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Welcome to Week 77 of Be the Change
It's over 100 degrees where I live, almost 20 degrees above average. I know whom to blame for this extreme weather, and I have an idea for how to make sure others know, too.
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Notice how I used passive voice in that last sentence--has been made--as though climate change were just a thing happening? Well, let's be clear: this is a crisis caused by specific people and businesses I consider climate criminals. A climate criminal is any person or entity that has stood in the way of action to stop the climate crisis while, directly or indirectly, profiting off the fossil fuels accelerating it. The correct way to describe this weather, then, is to say that climate criminals have made the heatwave 5 times more likely.
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Wouldn't it thus be appropriate to name extreme weather after the people driving it? Each heatwave, hurricane, wildfire, flood, drought, or typhoon made more likely by the climate crisis can be an opportunity to name, shame, and explain the role of a climate criminal, of which there are many. Imagine a world in which I can say, well, my son hasn't been able to play outside for the past week and, more importantly, hundreds have died due to Heatwave Darren Woods. I can then explain that, as CEO of ExxonMobil since 2017, Mr. Woods has tried to blame consumers for greenhouse gas emissions--even though company he leads has known about global warming since 1977 and has fought an all-out war, first sowing doubt about the science and now arguing that yes, climate change is a problem, but it's too expensive to solve.
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Of course, even if my idea were widely adopted, it wouldn't, on its own, move the needle on reducing emissions. But just as naming hurricanes helps to "avoid confusion and streamline communications" and, in therapy, naming the source of anxiety can tame it, linking extreme weather to the people causing it can clarify the situation in which we find ourselves--and help shine a light on the path forward. For one of the most pernicious and successful campaigns in recent history was BP's effort to get people to obsess over their personal carbon footprint, and thus to divert attention from BP's effort to maximize profits at the expense of humanity's future.
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The truth is that, while each of us have a role to play through our individual actions, the scale of climate change requires the kind of large-scale action that only governments can undertake. And while there are a variety of reasons why few governments are on track to meet the commitments they made under the Paris Climate Accord, top amongst them is the opposition and influence of fossil fuel companies and the judges, politicians, academics, marketers and others they pay to maintain the status quo. Yet because so much of this happens under the surface, unbeknownst to the public, there is little pressure to stop it.
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Finally, one might ask well, suppose the public did know about the machinations of Big Oil? Would it matter? Not on its own, but the campaign against smoking provides a useful reference point. According to Gallup, in 1954, 45% of Americans were smokers, and it wasn't until the mid-70s that that figure dipped below 40%. The smoking rate declined consistently but slowly--from 35% in 1980 to 27% in 1990, 25% in 2000, 22% in 2010, and 15% in 2020.
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What has caused this decline? A number of factors. First, through lawsuits and investigative reporting, the public became aware of the cigarette industry's disinformation tactics. Second, this led to the public becoming more aware of the dangers of smoking: the U.S. Surgeon General first issued a report on the link between smoking and health in 1964, and it's only thanks to decades of research and education that, today, 76% of "U.S. adults cigarettes are 'very harmful' to people who use them." Third, public policy began to follow the science. Bans on smoking in public, higher taxes on cigarettes, required disclosures of the dangers of smoking on cigarette packs, and prohibitions on the advertising of cigarettes on radio, television, or other media have all brought down rates of smoking. And, finally, it became less and less socially acceptable to smoke. Despite all this success, however, 480,000 Americans per year still die from smoking, and secondhand smoke causes another 41,000 deaths.
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The parallels with climate change should be obvious. Citizens have a right to know what Big Oil knew and knows, and what they do, through dark money contributions and public-influence campaigns, to keep heating the planet. As more people understand, not only the science but the lies they've been told, they might become more inclined to support, if not call for, policy change. (I say might because I don't want to be glib about the amount of change that is required, and the difficulty of getting the electorate to consistently back it.) Only then might we begin to revoke Big Oil's social license to operate, so that, just as smoking is now viewed as verboten by mainstream society, so too will driving a gas car or heating one's house with a gas boiler become beyond the norm.
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The fact is that millions of people a year already die from climate change: heat, drought, floods, and fires are harming human health at an ever-faster rate. Nor is this carnage limited to the "third-world": Americans are increasingly seeing what happens when we use the atmosphere as a sewer. What naming weather events after climate criminals can do is begin to reveal who turned the atmosphere into a sewer, who is trying to clean it up, who is trying to stop the cleanup, and why the pace of change is still too slow, despite our having much of the technology--solar, wind, storage, green hydrogen, geothermal, nuclear, electric vehicles, heat pumps, low- and zero-carbon cement and steel, etc.--needed to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
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In short, Heatwave Darren Woods has been brutal, but it looks like it'll finally come to an end on Tuesday.
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