rollingstone13382020

APRIL 2020 ISSUE 1338

S P EC I A L I S SU E F E AT U R I N G

The Crusade of Greta Thunberg Our Deeply Troubled Oceans Building the Green New Deal The Bank Funding Global Destruction

NOW OR NEVER The Race to Save the Planet

©2020 Vans, Inc.

A W

E E S I N O T T H T E N

WO

RLD

YOU

e g n a h c e h t t a E

We salute every generation that puts the planet first.

That protects our food—and our soil, air and water.

And that makes every choice for the good of generations to come.

FROM THE

GRAIN UP

ISSUE 1338

CLIMATE CRISIS

‘ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS’

36 ZERO HOUR There is no stopping climate change. But how bad it gets is still up to us.

BY J E F F G O O D E L L

40 GRETA’S WORLD How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement.

BY ST E P H E N RO D R I C K

50 THE DOOMSDAY BANK Despite knowing the danger, Chase lends more to the fossil-fuel industry than any other bank.

BY B I L L M C K I B B E N

62 TROUBLED WATERS As the ocean rises and gets warmer, what does it mean for the rest of the planet?

BY J E F F G O O D E L L

70 BUILDING A

GREEN NEW DEAL

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on how a post-fossilfuel future will create an economy for working people.

BY T E SSA ST UA RT

BRYAN THOMAS

AND MORE The Global Climate Strike in September drew more than 6 million people in over 150 countries.

Contents The Mix 21

Hayley Williams Isn’t Afraid The Paramore frontwoman tells her biggest secrets on her first solo album.

BY BRITTANY SPANOS

RS REPORTS

26

Uganda’s ‘Ghetto President’ Bobi Wine is one of his country’s top artists and revolutionaries. Will he survive till election day?

BY DAVID PEISNER

Q&A

33

Jason Isbell On writing breakthroughs and meeting Springsteen.

BY BRIAN HIATT

MY OBSESSION

34

Bathtub Escape Brittany Howard shares her number-one stress reducer on long tours.

BY JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

Reviews Music 85 Pearl Jam’s Grown-Up Grunge The band’s first album in seven years balances rage and maturity.

BY KORY GROW

TV 88 New ‘Normal’ Hulu’s take on the Sally Rooney novel is a millennial romance for the ages.

BY ALAN SEPINWALL

Movies 90 ’Promising’ Revenge Carey Mulligan gives predators a taste of their own toxic medicine.

BY PETER TRAVERS

Departments 12 14 18 24 98

Letter From the Editor Correspondence Random Notes RS Recommends The Last Word

On the Cover Greta Thunberg illustration by Shepard Fairey.

Based on a photograph by Markus Schreiber/ AP Images/Shutterstock.

6 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

21 PHOTOGRAPH BY Valerie Chiang

Trademarks owned by Société des Produits Nestlé S.A., Vevey, Switzerland.

What’s new and what you might have missed — from the latest original podcasts and videos to reviews of music, movies, and more EVENTS

Women Shaping the Future ROLLING STONE’s second annual Women Shaping the Future event, in New York, featured performances and talks from Diana Gordon, Jennifer Nettles, Lauren Jauregui (from left), and others. Read and watch full coverage of the event on RollingStone.com.

CULTURE

The Making of Malkmus

The Cannabis Industry at a Turning Point

Stephen Malkmus has a great new solo album, Traditional Techniques, and will be reuniting with Pavement for the first time since 2010.

He stopped by RS to talk about his first favorite song (Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World”) and the first song he wrote (a little ditty called “Psychopath”) on “The First Time.”

This month, in honor of 4/20/20, we’re going deep on the business of cannabis. Read our coverage of what’s driving the emerging market forward — and what’s holding it back.

MUSIC

A Record Store Day to Remember Before you head to your local independent shop for Record Store Day on April 18th, check out the best special vinyl releases to look for, from a reissue of Paul McCartney’s solo debut to collectors’ items from Billie Eilish, Britney Spears, and David Bowie.

DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE

Grimes’ Fantastic Visions For our first-ever stand-alone digital cover story, senior writer Brian Hiatt visited Grimes at her L.A. home to hear about her mesmerizing new album and how she feels about becoming a parent.

