Jonathon Porritt - Hope in Hell: How We Can Confront the Climate Crisis & Save the Earth

"An indispensable handbook in the preeminent planetary struggle of our times. Truthful, trenchant, and yet refreshingly hopeful." -Sting

Hope in Hell

You, the Climate Crisis, and How We Can Save the Earth

Jonathon Porritt

Founder & Director, Forum for the Future

Published in the United States by

Earth Aware Editions

PO Box 3088

San Rafael, CA 94912

www.mandalaeartheditions.com

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Text copyright 2020 Jonathon Porritt

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN: 978-1-64722-361-8

ISBN: 978-1-64722-368-7 (eBook)

2020 2021. 2022. 2023

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2020

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

The right of Jonathon Porritt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

For all those

ready to embrace more radical responses

to todays Climate Emergency.

For young people today

already, stepping up

with the kind of conviction, courage, and compassion

on which our future now depends.

And for all the rest of us, who now know where our duty lies.

leave Hell. And again behold the stars.

D ANTE A LIGHIERI

This book is all about the power of hope. For the majority of US citizens, for the world as a whole, with both a new President and a mass vaccination program against COVID-19 waiting in the wings, 2020 ended in a much more hopeful way than had once seemed possible.

Since the momentous Election on November 3rd, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris focused on building bridges, on healing deep wounds in the US body politic, on preparing to govern for all US citizens, not just Democratic voters, signaling in the clearest possible way that their Administration will prioritize getting on top of COVID-19, ensuring a rapid economic recovery, addressing racial inequality, and urgently bringing forward measures to combat the Climate Emergency. Four priorities, one aspirational vision: a fairer, more prosperous, less divided nation, ready to lead the world in addressing the threat of runaway climate change. Few nations have suffered more from the economic and emotional impacts of COVID-19 than the USAand I say that as a citizen of the UK, which can make no claim to having escaped any more lightly. The prospect of mass vaccination campaigns being rolled out across the world in 2021 has lifted all our spirits, even as we surely understand that this in no way looks anything like getting back to normal. Indeed, the costs of COVID-19 remain incalculablefor individuals, families, communities, businesses and whole economies. Nation states will be paying down the staggering debts incurred to deal with it for decades to come.

For completely understandable reasons, with so many peoples lives so painfully disrupted, pretty much any consideration of the Climate Emergency disappeared during 2020. What weve witnessed is a particularly telling example of the tragedy of the horizon, with COVID-19 posing an immediate and unignorable threat, a clear and present danger, with the lives of so many at risk, necessitating comprehensive, sometimes draconian interventions from government. By contrast, the Climate Emergency is still seen by most people today as a challenge for tomorrow. Even as our continuing failure to get to grips with it today, right now, is putting at risk the lives of countless millions of people in the future.

The Climate Emergency poses an infinitely graver risk to humankind than COVID-19. There is no vaccine against the impacts of accelerating climate change. But political engagement over the years has lacked any real urgency. Thats the tragedy of the horizon: Today always trumps tomorrow. That might easily remain the caseunless the sheer, gut-wrenching trauma of COVID-19 causes us all to start thinking very differently about the future. At the very least, people have already begun to understand that COVID-19 is almost certainly just the first in a new wave of pandemicscaused in large part by our seemingly insatiable desire to go on abusing the natural world and its wild creatures, with no thought for the consequences to ourselves.

Experts have been warning for many years that most of the new diseases that have emerged in the last 50 years come from wild animals. The risk of pathogens jumping from animals to humans has always been there, but our constant encroachment on the worlds rainforests and other habitats has multiplied those risks many times over. As have the global trade in wild animals and wild animal markets. So lets be clear about this, before the origins of this terrible pandemic fade away into the background: Governments could put a halt to all those things, specifically to reduce the risk of future pandemics, with exactly the same kind of urgency and resolve theyve demonstrated in addressing the pandemic itself.

Might that be just the first of many dramatic shifts in policy that, pre-COVID-19, were seen to be unthinkable?

Throughout Hope in Hell, Ive set out to explain why this is the decisive decade for the future of humankind: if we do what we need to do by the end of the decade to avoid runaway climate change, however unthinkable that may be to most politicians at the moment, then well have a fighting chance of ensuring a better world for humankind in the future. But if we fail to grip that challenge, then its more than likely that todays young people will be looking back on COVID-19 as a relatively insignificant, short-lived perturbation in their lives.

Its impossible to exaggerate the influence which the Biden/Harris Administration will have on this inflection point in all our lives. Ive followed US politics for more than 40 years, with a near-obsessive focus on the politics of climate change; Ive despaired of the historical, cumulative failure of one US President after another during that time, including Barack Obama, who promised much but delivered little; and Ive railed endlessly against the corrupting power of Big Oil systematically undermining US democracy, and against the equally corrupting influence of Rupert Murdoch (and Fox News in particular) endlessly obscuring and lying about the reality (the scientific reality) of climate change.

Right now, however, in December 2020, I feel more inspired by what is happening in the USA than Ive ever done before. And thats because I have never read a more compelling, intellectually robust election statement on climate change than the Biden/Harris Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice. No other world leaders have recognized accelerating climate change as an existential threat to the future of humankind. No candidates for the highest office in your land have come close to explaining the true nature of that threat in hard-edged economic terms. No politicians, anywhere in the world, have come up with a more ambitious plan to address that threat. And the decision to appoint former Secretary of State John Kerry, one of the leading architects of the 2015 Paris Agreement, as Climate Envoy, confirms their seriousness of intent.