Podcast

A summary of the conversation is provided below.

Climate Trajectory in Context

Raven illustrated how climate challenges range from rising temperatures and heat concerns to famine, drought, and floods. Climate assumptions from the Middle East and North Africa to the American Southwest in Texas indicate that the slightest volatility in weather can wreak havock in unprepared communities, they explained. Climate change is going to mean food and water scarcity and conflicts over the remaining resources.

Raven described other effects from climate change: Ocean acidification, mass extinction of species, plagues contained in animals that are melting from permafrost. “All of those are going to cause mass displacement of communities in order of magnitude larger than current refugee flows,” Raven said. They concluded that to avoid the worst impacts, we must act now.

Additionally, Raven cautioned that framing climate as the biggest or most important issue leads to the implication that other work is less important. They caveated that climate action should be undertaken with other changes in society: Fixing democracy, building a racially just society, improving healthcare, repairing education, and managing a pandemic response.

“We have to tackle all these crises at the same time, and they don’t have to be in competition… Solving any of one of these problems can help achieve progress in all of them,” Raven said.

Urgent Action Now

The political landscape

The Biden Administration has proposed a social cost of carbon policy. This legislation aims to quantify the tradeoff between costs and benefits of moving from carbon emissions. The social cost of carbon is one way to frame zero-carbon alternatives as cost-competitive, Raven said.

Raven warned there are limitations and assumptions to consider in the social cost of carbon calculations. The discount rate of how we care about what happens tomorrow versus what happens in twenty years changes in the calculations. Furthermore, the impact of climate may differ, and how we relate climate assumptions into GDP and economic wellbeing is based on that set of assumptions.

Even with the assumptions present, Raven insists we still know we need to mitigate environmental impacts coming from our production and consumption. They explained that there is a generally agreed upon figure - 2 degree celsius of warming - that we need to keep our planet under to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

Dramatically Transform Five Systems

According to Raven, there are five intertwined systems we should transform to address climate: Electricity, Transportation, Heating and Cooling, Industrial, and Food systems.

These interact in complicated ways, Raven acknowledged. At a high level, they offered a two-step approach to reducing carbon emissions: Step one is to de-carbonize electricity and step two is to electrify everything. Cars should become electric. Heat pumps need to switch to electricity from fossil fuels. Other initiatives should be taken to move towards a carbon-free economy.

At a high level, this is all conceptual. At a lower level, this becomes tangible and the concern becomes how to implement. Raven explained that 700 policies have been identified in the United States to stem climate disaster. Each policy is a substantial starting point to address step one and step two, Raven detailed.

Taking Action in Our Own Lives

On a broad level, Raven supports social activism.

“I am banking on the power of social movements,” Raven said. “Social movements have an enormous ability to change the landscape on which elected officials are acting.”

Raven described Bill Moyer’s writing in Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Social Organizing to illustrate different roles people play to create social change: People who help the movement, people who advocate for change in power structures, people who rebel to highlight the urgency and current crisis, and people who organize to make information digestible to the broader public. Raven explained that all four roles are needed in a movement, but they often are not coordinated which leaves room for growth.

“Social movements have an enormous ability to change the landscape on which elected officials are acting.”

Raven urged us to find local community groups making change. They believe a great aspect of the broader social movement is plugging into local organizations. They said there are groups that have chapters throughout the country worth joining. For Raven, social movement mobilization may be the way forward to mitigate climate disaster.

“We can all find our niche in that broader system and support others who are taking different strategies,” Raven said. “This is where the fun part comes in.”

Further Reading