The vision
“Our planet is transforming in a way that will make life much more difficult for most people. It has already brought suffering to millions and millions of people. And in the United States, most of us are learning about the scope and significance of this crisis at a point when there is not much time to change course. That realization carries both a mental toll and an emotional reckoning.”
The spotlight
Hello there, See you ahead readers. Today we await the impact of Hurricane Milton’s impending landfall in Florida – less than two weeks after Helene hit the state and then tore through its northern neighbors. Like Helene, Milton intensified unusually quickly as it moved over a record-warm sea surface, Made 400 to 800 times more likely due to climate change. (If you’re dealing with the aftermath of Helene, or standing for Milton, we have a disaster 101 guide hereand recovery guide here.)
While it is absolutely necessary to cover climate disasters like this – and many of the Grist team do just that — here at the Looking Forward newsletter, our mission is to present a vision of a clean, green, just future, and report on the solutions that can help get us there. It can feel hard to do this when the news of the day is so heartbreaking and grim. But the painful realities of climate change are exactly why we need to urgently propose ambitious, well-thought-out solutions, for both mitigation and adaptation.
And grappling with those painful realities, and the tough questions they raise, is an essential part of arriving at the solutions – which is what we’re looking at in this week’s newsletter. Last week, Grist launched a series dubbed “Moral hazards,” which explores some of the ethical problems of living in the age of climate change. For example, how much responsibility does each of us bear to change our actions, and what does it mean to take meaningful action as an individual? Who counts as a climate villain, when every flight you take and every hamburger you eat is a tiny piece of a deadly puzzle? Is a policymaker who has fought climate change from within the systems that produce it doing well, or failing to meet the moment?
“We really loved this idea of sparking a conversation about climate change around these issues where there aren’t easy answers,” says Kate Yoder, a Grist writer and one of the leaders of the series. She wanted the four stories in the package to “create discussions and make the reader grapple with these issues a little bit, maybe not even knowing exactly how to feel about it, but wanting to discuss it with someone else .”
Living in the Anthropocene—the name sometimes given to our current geological era, in which humans are the driving force of environmental change—comes with a host of moral questions. And none of them have simple answers, but being willing to entertain and debate them can inform how we decide what is right, wrong, enough and fair when it comes to tackling the climate crisis.
“For so long, there’s been this question about the climate change debate — and it’s always debating whether the problem is real or what we should do about it,” Yoder said. But repeating that false debate gets in the way of asking the questions that really need to be debated to determine how we move forward. “It’s kind of like: Can we change the climate change debate to really discuss these real dilemmas for which there is no easy answer?” Yoder said. “Can we debate that, instead of the problem’s existence?”
Managed retreat
Perhaps no issue illustrates the ethical purity of adapting to our changing climate more than managed retreat — the planned movement of communities away from areas at risk, often due to flood risks or sea level rise. What counts as “fair” when deciding who should be resettled, and how they will be compensated?
Grist’s Jake Bittle, who has extensive experience covering climate displacement and disaster management in the US, writes:
“When I discuss these stories with readers and friends, I find that people’s reactions depend a lot on who lives in the flood-prone community in question. If it’s a case of a coastal city trying to buy out wealthy beachfront homeowners, readers tend to side with the government trying to force residents to take a payout; if it’s a city trying to buy out a low-income or middle-class neighborhood, readers are more likely to side with the residents. In some cases, in other words, we decide that private property rights trump the public interest, and in other cases we decide the opposite, even when the underlying risk of climate change is the same.”
Even after thousands of home buyouts and locally managed refuge efforts across the country, Bittle writes, “there’s nothing close to a rubric for deciding when it’s okay for a government to force someone to leave their home for the sake of climate adaptation — or when the government has a moral obligation to protect a community that wants to stay in place.”
Bittle walks through some of the difficult questions that managed retreat raises, and finally presents a potential scenario that takes a very different approach. Instead of dealing with community-by-community-run refuges, he thinks, as individual localities come under imminent threat, what if these decisions were made nationwide, holistically and early?
