Have We Already Forgotten About New York’s Apocalyptic Orange Skies, and What It Told Us About the Climate Crisis?

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For a few days, from June 7 onwards, when toxic, apocalyptic orange skies engulfed New York City and Washington, D.C., caused by wildfires in Canada burning on an unprecedented scale, it seemed that the reality of the climate crisis had finally struck home in two of the places that counted most in terms of sounding alarms in the Global North, where so much of the world’s economic and political power still resides, and where people, in general, are largely oblivious to the disasters regularly afflicting the Global South, via unprecedented heat, droughts and flooding.

For the Global North to wake up to reality, climate change, it seemed, needed to arrive on their doorstep, and for a few days the media coverage was suitably sombre, although, even then, as the worst of the pollution passed, the relentless churn of the news cycle returned to its typical dreary pattern of distraction.

Few dwelt on the irony that, as the veteran environmental activist Bill McKibben explained for the New Yorker, the arrival the toxic skies coincided with Joe Biden’s approval — to save the Inflation Reduction Act, “the first truly serious climate bill our government has ever passed” — of “the MVP pipeline, which will carry fracked gas across West Virginia and Virginia”, and which “is precisely the kind of new fossil-fuel infrastructure that climate scientists have repeatedly said we must stop building”, and of “plans for an enormous new oil-drilling complex in Alaska (and liquefied-natural-gas exports), and huge new offshore-drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.”

McKibben was with climate campaigners when he wrote his article — the youthful activists of Climate Defiance, and members of Third Act, a group he helped to form “to mobilize people over the age of sixty.”

“My sense”, he wrote, “is that the younger people are staring down their long smoky future, and those of us who are older are thinking back about the world we knew”, and he hoped that, although the fossil fuel industry “has clouded our politics as thoroughly as it has clouded our air”, the orange haze would “help illuminate that deeper murk.”

In New York City, the Mayor, Eric Adams, seemed be taking the orange skies seriously, posting a suitably stark tweet, in which he stated, “Climate change is directly responsible for the intense wildfires and dangerous smoke we’ve endured this week. The time for action is NOW.”

He also provided a link to a statement by himself, and the Mayors of four other cities affected — Montreal, Toronto, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia — in which the Mayors declared, “Our mission is clear: Without drastically reducing fossil fuel use in order to at least halve our emissions by 2030 we will likely be condemning ourselves to a future filled with weeks like these in cities across the world. Achieving this goal will take all hands on deck. We stand ready to address this climate and health emergency and call on all governments, companies, and residents to act with us.”

I found the statement quite powerful, because it’s so rare to see city leaders publicly declaring that fossil fuel emissions must be halved — at least — by 2030, even though it is supposed to be a target to which most of the world is committed, as agreed at the COP21 climate summit in Paris in 2015, when the supposedly legally-binding Paris Agreement was reached.

The Paris Agreement — and C40 Cities

Agreed by 196 countries, the Paris Agreement’s “overarching goal”, as its website explains, was to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

Since then, however, as the website explains, “world leaders have stressed the need to limit global warming to 1.5°C”, because the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been reporting on climate change and the need for urgent action for over 30 years, “indicates that crossing the 1.5°C threshold risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts, including more frequent and severe droughts, heatwaves and rainfall.”

To limit global warming to 1.5°C, as the website further explains, “greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43% by 2030.”

The statement by the five Mayors therefore reflects the targets of the Paris Agreement — although tweaked slightly to reflect the need for ever more urgent emission reductions — although the reason it stood out for me is because, despite the Paris Agreement supposedly being “a binding agreement” that “brings all nations together to combat climate change and adapt to its effects”, we rarely hear anything about what is required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43% or more by 2030, either from politicians, or, in general, from the mainstream.

A closer inspection of the Mayors’ statement revealed that it was issued in their capacity as members of C40 Cities, which describes itself as “a global network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis.”

As their website explains, “To remain within a 1.5°C rise, average per capita emissions across C40 cities need to drop from over 5 tCO2e per capita to around 2.9 tCO2e per capita by 2030 [a 43% drop]. For wealthier, high-emitting cities, that means an immediate and steep decline in current emission levels. Many rapidly-developing cities can maintain their current levels for up to a decade, and, in a small number of cases, there is some scope for emissions per person to rise slightly before they fall to zero.”

“In all cases”, the website adds, “transformational change is a necessity — cities must diverge considerably from their current business-as-usual emissions trajectories.”

