Lots of people eagerly study all the polls and reports on how many people believe that climate change is real and urgent. They seem to think there is some critical mass that, through the weight of belief alone, will get us where we want to go. As if when the numbers aren’t high enough, we can’t achieve anything. As if when the numbers are high enough, beautiful transformation will magically happen all by itself or people will vote for wonderful politicians who do the right thing.

But it’s not the belief of the majority or the work of elected officials that will change the world. It will be action, most likely the actions of a minority, as it usually has been. This week’s appalling Obama administration decision to let Shell commence drilling in the Arctic sea says less about that administration, which swings whichever way it’s pushed, than that we didn’t push harder than the oil industry. Which is hard work, but sometimes even a tiny group can do it.

Take San Francisco, population 850,00, which is near the very top for percent of people who believe in climate change, according to a pollster I spoke to recently. I wish that meant that there were 850,000 climate activists in my town, or even 425,000. But I’ve watched for two years (and sometimes joined) the group of people pushing the San Francisco Retirement Board to divest its half billion dollars or so in fossil fuel investments. In April of 2013, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an exhilarating unanimous (but nonbinding) resolution asking the Employee Retirement Board to divest.

Out of the 850,000 San Franciscans, seven or eight dedicated people have kept the divestment initiative alive, while the retirement board balks, stalls and grumbles about how straightforward changes in a modest portion of their portfolio are difficult, impossible, dangerous (even as they lost tens of millions when petroleum and coal stocks crashed). The activists pushing this forward are not one percent of San Franciscans, which would be 8500 people, or .1%, 850, but about .001% of people in the city.
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They’ve come this far by being dedicated, tenacious, deeply informed on the issue and on board policy, and by regularly meeting among themselves and attending most of the meetings. Occasionally they get more people to show up, but they’ve carried the weight for two years. Recently they had a substantial victory, and they may yet win. For all of us. Otherwise divestment might have slipped away in San Francisco. It’s been the same at schools from Rutgers to Stanford: small groups of students and allies have pushed divestment and, sometimes, won. This is the kind of race that tortoises, and not hares, tend to win.

Sometimes small groups matter. Larger groups often do. People have the power, when we choose to use it, to act on it, to dedicate ourselves to change. We have so many stories about how power is elsewhere. As the Obama Administration nears its end, I keep hearing from the bitterly disappointed and the generally bitter, who seem to believe that one man should have reversed the status quo more or less singlehandedly. They blame, credit, and obsess about the 53-year-old in the White House. But Obama is just the weathervane, and he knew it when he was elected.

Then, he implored the great wind that lifted him up and carried him along to keep going. Instead, people believed the job was done when it had just started and went home. Had the exhilarating coalition of the young, the nonwhite, the progressive, the poor who are usually excluded from political power kept it up, had they believed the power was ours, not his, we could have had an extraordinary eight years. The failures are not his alone – we can’t expect more of politicians than of the civil society that could push them. We can expect more of ourselves.

The climate movement is picking up steam – or rather wind. This January you could even see Mitt I-Will-Build-the-KXL-Pipeline-Myself Romney start to waver on the reality of climate change and its causes.

Yes, that’s the same Mitt “I’m not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet” Romney we heard from in 2012.

In 2004 Senator John McCain actually said, while pushing emissions-control legislation:

“There is strong scientific consensus about the fact that global climate change is occurring, and occurring as a result of human activity.”

By 2008, he was picking a climate denier as his running mate. Corporate wind machines make them spin and spin, these ambitious men.

“Marco Rubio Used to Believe in Climate Science. Now He’s Running for President”, ran a Mother Jones headline.

He knows, as my mother would’ve said, on which side his bread is buttered.

We complain about politicians spinning, rather than recognizing that this is exactly what we want a weathervane — or hey, a wind turbine — to do, or recognizing that it’s up to us to be that wind. That’s why the ordinary people of Richmond, California, managed to beat the candidates mighty Chevron Corporation backed to elect a full sweep of green populists to city government last November. It’s also popular to say that we need to get money out of politics, but the people in that Chevron-refinery-dominated town proved that even money can’t buy everything if people are passionately engaged. As my friend Jamie Henn of 350.org said, we don’t need to get money out so much as we need to get people in (and by that I don’t think he means obediently voting at the end of the process, but transforming the process, inside and outside electoral politics).

