood their lobbies.
For high-carbon industries to continue to be attractive investments, then, they must spin a tale of future growth. They must make potential investors believe that even if there is a Carbon Bubble, it is decades away from popping — that their high profits today will continue for the foreseeable future, so their stock is worth buying.
So the huge amount of resources and cash that the oil industry spends to fight a PR/legal/political war that climate change is both/either inevitable/not happening/a natural process is huge. (This is why climate denial narratives are so contradictory, because they care only about slowing the transition to a clean energy future, nothing else) If the oil industry didn’t need to maintain the future profits illusion then it would not need to do any of this. Yet, year after year, the impacts and reality of climate change pile up, so it needs to do more and to protect the illusion. As I’d written before:
The reason is because despite all the bad news, they know the writing is on the wall and they can see the end of the age of carbon. They engage with it because all they have left is delay. This is not hyperbole, actions speak louder than words; Heatmap.news, a new energy news start-up, noted that the spending patterns of the oil industry shows not an industry investing in the future, but one cashing cashing out.
(Image - Micro-grid using small wind turbines, solar PV, energy storage by Munro89)
Point no. 2 - Doomerism protects the status quo
So what the barrage of activity that the decades-long big oil strategy of delay and denial wants is for people (at best) to either join it in the illusion we can ignore reality but if not that, then check out. And believe me, they are fine with doomerism as an outcome:
One of the most telling examples of how fossil fuel interests leverage hopelessness to prevent climate action comes from a leaked 2018 PR firm document. The PR strategy document recommends that a comprehensive coalition of industry, civil society, and political leaders challenge Canada’s proposed federal clean fuel standards by arguing that “fighting climate change is a losing battle.” Strikingly, polling evidence suggests that for people who do not think the government should act on climate, a key factor driving their attitude is they feel there is nothing the government can actually do to stop it. Climate apathy and doomism protect continued fossil fuel extraction.
So even if there was no hope (which there is) I’d keep hope alive to not let big oil win.
But I don’t need hope for hope’s sake; the reality is that climate change is real and we know how to stop it. We just need the political will to follow through and to take action.
Victory in this battle is not all or nothing. We can lose battles yet win overall. Because every single fraction of a degree of warming that we stop matters.
Point no.3 - Action makes hope
One of the best ways to get hope is to act. Inaction is the antithesis of hope. This is a great summary of the point from the article entitled ‘I was in despair about the environmental crisis. Then I volunteered to clean up my local park’
“It was the counsellor I was seeing who switched me on to the idea of volunteering. As I sobbed in front of my computer screen during one of our online sessions… He gave me three rules: make it simple, immediate and collaborative. That’s how, a week later, I found myself in Victoria Park in Ashford, Kent, fishing old carrier bags out of the river. In subsequent sessions, our band of volunteers put up bat-boxes, created new paths, renovated the dried-out pond and surveyed for amphibians. Psychologists call the mental boost from volunteering the “helper’s high”. And boy, did I get high.”
So the science backs the point up - that action makes us feel better. What is even better is collective action. Why collective? Because climate change is not a personal issue and thinking of it solely in those terms is another way to hand a win to big oil. ( See ‘Net zero hero’ myth unfairly shifts burden of solving climate crisis on to individuals, study finds)
Because of the state of the world, there is no shortage of places to put your energy. I’ve recommended a few here. Feel free to suggest others to me too.
Key here though, as well as to take action., is to not run down something that another is doing to fight climate chaos. If you think your strategy is better, the best way to convert people to it is to show your strategy in action and get results.
(Note - given I’ve said a focus on personal changes does not really help, am I contradicting myself here? No, so while taking personal steps to reduce climate change won’t resolve the issue, it does create an environment that makes it easier for larger political change to happen. So it is all good - provided you don’t spend your energy attacking others for not doing it the way you’d do it).
Point no.4 The climate movement is about building the future
What we are building here is the future of humanity. To see the future needs a hope that we will both get there and can make it better than the projected worst cases. We’ve already escaped the very worst - but we need to go further! As will all human enterprises, the future (and building it) will be messy, fractious, imperfect and noisy, for sure. But what it wants at heart is a better future for all. It is not seeking to push one group of people down to advance another. It is not seeking to burn the world to ash to be the last man standing. It wants to move us forwards to a better place than we’re in now.
This movement, within the current world, is best exemplified by this classic cartoon:
(Image - by U.S. cartoonist Joel Pett for USA Today)
This is in contrast to the movement that opposes us that is, at best, about the status quo, but is increasingly about destruction.
"Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood Trump associations or Trump business clubs. Nor are Trump supporters flocking to traditional religion; Christianity has stopped declining since the pandemic, but both Christian affiliation and church attendance remain well below their levels at the turn of the century."
This is why collective action is so key - building is best done as a group activity. Ideas are here.
Some final thoughts
I want to shout out to some other newsletters that are also covering a similar ‘beat’ to mine. I’m enjoying their writings:
Let me end with this quote:
The world is burning whether you watch it, read about it, spiral over it - or not.
But in your circle of control, you can build something that matters.
Something real.
Something that helps.