Ever-rising greenhouse gas emissions

This is all well and good, but the devil, of course, is in the detail, and while the C40 Cities and governments around the world are making some of the right noises, the necessary action remains sorely lacking. We’re now halfway through June 2023, and yet, despite the Paris Agreement’s requirement to ensure that “greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025”, they continue to rise at an alarming rate.

Analysing a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in April, the Guardian stated, “Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide — the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity that are the most significant contributors to global heating — continued to increase rapidly during 2022.”

As the Guardian further explained:

Carbon dioxide levels rose by more than two parts per million (ppm) for the 11th consecutive year: the highest sustained rate of CO2 increases since monitoring began 65 years ago. Before 2013, scientists had never recorded three consecutive years of such high CO2 growth.

Atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.

The 2022 methane rise was the fourth-largest since records began in 1983, following record growth in 2021 and 2022, and now stands at an average of 1,912 parts per billion (ppb). Methane is a potent greenhouse gas less abundant than CO2 but which warms the Earth’s atmosphere much faster, and today is responsible for about 25% of the heat trapped by all greenhouse gases.

Methane levels in the atmosphere are now more than two and a half times their pre-industrial level. The oil and gas sector is the largest industrial source of methane, which can also cause medical complications, fires and even engine failure leading helicopters to fall out of the sky.

Levels of nitrous oxide, the third-most significant anthropogenic greenhouse gas, are now 24% higher than pre–industrial levels, following a 1.25ppb rise last year.

Fossil fuel-powered vehicles (cars, buses, trucks, farm machinery) are a major source of nitrous oxide, which is harmful to human health and water sources. But the primary culprits behind rising nitrous oxide levels in recent decades have been synthetic fertilisers and livestock manure from industrialised agriculture.

Where is the panic?

The response to this failure to stop rising emissions ought to be blind panic, but as anyone paying attention to it realises, the only voices of undiluted alarm are, for the most part, climate scientists, who are largely ignored by politicians, and, shamefully, by the mainstream media, even though the results of this collective indifference are being spelled out to us on a daily basis — through Canada’s wildfires, through New York City’s orange skies, through the Sahara Desert marching northwards to the Southern Mediterranean, though an unprecedented and truly alarming increase in ocean temperatures, and through an equally alarming loss of ice in Antarctica, in the Arctic and in glaciers, with terrifying consequences, including rising sea levels.

As the Guardian explained last month, after scientists reported the probable loss of Arctic sea ice in summer by the 2030s, a decade earlier than even the gloomiest previous scenarios, “Faster melting of Arctic sea ice leads to a vicious circle of more heating, because the dark ocean exposed as ice melts absorbs more heat from the sun. The result is faster warming in the Arctic, and scientists have increasing evidence that this is weakening the jet stream and leading to more extreme weather events in North America, Europe and Asia. The searing heatwave in the Pacific north-west of America in 2021 and the catastrophic floods in Pakistan in 2022 are the type of events that may be increasing in likelihood because of a weaker jet stream.”

For any sensible person looking at the continuing rise of emissions, and the consequences that are already being felt, with the atmosphere already heating up quicker than expected, the only solution is for activities that involve greenhouse gas emissions to be curtailed with immediate effect, and yet our leaders and our media, for the most part, continue to ignore the need for immediate and drastic emissions cuts, or even to deny that need, despite our Paris Agreement obligations.

At a bare minimum, to stand a chance of retaining a habitable planet, we need to ban all new oil, gas and coal extraction with immediate effect. As Carbon Brief explained in a recent article, “Back in 2021, the world’s most influential energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, said there was no room for new oil and gas expansion anywhere in the world if the global energy system is to reach net-zero by 2050”, and in March this year over 700 UK academics sent a letter to the UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling for “an end to the issuing of new oil and gas licences in light of the scientific evidence.”

This, of course, is the key aim of Just Stop Oil, the British activist group portrayed as “eco-terrorists” by the government and the right-wing media for doing nothing more than mildly disrupting traffic and staging harmless, but attention-grabbing interventions in art galleries, at sporting events and at the Chelsea Flower Show to highlight the government’s failure to follow up on legally-binding commitments to which it has already agreed.

As well as engaging in astonishingly hypocritical attacks on JSO (especially, on Twitter, on the part of the disgraceful Minister for Net Zero, Grant Shapps), the vile home secretary Suella Braverman — and her predecessor Priti Patel —  have also introduced draconian new laws restricting even mildly disruptive forms of protest, all to protect the ever-increasing profits of homicidal, ecocidal industries whose time is up, and in this they have been vigorously joined by the right-wing media.

