Why Taylor Swift's Jet Matters--And Only Big, Structural Change Can Fend Off Climate Disaster

A conversation with Dana R. Fisher about her new book, "Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action"

Wildfires in Canada blanketed North American cities in smoke in 2023; this was the air quality in Minneapolis on 18 May 2023. Image credit: Chad Davis/Wikimedia Commons

---

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy tore through the mid-Atlantic states. I had just moved back to New York City, after five years of living exclusively in Connecticut. We lived on the tenth floor of a tall steel and glass tower, with floor to ceiling windows that allowed us a full view of New York Harbor, as it swelled up and over the FDR Drive and swirled into lower Manhattan. A friend’s husband died that day of a heart attack, the lobby of their building filling with sea water, unreachable by any emergency worker. But perhaps what I remember best was the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, right across the highway from our building, belching up water that had originally entered in Manhattan’s Financial District. Over a decade later, New York is still fixing the damage to its infrastructure from that storm.

It’s the kind of thing that I thought happened—well, someplace else, to other people. But increasingly, as the temperature of the earth rises and extreme weather events become more likely and more punishing, those “other people” are you, me, and everyone around the world, In Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dana R. Fisher, a professor at the School of International Service at American University is here to help us back from the brink. Because as she points out, extreme weather—and extreme neglect in reigning in the fossil fuel interest—now requires extreme action.

And it’s not going to happen without a fight.

---

Claire Potter: Dana, in your new book, you argue that, on the one hand, we have been working on climate action for over 30 years; on the other hand, we may be further behind on saving the planet than we ever have been.

Dana Fisher: Yes. I wrote this book having studied climate policymaking for the entirety of my career. I started out in the 1990’s studying what became the Kyoto Protocol (1997), which was going to save us. It didn't save us, and since then I've tracked numerous efforts at both the national and the international level that are supposed to be the next thing that's going to stop the climate crisis from happening, and none of them have worked. 

So, I decided that this time around I was going to write a book specifically geared towards a public audience. I've worked within this system for years. I wrote for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) last time, and I think it's time to really be speaking to the general public because the general public needs to know what's going on. We are getting ridiculously close to falling over the climate crisis cliff, and once we hit certain thresholds it's probably a no return kind of situation. 

Everyone needs to be aware of that.

Let's talk about the policy angle for a second. You talk about big policy plans that implicate the entire planet and every nation on it, but these plans really hinge on the United States signing on to them and passing them here requires giveaways to a fossil fuel industry that is creating the problem. 

Can you talk about that dynamic a little bit? Why has no one in American politics figured out that this is not a good compromise?

It's becoming extremely apparent the role that these vested fossil fuel interests have played in policymaking. In fact, I think that they're saying the quiet part out loud now, if you look at the way that they participated in the most recent round of climate negotiations. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) had its own showcase there. They gave away swag, and it used to be only the clean energy folks that gave away swag. 

What is really I think important to note here is that it's not just the United States. Any country that extracts fossil fuels has, at this point, really been captured and held hostage by these privileged interests. They have access to power and access to natural resources. Think about the way that fossil fuels are subsidized in most countries, and the way that they play such a role in decision-making, so that it makes it impossible to pass any regulation where the underlying intention is to phase out fossil fuels. 

Which is why it's just so laughable to have this next round of climate negotiations this fall in a petrol state, where the person in charge is a fossil fuel executive, just like last time. 

Those negotiations will happen in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. 

Before I read your book, though, I was one of those people that you're writing to. I thought well, we’re going to get there incrementally. I had some faith in the compromises that you write about for example, making extraction cleaner, which as it turns out, is really not useful.

Can you talk to us a little bit about why Incrementalism is not going to solve the climate problem?

One of the things that I try to shine a light on in the book is the way that incrementalism is useful when we're thinking about policy process and trying to understand policy success. But it also isn't working. The only way to get to the other side of the climate crisis is systemic change that involves really moving away from fossil fuel burning and fossil fuel extraction to provide the lights and the energy that everything basically runs on. 

There have been successful incremental steps to grow the renewable energy sector, but if we're still burning natural gas, we are not solving the problem because of the concentrations in the atmosphere already. Right now, February 2024 is the hottest year on record. It is the hottest February on record. Ever. I was just reading in the Washington Post yesterday that in some parts of the world, temperatures are 13 degrees above the average temperature for February. That's not a small deviation from the norm. We're talking like a huge jump—and it is an El Niño year.

This is an indication of the kinds of changes that are coming. While incremental politics may make us feel better, it won't stop what is already built into this system. That's why we also need systemic change.