Too many of us seem far too fond of narratives of our powerlessness, maybe because powerlessness lets us off the hook. As we head into that most dismal of situations, another unbearably long electoral cycle, many who care about climate change will say that we need an elected official who will represent us or a great majority who agree with us. But we don’t need everyone on board; we don’t need one magic person in office; we need ourselves. To act. It’s the wind, not the weathervanes.

Source: The Guardian

There has always been an odd tenor to discussions among climate scientists, policy wonks, and politicians, a passive-aggressive quality, and I think it can be traced to the fact that everyone involved has to dance around the obvious truth, at risk of losing their status and influence.

The obvious truth about global warming is this: barring miracles, humanity is in for some awful shit.

Here is a plotting of dozens of climate modeling scenarios out to 2100, from the IPCC:

The black line is carbon emissions to date. The red line is the status quo — a projection of where emissions will go if no new substantial policy is passed to restrain greenhouse gas emissions.
Related 6 reasons conservatives should take climate change seriously

We recently passed 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere; the status quo will take us up to 1,000 ppm, raising global average temperature (from a pre-industrial baseline) between 3.2 and 5.4 degrees Celsius.

That will mean, according to a 2012 World Bank report, “extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise,” the effects of which will be “tilted against many of the world’s poorest regions,” stalling or reversing decades of development work.

“A 4°C warmer world can, and must be, avoided,” said the World Bank president.

But that’s where we’re headed. It will take enormous effort just to avoid that fate. Holding temperature down under 2°C — the widely agreed upon target — would require an utterly unprecedented level of global mobilization and coordination, sustained over decades. There’s no sign of that happening, or reason to think it’s plausible anytime soon. And so, awful shit it is.

Nobody wants to say that. Why not? It might seem obvious — no one wants to hear it! — but there’s a bit more to it than that. We’ll return to the question in a minute, but first let’s look at how this unsatisfying debate plays out in public.

Read more: Vox

The green economy faces significant uncertainty as a Tory government with a wafer thin majority faces a host of energy and climate policy challenges

[From 8 May] Something truly historic and genuinely shocking has happened in the past few days. That’s right, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed the monthly global concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere passed 400 parts per million for the first time in human history.

Meanwhile, on a small archipelago off the coast of Europe, David Cameron pulled off the biggest political shock in a generation and is now odds-on to deliver the first Tory majority government since that last electoral surprise in 1992, albeit with a wafer thin majority that may eventually see him long for the parliamentary stability of the Major years.

For all the immense challenges Cameron now faces – delivering his promised EU renegotiation and referendum, holding the union together when it is pulling apart at the seams, identifying the unfunded spending and tax cuts he promised, navigating ever louder (and entirely justified) calls for electoral and constitutional reform – it is the response to the ongoing global climate crisis that will one day be seen to define his generation of world leaders.

There are plenty of climate scientists who reckon by the end of this parliament global greenhouse gas emissions need to be peaking in readiness for a vertiginous decline.

Cameron knows this and in those quieter moments when he is allowed to present himself as the One Nation Tory Moderniser he instinctively remains – and this morning promised to become once again – he is committed to playing his role in delivering the global green industrial revolution. But green businesses and campaigners will this morning look at the result and wonder how many of those quieter moments he will be granted over the next five years. Cameron’s commitment to the Climate Change Act may be solid, but his commitment to the policies required to deliver on it has already been shown to be flaky.

Does he have the nerve, the authority and the political nous to face down climate sceptic backbenchers whose votes could be crucial? That is one of the many unanswered questions of this election for green businesses.

But first, the good news. Even if GDP is not, in the words of Boris Johnson, going gangbusters, there are signs the green economy is. Renewable energy capacity trebled over the past five years and is on track to hit a 20 per cent share by 2020. The electric car market is booming and a host of low carbon infrastructure projects, from new nuclear reactors, to CCS demonstration projects and giant offshore wind farms are in the pipeline.

The Conservatives remain committed to expanding the ultra-low emission vehicle fleet, rolling out rail electrification programmes, delivering smart meters to every building, and enhancing biodiversity protection rules, especially for marine habitats. The Tory manifesto may not have been as overtly green as the Lib Dems or Labour’s, but it is not without its strengths. Moreover, the bulk of the energy industry is celebrating this morning (and share prices are jumping) as the prospect of a potentially investment-disrupting energy price ‘freeze’ is buried with Ed Miliband’s political career.

However, if businesses can see investment and policy certainty on a number of fronts, it is tempered by chronic uncertainty on a host of other important issues.

Whoever takes up the reins at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (assuming of course it is not merged back into another department in pursuit of George Osborne’s steep Whitehall spending cuts) faces one of the most daunting in-boxes in Westminster.

