What Resolve, and What Conflict, at a Global Climate Summit Billed as "The Future Is Us"?

With Washington denying climate change and pulling out of the Paris Agreement, local governments are trying to build a climate leadership of their own — and facing discontent of their own.

"Our world is in the early stages of a sustainability revolution... This revolution is sweeping the globe with the force of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the Digital Revolution. We can do this! We can already separate economic prosperity from emissions — and California often plays the leader's part in that. We have the tools we need. We can solve this problem. The only question left is whether we are willing to change. That is the theme of this Global Climate Action Summit."

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's voice carried, deep and ringing, through the main hall of San Francisco's Moscone Center. Below him, the thousand-plus people at the morning plenary of the Global Climate Action Summit on the 14th were fired up.

Before that, he had run through the disasters climate change has recently visited on the world. The heat that global warming pours into the oceans gives hurricanes more energy and makes them stronger. Rain is no longer just rain; it has become "rain bombs." Hurricane Maria killed three thousand people in Puerto Rico last year, and on the afternoon of September 12, U.S. Pacific time, as he spoke, possibly for the first time in history two large tropical cyclones — Hurricane Florence and Super Typhoon Mangkhut — were closing in at the same time on the east coasts of the United States and China, one from the Atlantic and one from the Pacific. Drought driven by warming has ravaged the American Southwest, the Korean Peninsula, Southeast Asia and Mongolia in recent years; last year the whole city of Cape Town, South Africa, came close to running out of water. Drought and heat have also fed wildfires: California's fires this summer burned for months and made history, at times strong enough to spin off fire tornadoes, killing 129 million trees. In the middle of these scenes out of the Book of Revelation, more and more people are becoming climate refugees...

His speech recalled his documentary of twelve years ago, An Inconvenient Truth (its Chinese title is also rendered as "The Truth That Cannot Be Ignored"), and the sequel released last January, An Inconvenient Sequel. The "inconvenience" of the first film was telling people about an enormous crisis the whole world had to face. The "inconvenience" of the second was that the crisis had grown worse and the United States now had a president who denied climate change and had vowed to pull the country out of the Paris Agreement.

"The Paris Agreement points to a road on which the world unites and acts... Donald Trump did give a speech (Note: Trump's statement of June 1, 2017, announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement)," he reminded the audience, "but under the law, the earliest date the United States can formally leave the Paris Agreement (Note: November 4, 2020) happens to be the day after the next U.S. presidential election. If we have a new president, that president need only give 30 days' notice and we can rejoin the parties to the agreement immediately." The hall answered with loud applause and cheers.

He ended with this: "To anyone who doubts that we as human beings have the political will to meet the obligations history demands of us, remember: political will is itself a renewable resource." The hall erupted.

This kind of rousing material turned up in at least three speeches Gore gave during the Global Climate Action Summit: one that morning at the "China Pavilion," the summit's official side event hosted by the Chinese delegation, and one at the plenary on the 14th, the summit's last day. Each was more impassioned than the one before.

1

The Global Climate Action Summit ran from September 12 to 14 in San Francisco, California. Besides the more than 20 main-stage sessions held over two days, the 13th and 14th, at the Moscone Center, more than 300 side events took place across the city — workshops, product launches, exhibitions, concerts, beach cleanups. The more than 4,000 people who attended included local government officials of every level from many countries, along with academics, business people and the nonprofit sector. By the count taken afterward, more than 500 pledges and commitments on climate change were announced over the course of the summit.

The summit's official slogan was "Take Ambition to the Next Level" — meaning that, after the world's countries first agreed on climate action in Paris in December 2015, it was now up to non-state actors (local governments, companies, universities, nonprofits) to take real steps toward the goals the Paris Agreement had set.

This was a summit of non-state actors, but it was hardly a minor one. Its co-chairs included Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which runs the UN's climate negotiations; Xie Zhenhua, China's special representative for climate change affairs; and Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor and billionaire whom UN Secretary-General António Guterres appointed as his special envoy for climate action this past March. Also working the floor were Christiana Figueres, who was UNFCCC executive secretary during the 2015 Paris climate conference, and Erik Solheim, the current head of the UN Environment Programme.

