Dissent

Ten years ago, as world leaders headed to Copenhagen for the fifteenth annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, dignitaries hailed the event as the last chance to avert catastrophe.

"If we do not reach a deal at this time," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said, "let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement in some future period can undo that choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late." The eminent economist Nicholas Stern echoed Brown's predictions, calling the summit "the most important gathering since the Second World War, given what is at stake."

Against this foreboding backdrop, hope was having its moment. U.S. President Barack Obama had taken office that year affirming America's "responsibility to lead" on global climate action and pledging a $100 billion green jobs program over two years, in the vein of what some—borrowing a phrase from none other than free-market evangelist Thomas Friedman—were calling a Green New Deal. The UN got on board too: as climate writer Alexander C. Kaufman and others have highlighted, the UN Environment Programme published a report as early as 2009 calling for a "Global Green New Deal" that would see major investments in public transit, energy-efficient buildings, renewable energy, and land and water conservation, while drastically reducing fossil-fuel subsidies.

It didn't take long for those hopes to be dashed. Once in Copenhagen, the United States tried and failed to strong-arm other countries into a deal on its terms. No binding agreement was reached. Friends of the Earth International called the conference an "abject failure," and the decade since has borne out their diagnosis. Global CO2 emissions have gone up at least 15 percent. We've experienced eight out of the ten hottest years on record, as average global warming has passed the 1°C mark. Extreme weather events, from hurricanes to wildfires, have multiplied at a terrifying rate. Welcome to the post-hope era.

In that same decade, though, the extinguishing of one set of hopes gave birth to another. A slogan first heard on the sidelines of [End Page 125]

Copenhagen—"System change, not climate change"—spent the last ten years percolating as the climate justice movement slowly but steadily entered the mainstream. Today, the slogan is a rallying cry of the school strikes for climate that have seen millions of students walk out worldwide—the largest international climate protests to date.

Another slogan has become ubiquitous at the youth strikes, too, capturing the movement's message even more succinctly: "No nature, no future." This is the message carried by the movement's sixteen-year-old icon, Greta Thunberg.

"You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!" she admonished world leaders in September. "People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth."

Thunberg's message not only conveyed the rage of a generation robbed of its very conditions of survival; it was also a reminder that those conditions go beyond the climate itself. Human extinction may still be a distant prospect, but the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of other species is a very immediate one. Surveying the collapse in insect and mammal populations, increasing numbers of scientists warn that we are witnessing the largest extinction event since the age of the dinosaurs. In May, hundreds of top researchers around the world issued a fresh wakeup call under the auspices of the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). They estimated that at least 1 million, or one in eight, species are at risk of extinction over the coming decades. More [End Page 126] than 85 percent of global wetlands have been eliminated, removing not only vital carbon sinks and hubs of biodiversity but also critical barriers against flooding. Soil degradation has caused a decline in productivity across nearly...