AMY LOMBARD FOR “ROLLING STONE” (WOMEN IN CULTURE PARTY); AMANDA JONES (MALKMUS); CHARLES REX ARBOGAST/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK (CANNABIS); ERIC BARADAT/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES (RECORD STORE)

VIDEO

VIDEO

The Killers on ‘The First Time’ This Month’s Top New Lists Bob Marley at 75: Ranking His 50 Greatest Songs The 50 Best Sci-Fi TV Shows

Visit RollingStone.com or find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

8 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

The 100 Greatest Debut Singles of All Time

Ahead of their new album, Imploding the Mirage, singer Brandon Flowers (right) and drummer Ronnie Vanucci Jr. tell us about the first albums they ever bought (by the Cure and the Pointer Sisters), their first times being star struck, and more for “The First Time.”

GRIMES PHOTOGRAPH BY Charlotte

Rutherford

YOU KNOW THE FEELING : You’re ready to catch a good night’s sleep before the alarm snaps you awake. But instead, you’re staring at the ceiling. Here’s our playlist of slower tempo, soft, melodious music to serve as the perfect accompaniment to help you relax, doze off, and get your Zzzs.

Jason Fine

Gus Wenner

Jay Penske

EDITOR

PRESIDENT AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

CHAIRMAN AND CEO

DEPUTY EDITOR MUSIC EDITOR CREATIVE DIRECTOR DIRECTOR OF CREATIVE CONTENT DIGITAL DIRECTOR MANAGING EDITOR DEPUTY MUSIC EDITOR ENTERTAINMENT EDITORS NEWS DIRECTOR POLITICS EDITOR SENIOR EDITOR CULTURE EDITOR SENIOR MUSIC EDITORS

REVIEWS EDITOR SENIOR MUSIC BUSINESS EDITOR NEWS EDITOR ASSISTANT EDITOR SENIOR WRITERS

CHIEF FILM CRITIC CHIEF TV CRITIC STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON, D.C., BUREAU CHIEF RS COUNTRY EDITOR RS COUNTRY DEPUTY EDITOR DIRECTOR OF CHARTS PRODUCTS EDITOR ART DIRECTOR DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR DESIGNER DEPUTY PHOTO EDITOR ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR SENIOR MULTIMEDIA EDITOR PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT CHIEF RESEARCH EDITOR RESEARCH EDITORS

COPY EDITORS

DIRECTOR OF VIDEO PRODUCTION PRODUCERS

VIDEO EDITOR ASSOCIATE PRODUCER SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR ASSOCIATE SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR ASSISTANT TO JANN S. WENNER

Sean Woods Christian Hoard Joseph Hutchinson Catriona Ni Aolain Jerry Portwood Alison Weinflash Simon Vozick-Levinson David Fear Maria Fontoura Jason Newman Patrick Reis Phoebe Neidl Elisabeth Garber-Paul Patrick Doyle Brendan Klinkenberg Hank Shteamer Jon Dolan Amy X. Wang Brenna Ehrlich Suzy Exposito David Browne Tim Dickinson David Fricke Andy Greene Kory Grow Brian Hiatt Alex Morris Stephen Rodrick Jamil Smith Brittany Spanos Matt Taibbi Peter Travers Alan Sepinwall Jon Blistein Ryan Bort EJ Dickson Samantha Hissong Charles Holmes Daniel Kreps Elias Leight Angie Martoccio Ethan Millman Brandt Ranj Claire Shaffer Tessa Stuart Peter Wade Andy Kroll Joseph Hudak Jon Freeman Emily Blake Tim Chan Matthew Cooley Toby Fox Kyle Rice Sacha Lecca Griffin Lotz Joe Rodriguez Maria Wurtz Hannah Murphy Jonathan Bernstein Rick Carp Andrea Marks Chris Kobiella Jason Maxey Steven Pearl Megan McBride Christopher Cruz Reed Dunlea Daniel Halperin Kimberly Aleah Adisa Duke Elvis Metcalf Alexa Pipia Dewayne Gage Natalli Amato Susan Ward