To keep climate change from turning into catastrophe, the Paris Agreement's core goal is this: by the end of this century, hold the earth's warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and try for 1.5. To get there, developed countries are to put up $100 billion a year by 2020, along with technology transfer and capacity building, to help developing countries cut emissions and better withstand climate disasters. On top of that, every country is to set its own emissions targets and measures, and to make the carrying-out of those targets more transparent.

Which is exactly why one important context for this summit was the Trump administration's announced withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. The exit of the world's largest economy and second-largest emitter throws the agreement's implementation into doubt — money for developing countries could fall short because the United States is no longer paying in, or other countries, seeing America break its word, could start breaking theirs, and the agreement could collapse. So when American local governments, companies and other "non-state actors" promise at this moment to carry out the Paris Agreement, it not only helps the United States still reach its own climate goals, it also gives other countries confidence.

The feeling at this summit was, in fact, that Trump's actions were precisely what was pushing non-state actors to raise their own bets and work more closely with one another — something like an uprising raising its banner. And if the uprising had a leader, it was the host: California Governor Jerry Brown.

Brown's fight with Trump over climate change began as soon as Trump was elected. In December 2016, during the transition, Brown said that if Trump really did cut the research budget of NASA's earth science division, as his aides had suggested, California would launch "our own damn satellite" and keep observing climate change itself.

"Our own damn satellite" was an old joke. In 1978, during Brown's earlier run as California governor (he was in his thirties then), he proposed that the state develop its own satellite for emergency communications; the plan died for lack of money. That episode, plus his attention to the environment at the time — pushing solar hard, championing clean energy, tightening regulation of the oil industry — earned his idealistic, unorthodox style the nickname "Governor Moonbeam."

On June 1 last year, Trump announced that the United States would leave the Paris Agreement. That same day, Brown joined the governors of New York and Washington State in launching the "U.S. Climate Alliance", declaring that they would work with other states to keep the Paris Agreement's commitments and act on climate. Five days later Brown went to Beijing and signed several agreements on climate and clean-energy technology. In July, as Trump arrived in Hamburg, Germany, for the G20 summit, Brown told an environmental rally there that he would hold a "climate action summit" in San Francisco in 2018 to make up for the federal government's missing leadership on climate. It would be, he said, "a world congress of states, regions, entrepreneurs and all sorts of other people who want to do something serious about climate change."

That same July, he and former New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg launched "America's Pledge", a project to gather information and data on climate action below the national level in order to measure how far the United States has come on its Paris commitments. Bloomberg became his partner in hosting this climate action summit.

This August, California openly fought the Trump administration's attempt to loosen vehicle emissions standards. On September 8, just before the summit, Brown signed two more bills to block Trump's plan for new oil and gas drilling off the California coast.

Two days before the summit opened, on September 10, Brown approved a landmark bill requiring that by 2045, 100 percent of the electricity on California's grid come from zero-carbon sources. Until then, people had worried he might veto the bill, which Democrats had introduced, out of party calculation, and give priority instead to his own bill to build a regional grid that would buy clean power from other western states.

That the bill became law matters a great deal, because California is the world's fifth-largest economy, and no national government of comparable size had ever set an ambition like it. But the executive order Brown signed the same day was far more ambitious still: by that same year, 2045, California's entire economy would reach 100 percent net-zero emissions. It is a much bigger ambition because power generation accounts for only 16 percent of California's carbon emissions; the other 84 percent comes from burning fossil fuels directly in industry and transport, methane released by agriculture, and other sources. Net zero means all of them have to cut deeply, and where they cannot cut, the plan is to offset — to buy emissions allowances from elsewhere through a carbon-trading system, allowances that others have banked by not emitting or by emitting less.

Before California, only Hawaii had written into law the same target of zero-carbon power and a zero-carbon economy by 2045; Hawaii's economy is one-thirtieth the size of California's, so the two hardly compare. On the day he signed the bill, Brown told the Guardian that his "number one fight" on climate change was with Trump.

Years of accumulated environmental political capital, and his decisiveness against Trump's environmental policies, have made Brown a leader in the new kind of climate diplomacy this summit stands for — diplomacy that reaches past the framework of nation to nation, running between cities, regions and companies, and also directly between regions and countries, as with California and China or California and the EU.

