“I’m not telling you anything new. That is the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere today. We started at around two hundred eighty before the Industrial Revolution. We know the absolute safe upper threshold is three hundred fifty, which the world blew by in the nineties, and it’s still rising at the rate of two to three parts per million every year. It’s as simple as this: The fate of every man, woman, child, and species on this planet is bound to this number. Nothing matters unless we can stop and eventually reverse that number.”
She steps back from the podium and decides to pull her hair into a bun, swiftly snatching a hair tie from her wrist and running her hand over her face to collect loose strands as she speaks. She gives a quick lesson in the basic physics and chemistry of greenhouse gas emissions, “simple enough that when Svante Arrhenius made a few back-of-the-envelope calculations in 1896, he predicted that if smokestacks continued to belch CO2, the planet would eventually warm by three to six degrees centigrade. This remains exactly in line with what the most sophisticated computer models still say today.
“What most scientists have been wrong about,” Morris continues, “is how quickly our planet’s systems could unravel given this additional heat. The chaos we’re seeing is from just a 1.2-degree temperature rise. Now we have feedback loops to fear.”
Her hands make swift, enormous gesticulations, a conductor building urgency for her symphony, as she describes the Amazon’s epic droughts releasing six billion tons of CO2, equivalent to annual US emissions. She moves on to the permafrost in the tundra of Alaska, northern Canada, and Siberia.
“Scientists believe by the end of this century”—she skips one palm across the other to send it riding to the sky—“the permafrost could release one hundred billion tons of methane, which is equivalent to two hundred seventy years of emissions at our current levels.”
Finally, she describes the deposits of methane throughout the world’s oceans. Scientists hoped it would take centuries for methane clathrates to melt, but they’re already discovering plumes venting from the Arctic Ocean during sea ice retreats. The first ice-free Arctic summer will probably arrive in the next five to ten years—and rather than white ice reflecting sunlight, the dark ocean absorbs it. Yet another feedback loop imperiling the highly dangerous clathrates.
“For anyone who hasn’t read Anthony Pietrus’s terrifying book, at that point, there is no adaptation, no survival, no Earth. The entire surface of the planet will be too hot to sustain life. So we’re not just talking about fucking polar bears here. We’re talking about the violent disintegration of civilization followed by a slow-rolling global genocide, and it’s underway right now. In other words, it might already be too late. Here is the absolute best-case scenario of where we are.”
She leaves the podium and approaches the edge of the stage. She stops with her toes on the precipice and leans forward, outstretched arms quivering in tight, tiny circles for balance. She teeters forward impossibly far, and one can easily picture her sprawling face-first into the front row, cracking her chin open, or worse. There’s a palpable anxiety to watching her perform this feat, the crowd tensing at this gut-clenching display, the spotlights spilling her long shadow across the stage. Two thousand mouths exhale with relief when she finally catches hold of her momentum and tilts back from the edge. She smiles at herself and returns to the podium.
“Again, that is our best-case scenario. We have a precious handful of years left to act, and I promise you this: If you do not join this movement now, you will wake up ten, fifteen, twenty years from now and feel sick that you didn’t do everything you could during the sliver of time when we still had a chance. When we hadn’t yet fallen over the brink.”
I’ve heard this speech multiple times by now, but there is something acute about the blanket silence that engulfs this crowd. Morris checks her notebook on the lectern.
“So what does that mean? First of all, forget about your carbon footprint. ‘Carbon footprint’ is a PR term invented by an oil company. I want you to remember two words…”
These words replace 430 behind her: THEY KNEW.
“ ‘They’ are the Carbon Majors, the one hundred companies responsible for over seventy percent of emissions since the eighties. Their own scientists knew what would happen. They knew if they kept burning their reserves they would threaten the future of the human race. They knew, and they built their oil rigs to account for higher sea levels and more intense storms. They knew, and they told us to focus on our consumer behavior while they locked us all into structures of hyper-consumption. They knew, and they waged a propaganda war of denial and delay. They knew, and they’re still doing it! There is no other way to put it, they are committing the greatest atrocity in human history and they knew. They knew, and they told us to worry about our fucking carbon footprints.”
She thrusts her right hand toward the sky. Three fingers stretch upward, and her voice thunders.
“So what do we do? Climate. Inequality. Democracy. They are inextricably linked, so our only choice is to seize power beginning right here in the US, right here in Arizona, right here in Phoenix.”
A smattering of applause breaks out, but Morris quickly speaks over it.
“That’s the philosophy of Climate X. There is no one deal—there is only this crisis as far as the eye can see. We won’t stop until the global economy is circular, zero-carbon, near-zero waste with contraception and education for all, with population stabilized, healthy, and thriving and with our ecosystems restored and managed. We won’t stop until half the earth is wild again. But right now, we have a dangerous waste disposal problem, and nothing else matters because this number has not stopped.”
430 again appears on the screen.
“When you climb a mountain, you don’t just materialize at the peak. You cannot ignore the first step. Which is why we have a plan that will deliver investment and opportunity to regions that have known only poverty, neglect, and exploitation. That means a rebirth right here in South Phoenix, in the decimated mountains of West Virginia, in the redlined neighborhoods of Chicago, in the Navajo Nation where my grandmother grew up. We will create a mass political movement that crosses race, region, religion, and any other category you can come up with. That binds us all in restoration and reparation.
“Yes, climate is a reckoning, a deadline, but this is also the keyhole through which we build a more just and equitable world. A Fierce Blue Fire has been told a lot of things: that we’re spoiling things for the Democrats, that we’re compromising with problematic people or we’re too uncompromising in our demands—but look, when you understand what’s happening, how can you not spill the whole toolkit on the floor? When I sit across from politicians that I’m trying to either get in or out of office, what can I say except ‘I don’t care about your stance on abortion or gun control or prayer in school, I don’t care about your sex scandal, I don’t care if you’re a Republican, Democrat, Whig, Tory, or Ostrogoth. I don’t care about anything except whether you’re ready to fight back.’ ”
She’s still talking, but the clapping slowly overwhelms her voice. Then people rise from their seats, thousands of hands beating themselves pink.
“We have an election coming in two years,” Morris cries over the applause. “And we need to blow the fucking roof off this thing.” A scream rises from the crowd, a war whoop. “We follow every candidate everywhere they go and ask, ‘What are you doing about this crisis?’ We protest, invest, divest, blockade, persuade, disobey, make nonviolent trouble, and most importantly, we vote, every race, no matter what. And if there’s no one worth voting for, bitch, get yourself a clipboard, get your signatures, and get yourself on that motherfucking ballot.”