Recasted urgencies in the Climate Emergency: three examples and implications (Major Read)

To lay all my cards out, for me it’s no longer “global cIimate change” but the Climate Emergency (and one deserving capitalization). I’m not, however, here to convince you that terminology matters. What matters more is demonstrating how the urgencies entailed in the Climate Emergency are open to rethinking and recasting, with very different policy and management implications for those, like me, who agree urgent climate action is required.

My take-home message is this: If I understand recent discussions, we must deal substantively and structurally with issues of inequality, poverty, fossil fuel, and rising authoritarianism, to name four only. If I understand the Climate Emergency, we also don’t have time for anything except radical action to prevent global climate disaster. In other words, this means the former narratives must be able to recast the urgencies commonly attributed to the Climate Emergency in order for both sets of requirements to hold. Three examples of how this can be done follow. I conclude with an answer to the “So what?” question.

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1. Recasting delay and deferral in the Climate Emergency

Narrative. To repeat, we don’t have time for more delays in dealing with the Climate Emergency. Vulnerable people, especially in but also all over the rest of the planet, are at risk and in hazard. Some are already dying because of this. We must act now to prevent the already bad from turning into the worst.

Implications for policy and action. If so, the narrative’s first implication is to acknowledge and understand why policy and action are shot through with delays, deferrals and their narratives. Policy and action are full of interruptions, with delays initially said to be temporary and deferrals indefinite, where not permanent. The mess is no less when the temporary turns out to be permanent, while some indefinites prove to be temporary after all

What can’t and mustn’t be ignored is that we have evolved a very rich literature to describe decisionmaking full of delays and deferrals: wicked policy problems, muddling through, incrementalism, groping along, bounded rationality, garbage can processes, second-best solutions, fatal remedies, rotten compromises, managing the unexpected, coping agencies, groupthink, adhocracy, and that deep wellspring of miserabilism, “the implementation gap,” to name just a few.

Nor do counter-exhortations of “Failure is not an option!” get us out of the messy decisonmaking that is part and parcel of responding to the Climate Emergency. Even if we were to end up with a techno-managerial elite able to control the Earth’s atmosphere to 1.5 degrees or something like it, we would still see learning and adaptation–aka, delays and deferrals–having to take place. Who doubts, for that matter, that the obviously necessary replacement of our energy intensive infrastructures with more sustainable ones won’t have their own learning curves–ditto delays and deferrals–even when (especially when) urgency is high?

What then is to be done? Am I saying nothing can be done? No. What I am saying is that we need to know more about those (implied) narratives of delays and deferrals under different scenarios of urgency.

“But we don’t have time for more research!” You’d then think that the costs to society of confronting these new disaster scenarios is set by the dangers of ignoring disasters, like hurricanes, floods and fires, that we are currently know more about. You’d also think that with the catastrophic disaster scenarios the planet is said to face, we’d see more investigations of how large critical infrastructures actually do avoid or avert massive climate induced flooding and fires.

In other words, what’s needs to be done is searching for more and different granularity that is actionable in varied Climate Emergency scenarios. Consider a timely example where urgency is already high and will be so for the rest of the Anthropocene: humanitarian aid.

A recent working paper, Understanding the role of narratives in humanitarian policy change and published by the London-based Overseas Development Institute (Saez & Bryant 2023), highlights the many and various factors leading to what they call delay narratives and discourses that infuse and transform contemporary humanitarian aid:

Not only does Figure 1 underscore that policy narratives can be better understood by focusing on delaying rather than supporting this or that policy and management. It also underscores the vast importance of context and contingencies in differentiating what factors are salient where, when and how.

That is, what the urgency of the Climate Emergency does is not erase or solve interruptions, but instead makes (1) the vastly different delay and deferral scenarios far clearer and (2) why no global techno-managerial elite could hope to address and monitor this high differentiation adequately, let alone “holistically.”

