How to get your bearings in the age of confusion
How to get your bearings in the age of confusion
Everything shifted in the late 2010s. Now we're in a new world, and it's crucial we reorient ourselves before we lose our way completely.
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It hit me the other day that I've been following the climate conversation for more than three decades.
My dad is a micro-meteorologist, and I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s around him and his colleagues - ecologists, complexity scientists, and climate modellers. In the mid-2000s, as a young theatre artist, I began collaborating with climate and earth scientists as part of science-theatre ensemble Boho.
One of the fun things about getting older is that you get to see first-hand how the tides of history change.
Back in the 2000s and early 2010s, one of the key features of the climate conversation was the focus on expertise. In those days, people felt like they needed to have a technical understanding of the subject in order to speak. Climate change was the domain of climate scientists, and everyone else felt unprepared and uncomfortable talking about it.
In climate conversations in that era, the person with the most authority was the one who'd read the most. The discussion usually devolved into someone just reciting some depressing facts they’d read recently, while everyone else fell silent, waiting for the subject to change.
As an artist at that time, making work about climate and the environment was deeply uncool. It was seen as technical, depressing, boring. Trying to pitch shows to festivals and venues about climate and global change, I felt like a massive nerd. (Also I was a massive nerd, which didn't help.)
I vividly remember a festival in the early 2010s putting on a series of breakfast conversations about different topics. The sessions about gender politics, race and refugee rights were all crammed with participants and crackling with energy. The session about climate change was so dry that… well, even I would have preferred to be somewhere else.
For many years, it felt like you couldn’t participate unless you had technical expertise. And so, of course, people didn’t participate.
To a degree, this wasn’t an accident. Naomi Oreskes and others have written about how the fossil fuel lobby set out deliberately to frame the conversation in highly technical terms. Their reasoning was that if people felt they couldn’t understand the issues, they couldn’t demand change. As a tactic, it was very successful.
But it wasn't just a tactic. From one angle, global warming and planetary transformation is a technical issue. Earth system science is not intuitive, it’s not something that you can pick up from reading a few articles.
But science is not the only angle you can view the issue from.
One of the best things about the mid to late 2010s was that we stopped looking at climate change as purely a scientific issue. We started considering it more broadly - as a social issue, an economic issue, a technological issue.
There are many reasons for this shift, but I think one of the key drivers was that by the mid-2010s, science had simply lost any sense of authority. Michael Gove's infamous comment that 'people have had enough of experts' captured something, however politically motivated it was. After 25 years of partisan attacks by politicians and the right-wing press, science was now regarded as just another service industry, weakened and politicised.
As a consequence, we stopped turning to scientists as spokespeople for climate issues. We knew what they were going to say, and we knew it would make no difference. And that opened up space for other voices to step in.
In progressive circles, the idea of ‘climate justice’ gained increasing currency. This is the concept that climate impacts are not gender or race or class neutral. Climate change is not a novel crisis, instead it exacerbates existing inequalities. This awareness made it possible to map climate change on to existing activist movements. Climate activists stopped focusing on scientists and technical experts, and started started centering the voices of Indigenous activists, feminist activists, or young people.
In my opinion, this was a very good thing. As someone who admires and respects climate scientists, I don’t think they should have been placed in the position of being the key advocates for political and social change. With a few notable exceptions, that’s not their expertise, and that burden shouldn’t have been placed on them.
More to the point, letting non-experts take the floor opened up a new energy around the climate discussion. Everyone working in this space back in the 90s and 2000s knew that it was only going to become a bigger and more urgent subject as the years went on, but I for one never expected it to become exciting.
In the late 2010s, climate change emerged as the top priority for the progressive left, eclipsing traditional concerns like anti-globalisation or the Occupy movement. In 2018 alone, activist organisations like Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise and the School Strikes for Climate suddenly surged to public consciousness.
This energy on the left was met by the plummeting costs of renewable technology - solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles and hydrogen. Suddenly a net zero vision was possible and credible in capitalist terms, which changed the landscape completely. In the lead up to COP26 in Glasgow, virtually every government and business felt obliged to make a commitment to Net Zero by 2050.
The late 2010s was an extraordinary window of climate activity. Andreas Malm calls it the ‘third cycle of climate activism’, following smaller waves in the mid-2000s and early 2010s. In many ways, the conversation moved more in the three years from 2018 - 20 than in the three decades beforehand.
Speaking more personally, after fifteen years of making climate theatre for a very small niche of science-engaged people, it was a surprise to suddenly find an audience for my work. People were coming to shows about the environment! And sticking around afterwards to talk about it! And telling their friends! And coming back!
But as exciting as it was, that phase of the climate conversation is over. We’re now in the new era of the struggle. And from here on out, it’s going to be a lot more murky.
