We certainly use the horizon of climate crisis in the Alternative UK, and the deadline of the early 2030s, as a way to maintain our urgency and activism. We try to blog both to highlight the often grim seriousness of the climate science indicators, but also to show how there are some signs - especially in renewable energy generation - which can inspire some qualified positivity and optimism.

This week we have pointers to two items, somewhat in the wake of Trump’s defeat and Biden’s inauguration, that show some signs that at least our responses are starting to match the possibility of climate catastrophe. No complacency! But no need for nihilistic despair either.

“The best case outcome is still grim. But also, miraculously, within reach”

New York magazine’s David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth and one of the most influential doom-sayers in environmental journalism, wrote a surprisingly positive column last week:

For a climate alarmist like me, seeing clearly the state of the planet’s future now requires a conspicuous kind of double vision, in which a guarded optimism seems perhaps as reasonable as panic. Given how long we’ve waited to move, what counts now as a best-case outcome [between 1.5 and 2.0C of warming] remains grim. It also appears, miraculously, within reach.

Wallace-Wells looks at the national climate commitments, and calculates that as much as half a percent reduction lies within them - if they are executed. But the real shift seems to be in the incentives of capitalism itself, as it faces activism and the pandemic:

In the months since the pandemic wiped climate strikers off the streets, their concerns have seeped into not just public-opinion surveys but parliaments and presidencies, trade deals and the advertising business, finance and insurance — in short, all the citadels presiding over the ancien régime of fossil capital.

This is not exactly a climate revolution; the strikers and their allies didn’t win in the way they wanted to, at least not yet. But they did win something. Environmental anxieties haven’t toppled neoliberalism. Instead, to an unprecedented degree, they infiltrated it. (Or perhaps they were appropriated by it. It’s an open question.)

Climate change isn’t an issue just for die-hards anymore — it’s for normies, sellouts, and anyone with their finger in the wind. It will take time, of course, for voters to see empty rhetoric for what it is, and for consumers to learn to distinguish, say, between the claims of guiltless airline tickets, or between carbon-free foods in the supermarket aisle.

Harder still will be sorting through the differences between real corporate commitments like Microsoft’s and more evasive ones, like BP’s. Already, there is considerable consternation among climate activists that the public doesn’t understand the tricky math of “net-zero” on which so many of these commitments have been made—it is not a promise of ending emissions, but of offsetting some amount of them, in the future, with “negative emissions,” sometimes called “carbon dioxide removal,” though no approach of that kind is ready to go at anything like the necessary scale…

…Elsewhere in the world, where 85 percent of global emissions are produced, the great infiltration of climate concerns represents what the British environmental writer James Murray has called “an alternative history to 2020” and what the scientist turned journalist Akshat Rathi has declared “a strong sign that climate action is starting to be ‘institutionalized’ — that is, getting deeply embedded into how the world works.”

This is not about coronavirus lockdowns producing emissions drops or “nature healing.” It is instead about long-standing trajectories in coal use and political salience passing obvious tipping points; promises and posturing by powerful if compromised institutions; and policy progress almost smuggled into place, all over the world, under cover of pandemic night.

In the U.S., in the second coronavirus stimulus, $35 billion in clean-energy spending passed in the Senate 92-6 — an effective down payment, energy researcher Varun Sivaram has estimated, on the innovation spending needed for a full electrification of the country. Did you even notice?

More here - including a fascinating excursus on geoengineering, and the points at which it may become acceptable.

Mike Berners-Lee’s There Is No Planet B has been updated for the pandemic era

One of the best and most readable guides to climate action for any individual, There Is No Planet B is out in a new edition. (By chance, it’s a bit of a week for the Berners-Lees… Tim showing earlier this week how we take back control of the web). With praise from both the Financial Times, as well as green leaders like Bill McKibben, Kim Stanley Robinson and Caroline Lucas, the new book adds to its plain-language framework some new material.

A chapter on protest - some samples: