Are we screwed, p.19
Are We Screwed?, page 19
My search took me into the media zone, where thousands of journalists from every major news organization in the world would at some point end up during the talks. A set of stairs led me into an elevated area that peered out over row upon endless row of workstations. It looked like an assembly line for the production of meaning. Back on the ground, and still croissant-less, I bumped into a friend from Canada. This was his fifth COP summit. “It’s sort of like Burning Man,” he said. “All these people coming out to the middle of nowhere and setting up a temporary city that just goes away in two weeks, except there’s a little more clothing and less drugs.”
The analogy proved apt in more ways than one. Anyone who’s been to a summer festival has at some point experienced the unique form of psychic stress known as FOMO, or the Fear of Missing Out. You know there’s too much to take in all at once, but in committing to one activity, you invariably hear later about all the better stuff you could have been doing. After finally finding a croissant, I sat down to check my e-mails. In the hour I’d spent aimlessly walking around the venue, I’d received nearly fifty of them—press releases, mostly, alerting me to events that were now over. Bill Gates had announced an alliance of billionaires to fund financially risky low-carbon technology. Obama and nineteen other world leaders had pledged $20 billion for the same. The Paris talks were just getting started, and already I felt like I was missing out.
It didn’t help that my media badge gave me only the most basic level of access to what was going on. I could walk up and down the halls and poke my head into, say, a forum being hosted by International Energy Agency leader Fatih Birol, but the truly A-list stuff was inaccessible. “Are you on the list of preapproved media?” a handler for John Kerry asked when I tried to get into his event. Likewise, I was restricted from entering the zone where any of the actual negotiations took place—and where on this opening day one leader after another, from Putin to Obama to Merkel, made speeches to the world. I watched them on my laptop instead. It was like getting backstage at a concert only to realize that the dressing rooms were off-limits.
So you can imagine my excitement when in the late afternoon I heard that Prime Minister Trudeau would be holding an event open to people like me. By definition no Canadian leader could ever be on the A-list of global elites, but the forty-four-year-old Trudeau was getting close. The UK Mirror had recently pondered whether he was “the sexiest politician in the world.”15 And at the APEC summit in November, he and Obama had acted like the best of friends, referring to each other by first names and prompting media to speculate about their budding “bromance.” “You should try to get a selfie with him,” my mom said before I left for Paris. The problem was I only had ten minutes to find Trudeau’s event, and nobody could tell me where it was.
I ran up and down the media zone until finally I stumbled upon a cluster of Canadian premiers and staffers who looked just as lost as I was. Pausing to catch my breath, I struck up a chat with Torrance Coste, a young climate change activist from Vancouver who was part of the Canadian Youth Delegation. Trudeau had pledged $2.65 billion earlier that morning to help developing nations fight and prepare for climate change. Obama had called him “extraordinarily helpful” on the issue.16 But Torrance wasn’t sure. If Canada was to actually do its part in preventing the world from overheating, it would have to go fossil-fuel-free by 2050. That meant no more tar sands. Was this a future Trudeau was prepared to accept? “We’ve asked him to meet with us youth several times,” Torrance said. “We’ll see if he follows through.”
Inside the press conference, Torrance sat in the front row with other members of the Youth Delegation. They wore large stickers demanding JUSTICE AND CLEAN ENERGY NOW. “It’s great to see so many engaged young people at #COP21!” Trudeau later tweeted. But during the event he refused to give details about how Canada would meet any climate target coming out of Paris, other than to say that “we have started putting elements in place for a plan.” And when it was over, he was whisked out of the room by security without saying a word to the young people up front. Outside the event Torrance was fuming. “Trudeau spoke for almost half an hour without really saying anything,” he said. “What we’re getting is a shiny veneer on the same old inaction and foot-dragging that we youth are used to from the government.”17
Torrance wasn’t the only young delegate to feel shut out of the summit. “Negotiations here at the conference happen behind closed doors,” Morgan Curtis wrote. “No press, no civil society observers. We cannot see any progress in the averting of suffering.”18 I was finding it difficult to see anything either. After Trudeau’s press conference, I took off in a jog across the “Champs-Élysées” to a media room where India’s prime minister was about to announce a twenty-nation solar energy alliance. As I arrived, a security guard was closing the door. “Sorry, sir, it’s all full,” he said. I thought about getting some food. But the line at the nearest cafeteria was insane. And the food—“13 famous French chefs cook for you,” it bragged—felt a bit too fancy for me.
So I made my way to the exhibition hall, where a youth-led discussion on intergenerational equity was about to begin. In contrast to the carefully tailored power suits I’d seen all day among the summit’s older delegates, the style here seemed much more relaxed. Half of the fifty or so young people in attendance were wearing jeans. Over in the corner I saw my first man-bun of the climate talks. “We are the first generation to really feel the impacts of climate change,” said Irene Garcia, a project manager at the World Future Council, “and possibly the last to avert it.” Beside me several people my age nodded in agreement.
But to what avail? I wondered. The talks were just getting started, yet it seemed like all the real decisions were being made in places off-limits to the young people who would be most affected by them. The young Dutch activist and Yale University Ph.D. candidate Ralien Bekkers made the point most strongly. “Are there any negotiators in the room?” she asked during her presentation. I looked from left to right. Not a single young person raised their hand. Bekkers seemed to take it as a confirmation for the point that she raised next. “The future of my children and my children’s children is in the hands of old men, and that doesn’t feel right to me,” she lamented. “Young people are still not taken seriously when it comes to our future.”
It was early evening when the panel discussion was over. I decided to call it a day. But before I could reenter the real world, I first had to wait in line with hundreds of other delegates to get through the conference area’s single exit. No one was doing much talking. Most people seemed just as tired as me. Day one of the climate talks had been more surreal than I expected. But as I lifted up my ID badge for the green-vested UN volunteer to scan, I kept repeating Ralien Bekkers’s words in my head: that here in this airport hanger, the fate of my entire generation was in the hands of old men. The future we ultimately had to live in was being negotiated without us.
Few places in the world are more remote than Svalbard. The Norwegian archipelago is separated from Europe by 450 miles of Arctic Ocean. Its vast icefields, mountains, and glaciers are only 640 miles from the North Pole. When Erlend Knudsen was twenty-three, he and five other friends set off on a ten-day ski trip across a wilderness where polar bears outnumber people. It was more of an adventure than they had expected. Right away one of his friends got sick. “There’s no roads up there, and so the way you transport yourself is by snowmobiles,” Erlend said. “But because there was a big storm he had to be evacuated by helicopter.” The group pressed on without him. A few days later they got walloped by another storm. “It was a bit of a tough trip,” he said.
Yet by his standards, it was a success: “The Arctic is so harsh. When you are in those surroundings your main concern is just to survive—that’s something I really enjoy.” At the time of his expedition Erlend was living in Longyearbyen, a town of two thousand people on Svalbard’s western coastline. He was there for a semester of research on the high Arctic while he completed a degree in science from the University of Bergen. “You can relate the numbers to something when you live there,” he said. In that type of environment, climate change wasn’t just an abstract issue. The thick ice that used to cover Svalbard’s bays was now often too thin to safely support a snowmobile, and glaciers receded by hundreds of feet a year.
“Seeing those changes really caught my attention,” Erlend said. “I decided that I wanted to pursue this further by going into climate research.” During the five years it took him to earn a Ph.D., he was exposed to so much alarming data about climate change that he became numb to it. “The new numbers are so shocking all the time that I stopped getting shocked,” he said. While researching his master’s thesis, for instance, he learned that thousands of glaciers in the Mount Everest region could disappear by the end of the century—and that with them would go a crucial water supply for millions of Asian farmers. “To me what’s surprising is how hard it is for people to realize how extremely important it is that we do something about climate change,” he explained. “Because it’s affecting people around the world right now.”
To residents of island nations like Kiribati, in the Pacific Ocean, it was already an existential threat. For years they’ve watched waves wash farther and farther onto their shores. In 2008 the Association of Small Island States commissioned a scientific study to learn how much temperature rise its members could survive. At two degrees, low-lying nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives would be swallowed by the ocean. They decided to push for a target of “well below” 1.5 degrees at the 2009 climate change talks in Copenhagen, arguing that anything less would drive them “extinct.” But world powers like China saw the target as unrealistic and tried to remove it from the text. The issue became so divisive that at one point it “brought negotiations to a standstill,” as the Telegraph reported.19
The island nations were undeterred. In the aftermath of Copenhagen, they kept pushing for global recognition of their right to survive. They gained an unexpected ally in 2011. “Two degrees is not enough,” UN climate chief Christiana Figueres warned. “If we are not headed to 1.5 degrees, we are in big, big trouble.”20 It was a huge symbolic victory—not only for small island nations like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands but for much of the developing world. The havoc wreaked by rising temperatures could “push more than 100 million people back into poverty over the next fifteen years,” estimated a 2014 report from the World Bank. “And the poorest regions of the world—Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia—will be hit the hardest.”21
That is why forty-three developing countries now belong to a global alliance known as the Climate Vulnerable Forum. Its founders include nations as diverse as Tanzania, the Maldives, and Bangladesh, which are dangerously exposed to the impacts of climate change despite playing relatively little role in causing it. That injustice is amplified by the fact that they have some of the youngest populations in the world. More than half the people living in Tanzania are under seventeen. The median age in the Maldives is twenty-three, and in Bangladesh it’s just over twenty-five. For nations like these, climate change could stunt an entire emerging generation. “My eyes go moist … because I understand how it feels to see my future and be forced to let it go,” the young Maldives climate activist Mohamed Axam Maumoon has said.22 Now compare that age data to the rich nations with the most historical responsibility for climate change. The U.S. median age is nearly thirty-eight, the UK’s is forty, and in Germany and Japan it’s over forty-six.
Those global divides are reflected at each year’s round of climate talks. Richer and older nations make most of the decisions, while poorer and younger ones live with the consequences. “It is the future of the young people who are alive now—not to mention the generations not yet born—that is up for negotiation,” wrote two young climate activists from the United States and Brazil.23 For years the Climate Vulnerable Forum has tried to change how those negotiations happen. It urges nations to see themselves not as separate entities fighting for national gain but as members of a collective global whole doing all it can to keep civilization alive. “At the moment, every country arrives at climate negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible,” Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives, has observed. “This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide … We want a global survival pact.”24
In Norway, Erlend Knudsen was trying to bridge a different sort of generation gap. The older scientists he worked with while earning his Ph.D. in climate research produced reams of alarming data about rising global temperatures. But many of them believed it wasn’t their role to tell members of the general public why they should care. That was for politicians and activists and journalists. “They think the only work you have to do is publish papers,” Erlend said. Scientists like himself see things otherwise. “The younger generation of climate researchers thinks we have to spend more time on outreach,” he says. “We have to make clear the consequences of our research and all the data we produce because the moral implications of it are just enormous.”
Erlend is joined in that opinion by climate scientist Daniel Price, whom he met while they were both students in Svalbard. They shared a deep interest in science—“and also adventures,” Erlend said. Though Daniel now lived in New Zealand, where he was completing his Ph.D. on sea ice in Antarctica, they’d kept in touch periodically throughout the years. “We both felt like there was a general mismatch of understanding about climate change in public and academia,” Erlend said. Most regular people think of global warming as a vague and distant threat. But the data produced by scientists like him and Daniel show that it is already affecting “our biodiversity, our migration patterns, our economy, the way we live,” Erlend says. “It’s not just a climate change problem, it’s a society problem.”
So when Daniel called him up and suggested they travel half the globe by foot and bicycle to reach the Paris climate talks, Erlend quickly agreed. “I was like ‘Yeah, sure,’” he said. On their solo journeys they’d be able to meet people already affected by climate change. They made a website called Pole to Paris where they could share those stories with the world. Erlend’s motivation was also personal. It’s hard to sit at a desk all day worrying about a threat you feel unable on your own to fix. By running more than fifteen hundred miles from Norway’s remote Arctic regions to Paris, he hoped to feel part of something bigger than himself or the country he was born in. He wanted to join people his age from all over the world to fight for a better future. Plus it was a good excuse for adventure.
Erlend began his run 286 miles north of the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian town of Tromsø. It was early August when he departed. He hoped to make it to Bergen, in the country’s south, by mid-October, a distance of over eleven hundred miles. He’d effectively have to run nearly a marathon every day. Not only that, but for much of the trip he’d be on steep footpaths in the mountains. The amount of altitude he gained would be almost equivalent to climbing Mount Everest seven times. As he left Tromsø, Erlend was carrying about thirty-three pounds of supplies on his back: enough food to last him ten days, a compass, a smartphone, a covered sleeping bag—“so I could survive outdoors,” he explained—and a flag of the North Pole. To assuage his parents’ concerns, Erlend had a GPS tracker that could be followed online. “They were really worried,” he said. “With this tracker they know exactly where I am, and I can signal out if there’s something wrong.”
Erlend’s days followed a steady routine. He started each one by asking himself “Why am I doing this?” It was meant to be motivational. Paris felt so far away, he needed to focus on the present. Maybe he’d be crossing a spectacular mountain pass that day, or giving one of the thirty or so school presentations that he’d scheduled along his route. Satisfied with his answer, he would begin his run. Typically he’d cover twenty to thirty miles, stopping to eat every hour. “Up in the mountains I’d drink energy powder,” he said. He refilled his supplies every few days. “I’d had parcels shipped to different places along the way,” he said. Many of his nights were spent in public cabins in Norway’s alpine regions. “The wind outside sounds like it’s going to lift the whole cabin,” he later recalled.25 Before he fell asleep, he’d ask himself one more question: “What are you thankful for today?”
Some days the answer was obvious. Not long after leaving Tromsø, he met a Sámi woman named Laila Inga. For thousands of years her indigenous ancestors had herded reindeer across northern Europe. Now climate change is making that way of life much harder. Warmer temperatures meant more precipitation, often falling as rain instead of snow in the winter, which caused a hard layer of ice over the lichens and plants that reindeer need to survive. Sámi people like Inga were spending more and more of their income on extra food for the reindeer—without it, many would die of starvation. Inga wondered if the day would come when the Sámi would have to abandon herding altogether. “Everything is changing for her,” Erlend said. “She doesn’t know what the future will be like for her kids. Her story had a strong impact on me.”
It gave him the resolve to keep going. There were days when he definitely needed it. In one particularly remote region of Norway, the snowmelt came later than usual and caused several rivers to swell to the size of lakes. “There were no bridges, so yeah, I had to cross them by walking through them,” he said. “It was very tough. You’re up to your knees or thighs in water, and it’s cold, like crazy cold.” He later told the Guardian he “was very much on the edge physically and mentally.”26 Yet he faced an even more “extreme situation” only days before finishing the Norway section of his run. “Before I reached Bergen, I had to cross a mountain area,” he said. “It was very cold, and a blizzard started. There was no one else around at this time of year, and I was tripping on all the rocks because they were so slippery from all the snow and ice.”