Or to put the point positively, some regional climate change modeling is of such a high resolution today that climate model results can be and are disaggregated in ways of use to key critical infrastructures. It is now possible to project estimates for rising sea-levels, storm surges, and inland flooding in, say, 20-year increments to better reflect already existing near- and longer-term cycles for infrastructure depreciation and forward investments, among others. More of this needs to be done, and importantly, we need to take the time do it.

2. What is to be done immediately in the Climate Emergency? Activate your EOCs!

Anyone who studies government emergency management in large disasters and catastrophes, at least in the US setting, knows longer-term recovery is the second part of emergency management. The first, very formidable phase is immediate emergency response. Which raises the issue: Yes, the climate crisis calls for a massive and rapid remaking of economy and society. Yes, surely that and more; but what do we also do immediately?

I

In the US setting, a disaster, like massive storms, wildfires or flooding, entails the activation of a city or county emergency operations center (EOC) and/or incident management teams (IMTs) to coordinate immediate response efforts. States also have their own EOCs or equivalent.

This activation is done all the time, when high winds, ice storms, wildfires, heat dome effects, flooding and their combinations take down essential services, particularly backbone infrastructures of water, electricity, roads and telecoms.

Now the thought experiment: Activate the EOCs and IMTs, or at least the ones which acknowledge and accept we are the Climate Emergency. And who, you ask, are the distressed peoples and sites?

Well, that’s not something you, the reader, can answer a priori. It’s up to those really-existing EOCs and IMTs, who recognize the Climate Emergency is making local spaces uninhabitable, taking away local employment. . .

II

The stakes thereby become clearer for both recovery and for immediate response when it comes to the Climate Emergency.

First, much of what outsiders recommend for now-now clearly belongs more under “long-term recovery” than immediate response, e.g., those net-zero emissions promises or those for more resilient or sustainable infrastructures. Nor is it news that this longer-term is invariably political with many stakeholders and does not have the same logic, clarity and urgency that immediate response has, e.g., disaster declarations that trigger immediate release of funds.

That said and second, those current appeals to “Stop oil!” and such immediately hit a major obstacle. In really-existing emergency response, fossil fuel is needed to evacuate people, transport goods and services to distressed areas, keep the generators running when electricity fails, and so on. Cutting down trees, distribution of water in plastic bottles, and wide use of readily available gas-guzzling vehicles, in case it needs saying, are also common because they are necessary..

III

As such, rather than focusing objections on the greater reliance in an emergency on petrol or like, we might instead want to think more productively about two empirically prior issues.

First, who are those EOCs and IMTs activated for the Climate Emergency? Their activation for wildfires, flooding and abrupt seasonal events have been increasing and increasingly responded to by all manner of city, county, state and agency EOCs and IMTs. That implies a learning curve, i.e., learning from past mistakes and delays.

Second, where EOCs and IMTs have been or will be activated, are they responding in ways that are climate-friendly? Or to put response challenge correctly: Where are the logic, clarity and urgency of the Climate Emergency requiring immediate eco-friendly response even before longer-term environmental recovery?

I ask the latter question, because I don’t think some of us who treat the Climate Emergency seriously have thought the answers through. It seems to me much more thought has been given by many more people to the use of eco-friendly stoves, toilet facilities, renewable-energy generators, and like alternatives. Years and years of R&D have gone into studying, prototyping and distributing more sustainable options.

Shouldn’t we then expect and want their increased use in immediate emergency response as well, especially when (not: “even if”) expediting them to the distressed sites and peoples means using petrol and cutting down trees in the way? Do the activated EOCs and IMT’S really need new benefit-cost analyses over such matters to take that decision—right now?

3. Not thinking radically enough about the Climate Emergency

I recently attended a conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades. Most of the day was spent on projects and interventions for climate mitigation and adaptation that I knew nothing about, including: a Lake Mendocino water storage innovation, several dredging and sediment projects geared to beneficial uses, wetlands restoration projects, and a great many planning and feasibility efforts funded with respect to not just sea-level rise, increased storm surges and inland flooding, but also for rising groundwater levels and changing air temperatures affecting major infrastructures differently.

