Regroup. Reroute.

I was not holding my breath about this year’s climate talks in Glasgow offering up a breakthrough whereby the world’s political leaders would, miraculously, agree to do what’s needed to radically and rapidly decarbonize the global economy. But even by my low bar, the way COP26 played out felt particularly dismal.

The steep barriers to entry faced by activists and other civil society members, especially from the Global South and Indigenous societies, the overwhelming presence of fossil fuel reps, and the final, lukewarm pledges in the Glasgow Climate Pact that, again, kicked the can down the road and paid barely a nod to climate equity, all pointed to one depressing fact — entrenched corporate and political interests continue to call the shots. Global cooperation to tackle a crisis that is no longer looming in some distant future continues to be frustratingly out of reach.

I’m not sure on what planet the pundits who are telling us that “significant progress” was made at the talks are living, but the one I’m on just emerged from an intense summer where a “heat dome” killed more than 200 in the Pacific Northwest; Hurricane Ida flooded New York and other cities along the East Coast; far deadlier floods swept through Germany and China; wildfires burned everywhere from the thawing Arctic to Greece to Australia and Indonesia; and rain, instead of snow, fell in Greenland for the first time in recorded history.

As I write this, heading into winter, massive flooding and landslides are wreaking havoc on the western seaboard of Canada and the United States, and there are predictions of another polar vortex in the Northern Hemisphere. (I haven’t even cited much from the Global South, where the situation is far, far worse.)

This is but a small sampling of our world at 1.2 degree Celsius above preindustrial temperature levels, but it should be enough to give a picture of what the future holds even if we manage to hold the line at 1.5°C, which seems more and more unlikely. In case you haven’t noticed, a 2°C to 2.4°C rise by the end of the century has crept into the conversation now and is well-nigh inevitable if we continue to accept incremental progress as enough.

“Simply put, when will the leaders lead?” asked Mia Mottley, prime minister of the island nation of Barbados, in her powerful speech at COP26 where she called out the Global North’s failure to adequately finance climate adaptation and mitigation as “immoral and unjust.”

Perhaps, the question we should be asking instead is — who are the leaders who will shepherd us through this? Certainly not our so-called “ruling class,” wedded to holding power and beholden to corporations as they are. The hard truth is those leaders will have to be all of us. Waiting for someone else to take action and save us is no longer an option.

Like the intrepid Climate Sentinels featured in our Winter 2022 issue, we need to regroup and chart a new path forward before all routes to a livable future shut down.

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