Beyond oil and gas

In contrast, BOGA (the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance), led by the governments of Denmark and Costa Rica, and also including France, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden and Wales, have, as Carbon Brief explained, “already announced that they will no longer issue new oil and gas licences because of the need to tackle climate change”, and, as they explain on their website, are “working together to facilitate the managed phase-out of oil and gas production.”

This is crucial, because, as it stands, Just Stop Oil — and all the other organisations and prominent individuals calling for an end to all new fossil fuel extraction — are only tackling the most immediate requirement to keep the planet habitable, whereas what is also needed is a rapid scaling down of our use of fossil fuels; in other words, decommissioning existing oil, gas and coal supplies, and transitioning to renewable energy (wind, solar and wave power). As the UN explains, “Fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, are by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions.”

The good news, as the UN also explains, is that “renewable energy sources — which are available in abundance all around us, provided by the sun, wind, water, waste, and heat from the Earth — are replenished by nature and emit little to no greenhouse gases or pollutants into the air.” Moreover, although “fossil fuels still account for more than 80 percent of global energy production … cleaner sources of energy are gaining ground.”

As the UN proceeds to explain, “About 29 percent of electricity currently comes from renewable sources”, which is “the cheapest power option in most parts of the world today. Prices for renewable energy technologies are dropping rapidly. The cost of electricity from solar power fell by 85 percent between 2010 and 2020. Costs of onshore and offshore wind energy fell by 56 percent and 48 percent respectively.”

At this point, defenders of “business as usual” usually start chipping in with comments about how we can’t rely on renewables to provide us with the kind of consistent energy supplies that we’ve come to depend on from fossil fuels, but what these people fail to realise is that we’ve been living beyond our means for decades, over-exploiting a finite planet, and most crucially, altering its atmosphere in ways that are now becoming evident to more and more people, as the spectre of extinction looms ever closer.

“Peak everything” is over

Essentially, the key message for the future is that “peak everything” is over.

I remember about 20 years ago, when the environmental writer George Monbiot was introducing some climate initiative, telling the crowd that this was going to be a huge uphill struggle, because, to paraphrase, “we’re the first protest movement asking for less rather than more.”

That quote has always stayed with me, although actually “less” is healthier in every way compared to the multiple brutalities and indignities of the horrendously selfish and materialistic culture that has come to dominate so much of life over the last 40 years in particular, and that has, inevitably, reached the point where it threatens our very existence.

What we need now, however, is honesty and intelligence.

We need out political leaders and the gatekeepers of the media to tell us the truth, unequivocally, to tell us that we’ve reached “peak everything”, and that we need to drastically cut fossil fuel emissions forever with immediate effect.

To do this, we need urgent national and transnational conversations, about how sweeping the cuts need to be (50% by 2030 really is the bare minimum), and to engage with us about how these cuts can be achieved, which needs to involve educating us about which of our activities produce the deadly emissions that need to be curtailed.

As the IPCC’s most recent report explained, greenhouse gas production by sector is as follows: Energy 34%, Industry 24%, Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use 22%, Transport 15% and Buildings 6%.

This is just the most basic breakdown, but it would be a useful starting point for discussions about which sectors can most easily be cut, and why.

The urgent conversations we need to have

A necessary recognition is that, as Carbon Brief describes it, “So-called ‘developed countries’ have ‘sustained high levels’ of per-capita emissions — more than double the per-capita emissions of Asia and the Pacific, Africa or Latin America”, while “the group of least-developed countries has the lowest emissions per capita and has ‘contributed only a negligible proportion of historic GHG emissions growth.’”

Within these figures, however are other stories: the “robust evidence and high agreement that the wealthiest 10% of people are responsible for 34-45% of consumption-based household emissions”, and that this 10% is found on all continents”, and the additional realisation that, when it comes to transport emissions alone, the super-rich, via their private yachts and private jets, are insanely prolific polluters.

As I recently explained in a post about a superyacht as part of my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, “In 2021, a report by EcoWatch ‘analysed the carbon footprint of 20 billionaires’, and found that a superyacht was ‘by far the worst asset to own from an environmental standpoint.’ As the authors, Richard Wilk and Beatriz Barros, explained, in one year —  2018 — the average American ‘emitted about 15 tons of CO2’, while ‘the global average footprint [was] smaller, at just about 5 tons per person.’ The top 20 billionaires, however, produced ‘an average of about 8,190 tons of CO2’, with, in many cases, the majority of this being derived solely from their superyachts.”