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Matthieu Aikins, Mark Binelli, Jonathan Cott, Cameron Crowe, Anthony DeCurtis, Raoul Duke (Sports), Josh Eells, Mikal Gilmore, Jeff Goodell, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Seth Harp, Erik Hedegaard, Will Hermes, David Kushner, Greil Marcus, Charles Perry, Janet Reitman, Rob Sheffield, Paul Solotaroff, Ralph Steadman (Gardening), Neil Strauss, Touré, Jonah Weiner

PUBLISHER DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS OPERATIONS EAST COAST SALES

WEST COAST SALES MIDWEST SALES MARKETING

ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

LIVE EVENTS PUBLIC RELATIONS DIRECTOR PRODUCTION DIRECTOR DIRECTOR, DISTRIBUTION IMAGING SPECIALIST

Brian Szejka Jessica Grill Edward Stepankovsky Nicholas Urkonis Brendan Hoey Mitch Herskowitz Kathryn Nachreiner Sabrina Phillips Sara Katzki Christopher Santorella Michael Tarazi Bridget Schelzi Hannah Lezak Liana Cervantes (Design) Sam Forrest Annie Quinn Anna Viserto Kathleen Garcia Kelly Schwantner Kacie Collins Rebecca Bernhard Kevin Hurley Mike Petre Germany Feng

ROLLING STONE is owned and published by Penske Media Corporation.

George Grobar CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

Gerry Byrne VICE CHAIRMAN

Sarlina See CHIEF ACCOUNTING OFFICER

Craig Perreault EVP, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Todd Greene EVP, BUSINESS AFFAIRS AND GENERAL COUNSEL

Debashish Ghosh MANAGING DIRECTOR

Jenny Connelly SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT

Ken DelAlcazar SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE

Tom Finn SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, OPERATIONS

Nelson Anderson VICE PRESIDENT, CREATIVE

Joni Antonacci VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCTION OPERATIONS

Rebecca Bienstock VICE PRESIDENT, TALENT RELATIONS

Stephen Blackwell HEAD OF PORTFOLIO SALES

Jann S. Wenner FOUNDER AND EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Gerard Brancato VICE PRESIDENT, PMC DIGITAL ACQUISITION

Anne Doyle VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES

Mara Ginsberg VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES

Noemi Lazo VICE PRESIDENT, CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND MARKETING OPERATIONS

LOS ANGELES OFFICE 11175 Santa Monica Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90025 310.321.5000

NEW YORK OFFICE 475 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10017 212.213.1900

Young Ko VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE

Gabriel Koen VICE PRESIDENT, TECHNOLOGY

Kevin LaBonge VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS AND LICENSING

Brian Levine VICE PRESIDENT, REVENUE OPERATIONS

Judith R. Margolin VICE PRESIDENT, DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL

ROLLING STONE (ISSN 0035-791x) is published 12 times per year, which is subject to change at any time, by Penske Business Media, LLC, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to ROLLING STONE Customer Service, P.O. Box 37505, Boone, IA 50037-0505. Canadian Postmaster: Send address changes and returns to P.O. Box 63, Malton CFC, Mississauga, Ontario L4T3B5. Canada Poste publication agreement #40683192.

International Publications Mail Sales Product Agreement No. 450553. The entire contents of ROLLING STONE are copyright © 2020by ROLLING STONE LLC, and may not be reproduced in any manner, either in whole or in part, without written permission.

All rights are reserved.

Julie Trinh VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL TAX

Lauren Utecht VICE PRESIDENT, HUMAN RESOURCES AND CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS

Mike Ye VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ACQUISITIONS

Christina Yeoh VICE PRESIDENT, TECHNICAL OPERATIONS

Julie Zhu VICE PRESIDENT, AUDIENCE MARKETING AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

Nici Catton ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT DELIVERY

Karl Walter ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, CONTENT

Gurjeet Chima SENIOR DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL MARKETS

Eddie Ko SENIOR DIRECTOR, ADVERTISING OPERATIONS

Andy Limpus SENIOR DIRECTOR, TALENT ACQUISITION

Amit Sannad SENIOR DIRECTOR, DEVELOPMENT

Constance Ejuma DIRECTOR, SEO

Laura Ongaro EDITORIAL AND BRAND DIRECTOR, INTERNATIONAL

Katie Passantino DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Ralph J. Gleason Hunter S. Thompson

10 |

Rolling Stone

|

1917-1975

Derek Ramsay

1937-2005

SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER

April 2020

Editor’s Letter

The Price of Greed Sing it hard, and sing it well, Send the robber barons straight to hell.