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In 2017, the status quo was to ignore or deny the science of climate change. Five years later, virtually every corporation has a Net Zero commitment, and governments worldwide have made extraordinary promises about their plans to wean themselves off fossil fuels.
In the early 2020s, the new status quo is to eagerly admit the severity of environmental crisis - to make statements like, ‘Climate change is an existential threat facing humanity’ - and then to make enormous promises to address it - promises with no accountability. Sometimes these promises are sincere, sometimes they're wishful thinking, and sometimes they're calculated greenwashing.
Look, speaking personally, I’ll take greenwashing over outright denial. This is progress, of a kind. Many (most?) of these commitments are empty promises, but at least they hold out the hope of holding these businesses and governments accountable to their own words.
But what we lose in this phase of the struggle is the clarity and simplicity of the late 2010s. Sophisticated greenwashing is harder to identify and call out than straight-up climate denial. It requires some knowledge and expertise to tell the difference between a genuine plan to reduce impacts, and a calculated bluff.
Are we now back in an era where the climate conversation is ceded to experts? If so, I fear that we’ll lose the energy and participation of the last few years. I don’t want the conversation to return to being the dry, technical recitation of facts of the 2000s.
But if you don’t understand the intricacies of how companies use terms like ‘net zero’ and ‘carbon capture’, how can you feel confident to speak about about the issues?
In other words, what happens when we say ‘Climate action now!’ and BP and Shell say, ‘Yes, of course’?
The debate around carbon offset programs is a good example. Companies buy offsets to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or to avoid adding them. They use those offsets to cancel out their actual emissions. This is how Shell was able to claim that it produced 'carbon neutral' gas in 2021.
In fact, carbon offset programs are a mess of shoddy accounting and scams. It's estimated that less than 5% of offsets actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But at the same time, offsets feature prominently in the 2015 Paris Agreement. In principle, they could be a viable way to manage the transition to net zero.
So when a company announces it has made carbon offsets, you should treat this as mostly empty rhetoric. But not always!
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This murkiness is perhaps a good indication of how the next decade of the climate conversation is going to feel: complex and confusing. The excitement and energy of the late 2010s will be hard to sustain as the climate debate becomes a set of hard, unpleasant trade-offs and negotiations.
Here's an example: up until now, renewable energy has been an extraordinary success story. But in the next few years, as the technology matures, we’re going to face difficult trade-offs. How much land should we dedicate to wind and solar? Whose land will be used? How will we mine the rare earth minerals needed to make these technologies operational?
There are many more. What do you think of nuclear power? Do you think we should keep some fossil fuel production active to power agriculture, transport and construction? If so, how much? How much should people sacrifice in terms of their lifestyles in order to ease demands on energy?
If you’re not a full-time activist or climate expert, you’ll probably struggle to answer these questions - I certainly don’t have answers. But these are the kinds of ambiguous, difficult choices we have to address in order to create a new and more sustainable world.
And of course, bad faith pundits will weaponise these ambiguities to undermine activist demands and continue to push for the status quo.
If you’re anything like me, the detail and complexity of these issues is confusing and intimidating. That confusion is perhaps the key emotion of the climate era. We’re stumbling through a strange new landscape with no clear guidelines or signposts. There are no narratives to help us make sense of what we’re seeing.
So perhaps the key question that this new phase of the climate era is asking you is this: How well can you handle confusion and ambiguity?
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NEWS AND PROJECTS
This month I'm in Scotland, performing You're Safe Til 2024: Deep History as part of the Edinburgh Fringe. If you're coming to the festival, drop by and check it out - 7.45pm each day at the Pleasance from 3-29 August. 26 shows!
After Edinburgh, I'll be presenting the show for a season at the Barbican London in late September. It's a real honour to get to perform there - I'm really looking forward to it.
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After this run of Deep History, on Tuesday 11 October I'll be presenting the first public sharing of the new episode of You're Safe Til 2024 at Shoreditch Town Hall in London.
Entitled The Birthday of the World, this episode is a dance party held to celebrate the new world we're building in the ruins of the old.
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Last month, I was stoked to join my friend and collaborator Ben Yeoh on his podcast series.
It was a great chat - please dive in if you're keen.
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In terms of recommendations: last month I returned to an old favourite, Ursula Le Guin's anthology The Birthday of the World. (I'm stealing her title for the next episode of YST24.) Brilliant, warm, humanist sci-fi from a writer on top of her game.
Musically, I've been losing my mind to the Two Shell Icons EP - utterly feral dance music. And Joe Rainey's Niineta is as rich and gorgeous as everyone says.
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As ever, you can get more background on my practice in my New Rules for Modelling series, or you can check out my website. And if you have any questions or offers that might make my life more interesting, feel free to get in touch.
Peace!