A particular bugbear of mine, which I’ve been chronicling for years, is the construction industry, which is a rampant polluter, despite pretending that its top-end trophy buildings are ‘carbon neutral’, while another area of concern, which many people don’t want to discuss, is the impact of meat eating and the dairy industry, with beef being by far and away the most polluting part of the meat industry from the point of view of emissions — and also responsible for one of humanity’s most suicidal endeavours: the vast clearing of the planet’s trees for farmland.

As the climate scientist Bill McGuire explains in his excellent primer, Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant’s Guide, “Before humans appeared on the scene, it is estimated that around 6 trillion trees populated the surface of our world. During the course of our civilisation’s growth, however, more than half of these have been cleared, and the destruction shows little sign of stopping. Every year, 16 billion trees are grubbed up or chopped down, the great majority in the vast areas of ancient tropical forest that are being shorn at a rate of 476 trees every second.”

And while we all need to remember — or to recognise — that Just Stop Oil are right, and that the executives in charge of the oil, gas and coal companies are not only some of the biggest criminals to have ever lived, but also continue to be subsidised, to an extraordinary degree, by governments ($5.9 trillion in 2020 alone — or $11 million a minute, according to Bill McGuire, citing the IMF) and also by banks, we shouldn’t forget that a large part of the reason why so much oil is necessary is because of the vast numbers of fossil-fuel powered vehicles on earth: “well over a billion cars, a quarter-billion trucks, 200 million motorcycles, 25,000 passenger jets, and 50,000 ocean-going freighters (a third of which are devoted to transporting more fuel to burn)”, as the Canadian author John Vaillant explains in his compelling new book, Fire Weather: A True Story From A Hotter World.

To return to where I began this article, with New York City’s orange skies and the five Mayors’ call for “reducing fossil fuel use in order to at least halve our emissions by 2030”, the C40 Cities website is good at pointing out some of the changes required, but far more timid when it comes to spelling out the need for drastic change.

Under ’Clean Air’, for example, proposals include “rapidly expanding zero emission public transport; creating low or zero emission areas; supporting walking/cycling; implementing vehicle restrictions or financial incentives/disincentives, such as road-use or parking charges; [and] reducing truck, non-road machinery and city-owned vehicle emissions”, while ‘Green and Healthy Streets’ notes, “We envision a future where walking, cycling, and shared transport are how the majority of residents move around our cities”, because “one third of greenhouse gas emissions from C40 cities come from transport and traffic is the biggest source of air pollution, globally responsible for up to one-quarter of particulate matter in the air.”

Maybe ‘road pricing’ will end up being the best way to clear our cities — and I’m thinking particularly of London, where I live — of the horrendously polluting traffic that afflicts us all, although it does seem to me that a carrot and stick approach might end up being the only viable way forward: first of all, encouraging people to drive less voluntarily, followed fairly swiftly by the implementation of some kind of ban. Transport is clearly one of humanity’s most intransigent problems, as the IPCC’s most recent report recognised, noting that it remains “one of the most challenging sectors for climate change mitigation — no country has so far been able to realise significant emissions reductions in the sector.”

Car-free days might be a good start, and while the aggressive pro-car brigade will be apoplectic, marinaded as they are in vitriol against the expansion of the ULEZ (the Ultra Low Emission Zone) to the whole of Greater London, and further deranged by US far right conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities being a plot to imprison them in their homes, we can all take heart from recent polling that showed that 53% of respondents support ”the pedestrianisation of the whole of central London”, with just 24% opposed.

Perhaps there’s hope for us yet, but I still want those who can — in particular, our supposedly responsible broadcasters, and perhaps the GLA — to take on our corrupt and/or idiotic ministers and our climate change-denying right-wing media by starting that national conversation we need to have about how we adapt to survive.

Millions of people know that we face an unprecedented emergency, but don’t know what to do about it, and are either trying to deny it, or are sinking into anxiety. Talking about it is clearly the best way forward, especially as the climate disasters are going to keep coming.

Canada is still on fire, toxic orange skies may soon be returning to New York City, and even in London the last week of hot weather is already so intense that, despite having cycled indefatigably through a decade of often hot summers, I’m finding that I can only stay our for a few hours before seeking the shade of my basement flat, where I read, I write and I publicise the work of climate scientists and activists, seeking to break through the paralysing silence that is forever shortening the odds of our continued survival on this miraculous and unique planet.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.