Within the next 18 months they need to finalise a new carbon budget for the late 2020s, secure a new Levy Control Framework for supporting clean energy projects beyond 2020, tackle the ongoing problems with UK energy efficiency policies and the scandal that is fuel poverty, sort out the future of the Renewable Heat Incentive, clarify the detail of the Tory ‘halt’ to onshore wind farms, address fracking protests and planning objections, support the reform of the EU emissions trading scheme, ink the long-awaited deal with EDF to deliver a new nuclear power plant, dish out the similarly long-awaited £1bn of CCS demonstration funding, execute a smart meter rollout that has many informed observers worried, weigh in on debates about the UK’s illegal air pollution, potential airport expansion, and resource insecurity, and represent the UK at an international summit that plenty of people regard as the most important in the history of human civilisation. No pressure, then.

Each of these policy debates could yet be resolved in favour of a more environmentally sustainable, climate resilient, and technologically competitive economy. But there is little doubt the battle will be intense and there are legitimate fears that if the right wing media continues to position action on climate change as an unjustified cost a Conservative government will throw green policies to the fossil fuel addicted wolves. Will the party focus on a competent programme of cost-effective decarbonisation or a chaotic programme of contradictory policies and climate politicking?

These hard policy choices will be further complicated by three over-arching realities that promise to repeatedly dilute Cameron’s best intentions towards the green economy and further undermine investment certainty: Europe, austerity, and the Tory backbenches.

The first two years of the parliament will be dominated by the build-up to an EU referendum and, if the Scottish referendum is anything to go by, the following two years will be dominated by the fallout. Emissions targets, air pollution rules, waste and recycling directives, biodiversity and habitat protections, all face an ambiguous future. The likelihood is the UK will stay in the EU or leave and be forced to keep many of these rules through a trade agreement, but for now uncertainty rules.

Meanwhile, cuts to unprotected departments mean DECC, Defra and related departments such as Transport, Business, and Communities will all face extremely tough decisions over what green initiatives remain and which will be cut. They will all be wary of the backlash that results when cuts to something like flood protection are shown to be ill-conceived.

Finally, every green policy or programme the Conservative government pursues will face vocal opposition from those on its own benches who cling to the idea that anything to do with climate change is a Commie plot. Add in the fact that if Cameron does need additional votes his first port of call is likely to be the DUP and party management becomes as crucial to the Tory green vision as the formation of that vision in the first place. Will the Lib Dems and Labour be responsible enough to work with the Conservative leadership on some of these issues to sideline the few climate sceptic voices in parliament or will they be granted influence that is in complete disproportion to their numbers?

What, if anything, can green businesses do to navigate this uncertainty and deliver the policy victories that will help the low carbon economy build on its recent successes?

As always, more needs to be done to demonstrate that clear majorities of the public support clean technologies and are in favour of decarbonisation. Yesterday may have proven once again that you can form a government with the support of barely a third of voters, but a true One Nation Conservative Party has an obligation to represent the country as a whole on these issues.

Similarly, green businesses need to recognise policy is only part of the story and not get too disheartened if some green policies are shelved. It is a scandal the Conservatives will now scupper a popular, successful and cost-effective industry in the form of the onshore wind energy sector. But the march of clean technologies is a global trend whereby costs are falling and green products are becoming normalised all the time. Divestment, community energy, smart grids, solar cells, these are trends and technologies that continue to go from strength to strength, regardless of the political weather.

Finally, those Conservatives tasked with presenting the party’s green policies in recent months have repeatedly declared that their focus is on cost-effective decarbonisation. Green businesses need to take this at face value, reach out to those remaining green Tories (they may seem as rare as a happy badger this morning, but they do exist) and demonstrate how decarbonisation is already being delivered in a cost-effective manner and will only become more cost competitive in a way fossil fuels will not. They could start by pointing out how the Conservatives are missing a trick in failing to take action on energy efficiency much more seriously. The Tory manifesto says they will improve one million homes over the next five years; Labour claimed to have a plan to upgrade 2.5 million homes at negligible extra cost – regardless of the final result, it is worthy of consideration.

Most of all though, green businesses and campaigners need to cling to the hope that the David Cameron who once declared that climate change is one of the most serious challenges the UK faces, who once declared he wanted the UK to be the most energy efficient economy in Europe, who once declared he would lead the greenest government ever, has it in him to tackle the climate challenge that will one day define the history books of this most unpredictable of political eras.

Source: Business Green