Knowing that a community is being moved for years or decades will create an opportunity to involve local residents in deciding where and how to preserve certain remains, and allow enough time for relocations on residents’ terms.
“What if we didn’t think of moving as, ‘We’re going to move people out today’?” AR Siders, a professor at the University of Delaware and a leading voice on managed retreat, told Bittle. “What if we thought of it as: ‘Where are the places where the people who are in their homes now are the last people who own those homes?’ It’s still going to be emotionally difficult and challenging, but you have years to prepare.”
Is an approach like this possible? Debatable. Is it desirable? You can decide. What’s so interesting about it to me is that it takes an issue that brings up all these thorny and unanswerable questions and completely reframes them—we don’t just have to wrestle with the questions as they’re usually posed. We can turn it into different questions that can ultimately have more satisfying answers.
Climate shaming
One of the core questions that has plagued the environmental movement for a long time is that of blame and finger-pointing. There has been a concerted effort by many prominent voices in the climate movement to move away from shaming individuals for not living perfectly sustainable lifestyles within an inherently unsustainable system – and a growing understanding that we can happily place the blame on large corporations and actors such as fossil fuel managers who knew exactly what they were doing.
But who else deserves blame, and where is the line between those who do and those who don’t? Is blame even a productive tool in this struggle?
A group called Climate challenge camped on one side of this question. The group has gained recognition for its approach to disrupting events and publicly shaming leaders – with the avowed aim of “ending the careers and destroying the reputations of those who disagree with us”.
In his profile of the group, editor John Thomason writes: “As they see it, the rich and powerful have thrown their lot in with those who have a vested interest in continued fossil fuel use, and this cabal is the main thing standing in the way. of a fossil fuel-free future.”
That cabal includes oil executives and elected officials like outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has obstructed major climate policies and has known financial ties to the coal industry. But it also includes President Joe Biden’s climate advisers, Ali Zaidi and John Podesta, who have been key to some of the administration’s climate victories, and who have targeted the group for public shaming on several occasions.
The approach clearly resonated; the group raised more than $100,000 in a single week last month, garnering huge engagement on social media, though it has been less successful in garnering mass turnout for its performances, which typically involve a small group of core activists. And Climate Defiance leaders have landed meetings with lawmakers and officials, including some of the same ones they made their targets.
But if average individuals don’t deserve to be shamed, and powerful individuals who are complicit in the system, where does the line exist between the two? For example, when does an outsider become an insider? (Climate Defiance funders include Hollywood celebrities and heirs to the Disney and Getty fortunes, and the group counts members of Congress among its supporters). And if your entire approach is based on shaming those in power, when they are ready to listen, are you ready to propose an alternative?
Thomason recounts that as Climate Defiance prepared for its first session with Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team, the group’s demands included stopping two newly constructed pipelines and ending federal subsidies for fossil fuel production. Thomason writes: “Given the group’s apocalyptic view of the stakes of the climate crisis, those claims struck me as alarmingly modest.”
Perhaps more than a fully calculated strategy, what Climate Defiance seems to represent is a sense of anger, and determination, that I’m guessing many climate-concerned citizens can relate to. Whether you’ve put it into action or not, I wonder if some of you might resonate, even a little, with the sentiment expressed in this quote from one of the group’s volunteers: “Let’s keep shitting up these shit f***ers stop destroying our future.”
And I highly recommend checking out the other two pieces in the series as well:
– Claire Elise Thompson
A parting shot
When an approach as sensitive as managed refuge doesn’t take residents’ priorities into account, it can go badly awry. In his story, Bittle mentions the indigenous community of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, where officials began discussing a planned move in 2016, promising to build a new home for residents that reflects the island’s architectural style and fishing traditions. will preserve “Instead, they ended up building a plain-looking subdivision that island tribesmen dismissed as untidy and strange,” Bittle writes. These photos show the problem of erosion on the island – along with some residents’ determination to stay.