The greedy thieves who came around, And ate the flesh of everything they found.

Whose crimes have gone unpunished now.

Who walk the streets as free men now.

They brought death to our hometown, boys.

—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN “Death to My Hometown”

12 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

is being burned down and could slip into a self-destroying end phase. Rainstorms and floods rage in the American South and throughout Western Europe and Southeast Asia. 2020 is already virtually certain to be one of the 10 warmest years on record, and has a nearly 50 percent chance of being the warmest in recorded history. A month ago, I read about the appearance of milewide clouds of hundreds of billions of locusts devastating Kenya and Ethiopia — caused in part by the same Indian Ocean weather changes that drove the fires in Australia.

What were once worst-case scenarios have been exceeded again and again, and

are turning into self-reinforcing cycles. It is difficult to conceptualize carbon as the enemy. How do you see or fight an odorless, colorless, invisible gas? But the proofs are unmistakable and inexorable.

These events may be geographically distant from one another, but taken together, we are witnessing what looks like a slow-motion apocalypse. In Australia, the fires were quickly followed by floods, what are called “compound extremes,” where one disaster intensifies the next. The fires burned an area as large as South Korea.

What has been the response in Australia?

The government moves ahead with plans

NASA

W

ELCOME TO THE NEW decade. Gather your strength and say your prayers. The fight of your life is underway, and we’ve already lost the first rounds. The deadline to global climate disaster is a moving target but, by all scientific consensus, is dead ahead and rapidly closing. We have already done irreparable damage, and there are just these 10 few years that remain before our earthly home is beyond our ability to repair. We are in imminent danger.

This emergency issue of ROLLING STONE was inspired by a speech that the then16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg made to the United Nations General Assembly last fall: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I am one of the lucky ones.

People are suffering. People are dying.

Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can do is talk about money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

A discussion of the climate crisis inevitably begins with a litany of alarms and flashing red lights. Antarctica is melting faster and faster; an ice shelf the size of Florida is at risk of collapse, and the temperature at one remote ice station was recently the same as in Atlanta. The Amazon rainforest

for the massive Adani coal mine, which will send millions of tons of coals to India, the world’s third-most carbon-engorged society. In the same time frame we learn that Japan will build 22 new coal-burning plants because they mismanaged one of their nuclear reactors.

The visible facts in the United States — Mississippi floods, California wildfires, punishing hurricanes — have now led to a 73 percent majority of public opinion that sees climate change as our most pressing national issue. Republican voters seem to be evenly split, but climate-change denial is part of the party’s orthodoxy, which includes racially-based immigration policies, voter suppression, health care and reproductive-rights rollbacks, and regressive taxation. The GOP may soon become the party that destroyed the planet. They are the zombies who ask no questions. They are the walking dead who blindly follow a monster without scruples or morals.

Putting the Democratic Party back in power is essential, but just a start. We will have the wind at our backs, but the real powers are the puppet masters of the GOP — the oil-and-gas interests that spent more than $250 million on lobbying in 2018 and 2019 alone. Make no mistake about their power to pay off Democrats as well as anybody else. They control trillions of dollars.

They get hundreds of millions in tax breaks, and billions are spent on military protection of the oil reserves in the Middle East. Our missiles surround the oil fields, our aircraft carriers patrol the shipping lanes around the world.

I don’t believe the political system alone can face this down. In example after example, we see what unrestrained, unregulated financial strength has done to our society and the world. The oil companies are following the same playbook as other corporate leaders — the drug companies, gun

manufacturers, sugar and fast-food giants — who knowingly spread disease and death: Lie, deny, and let them die.

Every year, the billionaires, global bankers, transnational corporate giants, celebrities, and “statesmen” gather in Davos, Switzerland, to talk shop. This year, there was a lot of what’s called “greenwashing,” the easy steps and “strategic plans” that make leaders appear as though they are

It is difficult to conceptualize carbon as the enemy.

How do you fight an odorless, colorless, invisible gas?