2

If you paid no attention to the heavy facts raised in the breakout sessions on oceans, forests, food, refugees and super pollutants, and followed only the talk about the bright future of renewable-energy transition and energy saving, then this summit was indeed full of an inspiring mood, full of ambition and opportunity. The announcements came in every day.

Two days before it opened, on September 10, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and London Mayor Sadiq Khan wrote jointly in the Guardian that their cities' pension funds would pull their money out of the fossil-fuel industry and put it into more sustainable, more efficient energy, and called on other cities to follow. On September 13, de Blasio announced again that New York City's pension funds would invest $4 billion over the next three years in renewable energy, efficiency upgrades and other climate solutions. Eight years ago, divestment from fossil fuels was still a grassroots campaign run by college students and intellectuals, who argued that pulling money out would shrink the industry's capacity and speed a sustainable energy transition. Now it is increasingly the choice of governments and industry, because investing in fossil fuels already means enormous financial risk.

C40 is a network of more than 90 megacities worldwide, covering 700 million people and 25 percent of the world economy. On September 13 it announced that 26 of its cities would buy only zero-emission buses starting in 2025 and would set up zero-emission zones inside their cities starting in 2030. Greenhouse gas emissions in 27 cities have already passed their peak and will keep falling. The next day it announced that 73 of its cities, with the network's encouragement and help, had begun drawing up or were already carrying out their own emissions-reduction plans.

Among companies, some announced a hard push on the energy transition, with plans to build out electric-vehicle infrastructure or to invest more in batteries; others said they would be carbon neutral by 2040, build 10,000 green stores, set up sustainable supply chains, or start new-energy funds to invest in renewables... At the same time, international coalitions formed to fight ocean acidification together, and several foundations pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to protect forests and the rights of indigenous people...

At the closing ceremony on the afternoon of the 14th, Jerry Brown's own announcement drew everyone's attention: forty years on, he was finally going to launch that "own damn satellite". The state of California would work with Planet Labs, a San Francisco earth-imaging company, to develop and launch a satellite that can track the planet's greenhouse pollutants with unprecedented precision.

The cloud over Washington could not be ignored. American domestic politics shapes the outlook for the global fight against climate change, so the subject could not stay away. One Republican mayor said in his remarks that ignoring environmental protection does not square with conservative values, and that fighting climate change should not be a matter of party, which is why the city he leads had joined "We Are Still In", the movement pledging to keep to the Paris Agreement. The audience applauded warmly. The idea that climate cooperation must rise above party surfaced again and again in the discussions — and the Republican Party was still seen as an enormous obstacle.

The billionaire environmental campaigner Tom Steyer told the plenary about NextGen America, the nonprofit he founded to get 18-to-35-year-olds who do not like voting to the polls, and so end the grip on politics of Republicans who are indifferent to environmental issues or who work with industry to block climate action. Michael Bloomberg simply announced that he would put up $80 million to help Democrats take back the House in the coming midterms and restore Washington's leadership on climate change. For part of the audience, this was the most cheering news of all.

3

For all the elation inside the hall, not everyone thought it so full of hope. The Global Climate Action Summit, which opposes Trump's climate policy, and its leader, California Governor Brown, had protesters of their own.

A little after nine on the morning of September 13, just as the last group of participants was about to enter the main venue at the Moscone Center, several hundred protesters outside linked arms and blocked the door. Some of their signs read: "Carbon pricing is colonialism"; "Not one more cent for dirty energy"; "Governor Brown, stop poisoning us"; "Brown's Last Chance"; "Keep it in the ground." The crowd chanted: "Our climate is not for sale." This was a protest by two movements, "It Takes Roots" and "Brown's Last Chance". The first is a network of alliances representing the people most easily hurt by climate change and by the measures taken against it — indigenous people and people of color above all. The second is a movement against Brown's oil and gas drilling policy in California. What both oppose is global carbon trading, and the fact that even as Brown pushes an energy transition he keeps giving new California oil and gas projects the green light.

In his years in office, Brown has approved more than 20,000 oil and gas wells. They include wells drilled by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which can bring a string of environmental problems: methane leaks (methane is a powerful greenhouse gas), water contamination, heavy water use, even earthquakes. Protesters argue that large-scale oil and gas drilling runs against the work of the energy transition — even though California has already done well on renewables — and that it leaves the many people who live near oil fields and refineries badly harmed by pollution.

Brown is 80 this year, and this is the last year of his term; having served four terms, he cannot run again under the law. So, protesters argue, if Brown wants to leave a political legacy as America's "climate leader," stopping oil and gas drilling now — "keep it in the ground" — is his "last chance."

According to figures published by Brown's Last Chance, 5.4 million of California's 40 million residents live within a mile (1.6 kilometers) of 84,000 oil and gas wells; 1.8 million of them live in badly polluted surroundings, 92 percent of them people of color (Latino, black and Asian), their health threatened by the oil and gas fields.

The other side of this coin is the carbon-trading program Brown has pushed, called cap and trade. To control California's total emissions, the state sets a ceiling on how much each company may emit; a company that finds the ceiling too low can buy carbon credits elsewhere to offset what it emits above the limit. Some places have credits to sell because they emitted little or cut their emissions and banked the allowances. This policy, brought in by the Clinton-Gore administration during the 1992 negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol, has been contested from the start. The European Union argued at the time for taxes and similar measures to cut emissions at the source. Neither side would give way at first, but in the end the American market model won and went into the Kyoto Protocol as a flexible mechanism for cutting emissions.

Critics say carbon trading creates the wrong incentives. If cutting emissions can be sold for money, why cut before someone pays for the credits? Or worse: why not first create the emissions, then eliminate them, and sell the credits that result?

A second dispute arose when carbon trading was later extended to forests. Planting trees and avoiding deforestation could both generate credits, which produced tree plantations and restrictions on indigenous people's use of forests, sometimes enforced with violence, and drew protests from indigenous nations. That is exactly why the banners outside the venue read "Carbon pricing is colonialism."

Besides the demonstration outside, protesters got into the main hall twice. Once was at the plenary on the morning of the 13th: just as Michael Bloomberg was about to speak, several indigenous protesters stood at the front with a banner and shouted at the audience, "Our air is not for sale!" After they were led out, Bloomberg remarked: "Only in America — environmentalists protesting an environmental conference." But when environmental damage falls differently on different people, there is no longer only one kind of environmentalism.

This was not the first time Brown had met such a protest. In November 2017, when he spoke at the 23rd climate conference in Bonn, Germany, several indigenous protesters against fracking stood up in the audience and shouted, "Keep it in the ground!" Brown shot back, "Let's put you in the ground!" — and set off an uproar.

Brown's defense afterward was that approving new oil and gas drilling is a gradual strategy in the face of real demand for fossil fuels: cut demand first — California has the strictest oil-reduction legislation in the country — and supply second. It is also, he said, the art of compromise that political goals require.

Protesters do not accept that logic. Outside the venue in San Francisco, asked by QDaily what she made of Brown's energy policy, a protester from Mozambique said: "Of course he's better than Trump, but that's a very low standard. What we face is a planetary crisis, so much more needs to be done. This country has long since used up more than its fair share of atmospheric space. It should stop emitting immediately, and stop adding any more dirty energy immediately."

The protesters may be right. Against a climate crisis moving faster than humanity, we may have no luxury to discuss realpolitik strategy and the art of compromise. A study published last year in Nature Climate Change found that humanity has only a 5 percent chance of holding warming to the Paris Agreement's 2 degrees Celsius. UN Secretary-General Guterres said on September 10, two days before the San Francisco summit, that the emissions cuts governments are now making fall far short of the targets they set under the Paris Agreement, reaching only a third of the global goal. A report put out this June by the consultancy Rhodium Group found that even with local governments acting, at America's current pace of reduction it will reach only half of the target the Obama administration committed to under the Paris Agreement — a 26 percent cut from 2005 levels by 2025. An expert writing a special report for the UN's climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due out in early October, recently told the Guardian that current national performance on emissions is "nowhere near on track" to meet the Paris Agreement's 1.5 degrees Celsius target...

