Climate Change: We are all Ukraine, we are all Russia

During the past weeks, for the first time in many years, climate change has not been at the top of my mind for a sustained period of time. Working as a South African in Germany, the war in Ukraine triggered immediate, here-now focus. There was most insidiously and pervasively, the vague and nagging worry about an all-out nuclear war. Stronger but less persistent was deep concern for the people immediately affected, mostly Ukrainians but also some hapless Russian conscripts laying down limbs and lives for reasons they mostly did not understand or did not know. There has been outrage and anger - as always when a bully deploys brute strength to secure a personal and destuctive satisfaction at the expense of the weaker. I even felt frustration and resentment at myself and at society for the focus and action we were able to bring to this cause, noble and important as it is, compared to climate change - the effects of which could be longer-lasting by thousands or millions of years. There was also a sense of impotence, wondering what I can do.

In all this, the topics seemed to be distinct: global climate change here, Russia-Ukraine-the international-community there. When I thought about what I could do, the most obvious answer lay right at hand: my daily, hot shower is powered by Russian gas, my comfortable apartment allowing just a light jersey throughout winter is heated by the same energy source. I could choose to turn off the gas, wash in cold water or from kettle-warmed water in the basin, and put on two more jerseys. I would become somewhat blameless, somewhat empowered, and if enough people did the same, the impact might become more than symbolic. The climate would benefit, the energy transition might be sped up. People who own conventional cars would have more choices.

Now, the topics of the immediate war in Ukraine and the never-ending one for climate stability have become intertwined. Having slept on it a few nights, they suddenly seem one and the same - at least psychologically.

How are we all Ukraine? Ukraine is surrounded, besieged. Its daily life and pleasures have been suspended while it battles a more powerful enemy. The danger is everywhere, overwhelming, is threatening everything cherished with permanent removal. So it is with every human and climate change. If some Ukranian is deeply off-grid on a camping trip and has heard nothing, her lifestyle is nevertheless as threatened by the invasion as someone watching news updates by the hour. The enemy is coming, whether we want to know or have allowed the knowing, or not. In every moment we are being choked and swallowed, as if by a giant python.  If we do not actively confront and defeat it, our lot is sealed.

And yet, simultaneously, incongruously, we are all Russia. All living in an illusion of how things were in the past, about the privileges we were able to command and demand. All the time living as if nothing has changed.  For Russia, talking about Ukraine but never really with it. Invading it because of how other people may or may not look at it, or use it. In the case of me, showering in hot water powered by gas and avoiding the strictures of additional jerseys  because long ago, there were few enough people and low enough concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that one luxuriating guy in Bonn would not matter. In the case of all of us collectively, by invading the futures of those younger than us, besieging them with our insistence on a lapsed privilege. Choking and swallowing their future lives in every moment, as if we are a giant python. Some of us talk the talk, few walk the walk. Perhaps because we think nobody will join us and we will sacrifice much - all by ourselves, achieving only symbolic virtue. And yet, Ukraine has resisted together, heroically together.

As Ukraine bears daily injury and Russia daily dehumanisation, I wonder about turning off the gas for a day, a month, a year, ten years. Would I do it, maintain it? If in the end Russia is humanised, Ukraine freed, climate change defeated, would it have been a sacrifice worthwhile? It feels like a “yes”.

The opposite scenario now haunts me – that on the day climate change finally runs away from all mitigation and all adaptation, we ask if the sacrifice was worthwhile – and find that there never was one. What sacrifice? That the gas was never turned down. That the generation who could choose to do so never made the sacrifices Ukraine has chosen and is left only with the astonished “what if?” when it is too late.   

We should try, should resist, the dying of the light. Ukraine is showing us how