But the proofs are unmistakable and inexorable.

doing something when they’re avoiding the hard choices. The “plant a trillion trees” pledge has a nice ring, but what we need is to stop burning the rainforests of Indonesia and Brazil. Now. The notion that a multibillion-dollar international bank is greening its offices might be described as a move in the right direction, but it doesn’t mean much. It has to decisively abandon its support of the carbon economy.

Greed is a disease. The unending craving for more money, the addiction to luxury and power, may destroy our civilization. Climate changes are now colliding with one another. Chaos caused by failed

states, fleeing populations seeking food, the disruption of our supplies, and the depletion of our treasury will ensue. We already see it on every continent, and this is just the easy stuff.

How do we cure the disease of greed?

Concern for the planet has been one of ROLLING STONE’s principal areas of coverage since 1970, when we launched our first sister magazine, Earth Times. We have published consistently important, tough reporting ever since. In this special emergency issue, three of our most experienced writers on the environment are heard — Tim Dickinson, Jeff Goodell, Bill McKibben — and we join hands with three women, of three generations, who are putting their lives on the line for us: Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jane Fonda.

Hear our voices.

Will it be enough? Is World War III at the door? But instead of a nuclear holocaust it’s an economic clash over our endless consumption of resources — food, forests, the ocean. They were stolen and then resold to us by the merchants of death. And in those big shiny skyscrapers, where they keep all their money, selling us on the fantasy of limitless growth and endless gratification, they were heard saying to one another, “What does it matter? I.B.G.Y.B.G. — I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

We must start living our lives as if it is an emergency. With our extraordinary comfort and privilege, we may be too spoiled to make the necessary sacrifices. But one day we will have to answer for what we did to protect our children, our grandchildren, and the miracle of the diversity of nature and species on this planet, when we still had the time.

How much fight do we have left?

JA N N S . W E N N E R N E W YO R K , N .Y.

April 2020

|

Rolling Stone

| 13

Correspondence

+ L OV E L E T T E R S & A DV IC E

Uncovering the Plastic Crisis

“This is a lady of today: appearing how she wants, living and thriving on her terms. Truly in love over this.”

This is the most comprehensive, enraging piece I’ve read on this crisis [“Planet Plastic,” RS 1337]. Thank you for illuminating the true farce in our current “recycling” system, and those who profit from it.

—Ryan Bartlett, via Twitter Coca-Cola and PepsiCo plastics may be unrecyclable, but couldn’t they be reusable? The government could force the polluters to pay for their waste and reuse it in other markets, as in shredding it up and adding it to asphalt, for starters.

—Melissa Cooper, via Twitter

—Dianne Laheurte, via Twitter

Pop’s Ambitious New Class Normani, Megan Thee Stallion, and SZA are three of music’s boldest new voices. But as we learned in our second Women Shaping the Future issue [RS 1337], that’s not all they have in common. All three have fought through personal pain and an unforgiving public life to build revolutionary careers.

Normani detailed the loneliness and bigotry she experienced as Fifth Harmony’s only black member; Megan Thee Stallion looked back on her intense rise, which happened while she was grieving for her late mother and working toward a health-caremanagement degree. Similarly, SZA talked about the insecurities she faces about carving out her own path as an artist, while also reflecting on the losses of her grandmother and her friend Mac Miller.

“SZA is a force to be reckoned with,” tweeted Alyssa Sullivan. “I’m glad she’s back in the game.”

Another reader wrote, “[Normani] was forced into the background and then popped off with a record that slaps. I have more than half of her songs on my gym playlist because she motivates me.”

For some readers, the superstar trio on the cover told a bigger story. “Thank you for this gorgeous representation of black women in music,” tweeted Sam Jones. “I want my daughter to see more magazines that have covers with women who look like her.” Others were just happy to discover new artists: “Great article,” James Suman wrote about Normani.

“I didn’t know who she was before reading this (sorry, I’m an ‘old man’). What a wise person.”

rusyaidigrnde: Three queens and we are still waiting for the collab!

The majority of the public is led to believe that our waste is managed through recycling, not sold and swept under the rug to pollute the oceans. So many people try to do the right thing but are misled, again. Lied to, again.