Between 1.5 and 2 degrees, heat waves, storms and sea-level rise all grow markedly worse, some staple crops could be badly hit, and tropical coral reefs disappear... And above 2 degrees, many scientists fear a "tipping point," with a series of self-reinforcing environmental disasters set off one after another like dominoes, and no way back.

4

The protesters outside were unhappy that the summit would not let their voices be heard inside, but that was not in fact the case. At the "Creating a More Just World Through Climate Action" breakout session on the afternoon of the 14th, for instance, their views got a full hearing.

All five panelists were non-white women, each with a background in environmental organizing for minorities and disadvantaged groups. Jamie Margolin, founder of the Zero Hour movement, introduced herself this way: "I'm supposed to be in a classroom. I'm a middle school student, and I came from Seattle, representing Generation Z."

Generation Z usually means people born after 1995, but most members of Zero Hour are in fact under 18. "Our generation is inheriting the worst of the climate crisis, but we're too young to vote. Zero Hour is about giving young people the power to act," said Margolin, who is 16. On July 1, Zero Hour organized what may have been the world's first round of youth climate marches, in Washington, D.C., and 25 cities around the world.

In a short video about the march, she talks about the mutual favors between fossil-fuel companies and politicians, which let them slip out of responsibility for environmental damage and human casualties so easily. "Honestly, I don't know why hurricanes get such pretty names — 'Maria,' 'Harvey'... I think they should be called 'Hurricane Exxon,' 'Hurricane Chevron,' 'Hurricane Shell'..."

Earlier this year she and 12 other young people sued the governor of Washington State and several state agencies, charging that they had failed to take adequate climate action and had thereby violated her generation's constitutional rights. She told the audience: "In Zero Hour, what people talk about a lot is that we can't solve the climate crisis with solar panels alone. We have to dismantle the oppressive system that is causing climate change."

"Climate change is to a large degree not a technical problem but an economic, political and moral one," said Miya Yoshitani, executive director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), taking up Margolin's point. Since the 1990s she has organized Laotian refugees living near the Chevron refinery in Richmond to fight for their rights, and in 2010 she stopped the refinery's expansion. "We should stop playing the shell game, stop buying and selling emission rights, stop offsetting pollution, and cut pollution at the source instead. We want to see active regulation that keeps fossil fuels in the ground."

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz is the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and is herself an indigenous Filipino. Clearly with the problems of forest carbon trading in mind, she said: "Indigenous peoples' techniques for managing natural resources work. The discrimination against them should stop."

"Bring indigenous people into the consultations." "Draw up the solutions together." So said, in turn, Enei Begaye, founder of the Arizona indigenous environmental group Black Mesa Water Coalition, and Sheela Patel of India, chair of Slum Dwellers International and founding director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC). That was precisely the demand of the protesters outside.

The name of that session, "Creating a More Just World Through Climate Action," repays thought. It does not merely stress the injustice of climate change — that the people who emit the least greenhouse gas are often hit hardest by it, hence the call to protect and support small nations and vulnerable groups. It treats climate action itself as a chance to make the world more just.

Gestures of this sort were not lacking at the summit. The C40 network launched a pledge on "inclusive climate action" urging city managers to bring communities into decisions about urban development, so that climate action and infrastructure spending reach every group fairly, low-income and vulnerable people in particular. And a further group of companies joined a pledge on decent work in renewable energy launched by The B Team, promising to respect workers' labor rights, talk with unions, protect social benefits and provide wage guarantees.

But the well-known Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein thinks that is not enough.

In her 2014 book This Changes Everything (the simplified Chinese edition, published in January 2018 by Imaginist and Shanghai Joint Publishing, is titled 《改变一切》), Klein also argues that we should create a more just world through climate action — not through the action of elites, but of ordinary people. She holds that the root of climate change lies in the current model of market-fundamentalist economic growth and the doctrine behind it. The climate crisis, she writes, gives the world a chance to tear down the oligarchic economy built on the fossil-fuel industry and rebuild a just one — a new abolition movement, a "Marshall Plan for the Earth," and, for the social movements still alive, a chance to finish the work of liberation they left undone.

The home-page cover image shows protesters outside the summit venue; the longform header image comes from Coal+Ice, a photography exhibition at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. All photographs by Jiang Yifan/QDaily.