In addition to these specifics, I was told that:

• The Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–to restore area wetlands and mudflats;
• It would require an estimated US$110 billion dollars locally to adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and
• To expect much more sea level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap melting in Antarctica and Greenland.

Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive new requirements posed by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high requirements to be met, let alone the really urgent ones?

It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.

What to do then? How to respond now?

I

These massively large sums (and like figures) are meant to stir us to urgent action. Such numbers do that for some people, but others respond by becoming even more uncertain than they already are in the Anthropocene. Some of that increased uncertainty is translated into dread over how to proceed (like we saw with respect to nuclear weapons in the Cold War), and dread can also be instrumental in generating immediate action.

More often though, I’ve found that the increased uncertainty generated by category-five sums and figures ends up reinforcing the focus on and approach to projects and interventions already underway. At least here we can see what hard work achieves.

And in that hard work is one answer to why such large numbers, even when they measure true requirements, fall short of the needed analysis.

II

The problem lies in the estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now, right now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the other losses already prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from happening that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.

Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?

Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.

We already have a pool of such professionals who make this radical recalculating possible. They are not being consulted nor is their professionalism adequately recognized for the Anthropocene challenges ahead. Those in infrastructures who are already making billion-dollar saves by preventing worse fires and flooding are going to be needed even if the impossible sums were funded, and most assuredly because they won’t be.

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So what?

Return by way of concluding, to our starting narrative about the Climate Emergency, expressed in such statements as.: “Based on climate science, there is not enough time to first overhaul a critical mass of economies simultaneously according to socialist democratic planning and then to realise emission reductions” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2024.2434469 ).

It should not be a surprise, however, that context-dependent factors relating to differences in inequality, poverty and the such interrupt the preceding conclusion, as when making the following statement.: “We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences” (https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242756; my italics).

All of which means that without first differentiating the impacts of the Climate Emergency by location and time, it is next to impossible to identify, let alone differentiate, the consequences with respect to the disparate and different practices of acting democratically here versus there–or otherwise heedlessly instead.

That said, such considerations are beside the point for those who insist the Climate Emergency calls for global climate security. But you see security is what militaries do—and a well-funded military is one of the few government organizations that routinely does long-term planning and often takes that planning seriously.

It’s one thing to call for radical resistance against the major polluting nations. It’s another thing to lay out how the next wave of environmental activism includes cadres of digital hackers ready to take on, say, Xi Jinping and the CCP. China is responsible for an estimated one-quarter of annual global GHG emissions, largely due to its massive fleet of coal-fired power stations. Where is the hacktivism ready and able to disable these plants? Or disable the real-time operations of, say, the “Big 3” credit rating agencies (S&P Global, Moody’s and Fitch) for their insanely positive ratings of the economies fueling the Climate Emergency?

In what world is an unprecedented global techno-managerial elite managing climate for nearly 8 billion people easier than, say, mobilizing the Chinese proletariat of some 220 million or disrupting the operations of the Big 3 CRAs, both for the planet’s survival?

So, again: What’s to be done?

As I hope my above examples illustrate and underscore, the Climate Emergency exhibits already a large array of local coping and managing responses. We know from this evidence that the Emergency is complex, precisely because local activities and responses are so heterogenous and diverse. We also know the large array of local cases form a distribution across which practices could emerge for local transformations, if not for scaling up.

What I am saying is that the agenda for better addressing the Climate Emergency would establish as its benchmark the really-existing diversity of climate responses and related practices already underway (including militant practices and those, say, reducing inequalities and poverty). Now, that would be radical! Yes, more is needed by way of other-level policy and management, but the “more” would be evaluated against this benchmark and not some other far more imperfect one of stop this! and stop that!