—Suzanne Cuey, via Twitter

Resurrecting Elvis REACTION

Stacey Abrams’ Political Machine In our last issue, staff writer Tessa Stuart followed Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician quickly becoming the Democratic Party’s brightest star. Abrams detailed how she is building Fair Fight, a coalition battling voting restrictions and suppression tactics that raised $21 million in 2019 — and traced her remarkable journey from poverty to Yale Law and the Georgia House of Representatives. Among readers, the story only confirmed what Joe Biden has hinted at since last year: “With a ticket of Biden and Abrams, we would not only win, but the two of them could put our country back together,” tweeted Susan Dine.

14 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

His estate is bound to suffer [“Can Elvis Presley Rise Again?” RS 1337], but I think Graceland is making the right move in turning the grounds into a venue so a broader audience will still be drawn to a special place. It’s a national landmark.

Whether you like it or not, Elvis and his legacy aren’t going anywhere.

—Aaron Halbrook, via Facebook

CONTACT US Letters to ROLLING STONE, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017-0298.

Letters become the property of ROLLING STONE and may be edited for publication.

Email: letters@rollingstone.com Subscriber Services: Call 800-283-1549.

Random Notes

Norah Jones Brings It All Back Home After 2016’s Day Breaks, Norah Jones decided to take a break from releasing albums, instead having fun on a series of one-off singles with friends like Jeff Tweedy and Mavis Staples. That turned into a prolific writing stretch — and, in time, a new album.

Pick Me Up Off the Floor, out May 8th, is a soulful set addressing personal anxieties.

“I wasn’t trying to string together anything — it was kind of a free-form way of working,” says Jones. “But the songs are all connected, probably because of me and my life and my brain. I found the thread after listening to [the songs] walking my dog.” Jones recorded some of it at home in Brooklyn, pictured here: “It’s fun. I can wear my sweatpants and my bunny slippers.” PATRICK DOYLE

16 |

Rolling Rolling Stone Stone

|| April April2020 2020

PHOTOGRAPH March 2018BY | Rolling Ebru Yildiz Stone

| 17

Random Notes

Don’t Fear the Oyster!

Oysterhead, the prog-rock supergroup featuring Primus’ Les Claypool, Phish’s Trey Anastasio, and the Police’s Stewart Copeland (from left), kicked off their first tour since 2001, in Broomfield, Colorado. The show featured epic covers of the Police’s “Voices Inside My Head” and Phish’s “46 Days,” plus originals like 2001’s “Shadow of a Man,” where Claypool wore a pig mask as Anastasio went into slide-guitar space. The band is playing more dates this year.

COUNTRY POP Margo Price met Iggy Pop at a New York benefit: “He’s a fucking legend and really down-toearth,” she says.

LONDON ON A PRAYER Prince Harry is almost done being a senior royal.

One thing he won’t be giving up? Hanging with his buddy Jon Bon Jovi, who joined him at Abbey Road for a session with a veterans choir.

ZAK ATTACK Zak Starkey (left) and his partner and bandmate Sshh Liguz hung with London rapper Same Old Sean in Rio de Janeiro.

18 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

Courtney Barnett’s Good Fight Courtney Barnett had been planning to spend the winter writing songs, but she put that work aside in January for a pair of benefit concerts for the devastating bush fires in Australia, followed by a show at Los Angeles’ Palace Theatre (above) to support music education. “The good thing about music is people can come together, and that shared energy is pointed in a positive direction,” she tells ROLLING STONE. “It doesn’t alleviate things, but it’s a momentary relief and an inspiration to work harder and keep fighting.”

Jerry Lee’s Miracle

THIS SPREAD, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: RENE HUEMER; NOAM GALAI/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID MCCLISTER; WWD/SHUTTERSTOCK; CARLOS GONZALEZ/THE1POINT8; POONEH GHANA; GILBERTO DUTRA; TIM ROOKE/SHUTTERSTOCK

When Jerry Lee Lewis entered a studio in January, he had barely played piano since his 2019 stroke. But the 84-year-old ended up cutting an entire gospel album with producer T Bone Burnett. “I couldn’t believe it — I thought I would never play piano again,” says Lewis. His next goal? Getting into the Country Music Hall of Fame. “I don’t know why not. You couldn’t be any more country than I am.”

REBELS WITHOUT A PAUSE Bernie Sanders brought together Dick Van Dyke and members of Public Enemy for a big rally in Los Angeles.

YEEZY: THE NEXT GENERATION Kanye’s Yeezy Season 8 show in Paris featured puffy shirts, weird sneakers, and more. But the biggest moment? The stage debut of six-year-old North West, who had rhymes like, “Look at my shoes/They are cute and cool.”

April 2020

|

Rolling Stone

| 19

INTRODUCING THE

SPOKESCANDY

...or what’s left of him.

EVERYBODY WANTS

Hayley Williams Isn’t Afraid Anymore Paramore’s singer opens up about her deepest secrets on her first-ever solo album

PHOTOGRAPH BY Valerie Chiang

| 21

The Mix

Beastie Boys, Live and Direct TWO YEARS AGO, Spike Jonze paid a visit to his friend Mike Diamond’s house. The Beastie Boy, whom Jonze has known since the early Nineties, had broken his arm, so when Jonze needed to select some photos for Diamond and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz’s Beastie Boys Book, he sent flowers and brought the images over in person. “I have photos of everything I’ve shot the last 30 years,” the filmmaker says. “Adam started going through them and said, ‘There’s a lot of photos. There’s enough for [another] book.’ ” Later, when Jonze was editing his film Beastie Boys Story, he decided to do just that.

“Hanging out, laughing, creating things,” Jonze writes in Beastie Boys, a coffee-table book of candid shots that’s out now via Rizzoli. “It’s all the same to them, one doesn’t go without the other.” ANGIE MARTOCCIO

TIME TO GET ILL Mike D rocks a mullet inside a guitar shop. “The Beastie Boys were kind of the absurd superhero cartoon version of what we were all into,” Jonze writes in his book.

“Somehow they were both larger than life and making fun of it too, like we wanted to be.”

H AY L E Y W I L L I A M S

I

N THE SPRING of 2017, Hayley Williams moved into the first home where she’d ever lived alone. Earlier that year, she had finished recording After Laughter, her fifth album with Paramore, and broken up with her longtime partner, New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert. “Half of me was very drawn to the romanticism of this artist who has had success but now is living in this small cottage by herself, and there’s these huge fucking spiders and bats,” Williams says, laughing over tea at the Bowery Hotel in New York. “The other half of it

22 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

TRIPLE TROUBLE “This was around ’94,” Jonze recalls.

“They needed photos, and we went outside to the wall next to Hamburger Hamlet and shot everything they needed in probably 15 minutes. Adam Horovitz [center] is so hot. Plus, he organizes really fun softball games.”

BODY MOVIN’ The Beastie Boys performing at Lollapalooza in 1994, alongside acts including Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day, L7, and A Tribe Called Quest. “One of my favorite live bands of all time,” Jonze says of the trio. “Damn, I wish you could all see one of their shows.”

was that I was really lonely. I had a lot of shame, ’cause I realized, ‘Whoa, you are 28, and you have never just taken care of yourself.’ ” Paramore began when Williams was 15, a couple of years after her mother’s divorce led to a move from Mississippi to Franklin, Tennessee. Once there, she met brothers Josh and Zac Farro, who became the band’s guitarist and drummer. Together they caught a timely wave of pop punk and emo hitting the mainstream in the mid-2000s, and Williams became the most successful woman in a sea of eyeliner-clad men.

Now, with the band on a short hiatus, she’s embarking on her scariest, loneliest endeavor yet: her solo debut, Petals for Armor. “This is

FAST FACTS DANCING QUEEN

Williams says her younger sister is on TikTok “dancing every day,” which the 31-year-old singer finds amusing.

TIME TO HEAL This June, Williams will share her self-care wisdom with fans by curating a spa area at Bonnaroo.

the first time that I am seeing my name everywhere, and it kind of gives me heebie-jeebies a little bit,” she says, mentioning a Times Square billboard she saw before our interview. “My name doesn’t look like a name, to me, that you would see on a marquee. I also feel like Paramore is half, if not more, of who I am.”

