The global suicide pact we all wrote

Author Nathaniel Rich.

By Tessa Knight

17 Jun 2019

US writer Nathaniel Rich is the author of a groundbreaking and controversial book on climate change. He told Daily Maverick about the pushback he experienced and how the current movement of youth-led climate activism differs from activism during the 1980s, the decade the course of global heating could have been changed.

Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change by Nathaniel Rich tells the story of a decade in US history – 1979 to 1989 – when a handful of scientists, politicians and activists had the ability to alter the future of our overheating planet. Originally a 30,000-word piece spanning the entirety of The New York Times Magazine’s August 2018 edition, Rich converted his nonfiction narrative of climate history into an exposé, published in April 2019.

The book primarily follows the lives of two men: Rafe Pomerance, an activist and lobbyist who was a part of the group Friends of the Earth in the 1980s; and James Hansen, a Nasa climate scientist who created computer models to simulate the impact of global heating.

Author Nathaniel Rich.

Losing Earth starts by introducing Pomerance, a historian by study, who reads a government report about coal. On page 66 of the report, he encounters a short paragraph explaining that the burning of fossil fuels will, in a few decades, damage the global temperature.

This small paragraph kick-starts a campaign, led by the politically connected Pomerance, to alert the GOP to the inevitable climate disaster we find ourselves facing today.

Both Pomerance, Hansen and the group of scientists they collaborated with tried, on multiple occasions, to prevent future global climate catastrophe by warning the public and Congress about the environmental impact of burning fossil fuels. At some points, they appeared on the precipice of enacting serious change – the appointment of President George WH Bush, the so-called “environmentalist president” seemed the start of positive climate action.

But perhaps the closest person to a real villain in Rich’s Losing Earth comes in the form of Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, who denied the Greenhouse Effect and tried to censor Hansen.

And as Rich says, despite alleging to want a greener future, Bush “had never taken a vigorous interest in global warming and was mainly briefed about it by non-scientists”.

The protagonists of the book, the scientists and lobbyists, faced censorship and pushback from inside and outside the White House, despite damning evidence of global heating.

Since the release of the NYT piece and the subsequent book, Rich has come under fire from prominent environmental journalists for blaming the everyday public, you and me, for the climate disaster we find ourselves in. During the decade we could have prevented climate change, Rich believes that “Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.”

Scientists and journalists alike struggled with this core thesis, arguing that it was not you and me who allowed climate change to occur, but rather big oil companies, capitalism and politicians that paved the way for our global environmental suicide pact.

Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic had the following to say: Rich “sees this sweep of time — this first decade in which climate change was understood to be political — as tragic in the Aristotelian sense. Some small group of men glimpsed humanity’s tragic flaw — but, woe unto us, they could not convince an intransigent and ignorant public before it was too late.”

Primarily, Meyer and other writers such as Naomi Klein of The Intercept, argue that Rich let both the GOP and big oil off the hook, instead opting to blame humanity as a whole.

Rich does talk to the Republican Party’s climate flaws. In the introduction to Losing Earth, he describes the party’s “stubborn commitment to [climate] denialism” by highlighting that “in 2018, only 42% of Republicans knew that “most scientists believe global warming is occurring, and that percentage has fallen”.

He is not wrong – in the age of Donald Trump, who chose to pull out of the Paris Agreement on global heating, climate denialism is on the rise. But Trump is not the first Republican president to defund and delegitimise climate change, as Rich notes.

“It is also very difficult for most Americans to believe … that many prominent Republicans pushed for major climate policy. Of course, the species known as the Republican environmentalist went extinct at about the same time as the Baiji dolphin,” Rich told Daily Maverick in an email interview.

And what of the fossil fuel industry, the oil and petroleum companies that have knowingly wreaked havoc on the environment? Meyer believes Rich let the industry off the hook, but speaking to Daily Maverick, Losing Earth’s author said the following:

“For all his vitriol, [Meyer] failed to identify a single fact about the fossil fuel industry that I did not include in the piece. In fact, I reported, for the first time and in damning detail, the inside story of how the industry created its multi-decadal campaign of disinformation propaganda, political bribery, and criminality. In general, I find it difficult to take any unsubstantiated attacks in good faith.”

In regards to the current climate change movement, primarily spearheaded by young people such as Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rich told Daily Maverick that their message is “more passionate, more personal, more urgent, and, frankly, more honest”.

Young people such as Thunberg take the climate arguments of Pomerance and Hansen and turn them into questions of ethics.

“They say that the failure to address climate change is not only illogical, but immoral — that our inaction betrays the values that form the foundation for civil society,” said Rich.

Unfortunately, we already know how Rich’s story ends. His book grapples with what Rich calls Apprehension – the period of time when we knew what the threat was, and what the consequences of that threat would be. We have left the stage of Apprehension, and entered The Reckoning. Now, we have to analyse why we made the decision to destroy the planet, although some would argue that governments and big oil companies should be asking themselves this question, not the general public.

And after The Reckoning? According to Rich, “We will find out soon enough.” DM

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