Williams initially signed with Atlantic Records in her teens as a solo artist, though she never released an album that way before now. As Paramore took off, she became an in- demand guest vocalist on hit songs by Zedd (“Stay the Night”) and Lupe Fiasco (“Airplanes”). But she always insisted on being billed as “Hayley Williams of Paramore” on those PHOTOGRAPHS BY Spike Jonze

SABOTAGE Jonze directed the “Sabotage” video in 1994. Yauch, Horovitz, and Diamond (from left) shopped for their disguises around Los Angeles. “Does Ross Dress for Less still exist?” asks Jonze.

“Between that and the Kmart, all of our shopping needs were taken care of. I still have a pair of polyester pants from back then.”

SLOW AND LOW New York, 1996. “Yauch had a one-room apartment on Prince Street for a few years,” Jonze says.

“It had the best vibe, but it was tiny. A bed, an amp, a sofa, and a projector we watched movies on.”

RHYMIN & STEALIN Jonze (left) with Diamond. “Mike and I probably were the closest in that we were both the sensitive-feelings guys,” Jonze writes. “If our relationship was one thing, it was driving around L.A. in his Volvo . . . talking about what we were into.”

SURE SHOT Yauch, who died of cancer in 2012, was “one of those friends that is just naturally good at everything,” Jonze says. “The stand-up bass, cameras, musical equipment that he could take apart and reassemble; starting film companies, nonprofit organizations, and music festivals . . . and he was also very good at making fun.”

FUNKY BOSS

RIZZOLI NEW YORK

A casual moment with the ever-stylish Yauch. “We never met a wig we didn’t love,” says Jonze.

songs. “I wanted to promote the band through those opportunities,” she says.

Petals for Armor began in her unfurnished, possibly-haunted Nashville home after Paramore’s yearlong theater and arena tour for After Laughter. Williams had planned to take time off, but her therapist encouraged her to start writing again. “She would always say, ‘Don’t judge what you are feeling,’ ” the singer says. “I have a tendency to do that.”

Williams found herself writing about the impact of her parents’ divorce on her own relationships, the various forms of abuse the women in her family have experienced (“Simmer”), and the creepy house she grew to love

“I felt like this should live somewhere, otherwise it’s not going to feel like I have released it from myself.”

(“Cinnamon”). Soon she began to feel as if she were finding catharsis for a lifetime of depression and mistakes. “I felt like this should live somewhere, otherwise it’s not going to feel like I have released it from myself,” she says.

The most sensitive subject on the album is the way her relationship with Gilbert began, when she was 18 and he was still in a previous marriage. “In ‘Dead Horse’ I admit to having an affair — that’s how I got into my longest relationship,” she says. “I felt shame for all of my twenties about it, but being able to admit it made it less scary. It didn’t own me anymore. It gives people a chance to actually know me and decide if they like me or not.”

The songs on Petals for Armor move from dark into light in both subject matter and sound, reflecting her own recovery from all the trauma that resurfaced as she made the record.

“I don’t think you can get to the good shit without digging through the bad first,” she says.

“It’s like you are trying to find the center of the Earth — how can you find that without cracking through limestone and heavy, hard things?”

Lately, she’s surprised herself with how easy happiness can feel. “Once you get through it, you find water flowing,” she says. “Once I broke through deep enough, things started pouring out. I was surprised to find that there was, like, good shit in it. Happier shit.” BRITTANY SPANOS April 2020

|

Rolling Stone

| 23

The Mix

RECOMMENDS

2

OUR TOP POPCULTURE PICKS OF THE MONTH

8

ASK

CROZ Real-life advice from a guy who’s seen, done, and survived just about everything

4

I have a son who is an opioid addict. Do you let a guy who is 31 and a college graduate go all the way to the bottom and onto the streets because of his continued use?

—Dave, WI

1. Lady Gaga, “Stupid Love” Remember when Lady Gaga would drop the kind of disco bombs that made you want to party until you passed out in the bathroom of the trashiest club on the Lower East Side?

Well, on “Stupid Love,” she remembers too. Welcome back, Glam Gaga!

PROTEST

2. Earth Day Climate Strike For the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, activist coalition Strike With Us is calling for workers and students to stage walkouts across the U.S., demanding action before it’s too late.

TOUR

3. The Monkees Half the band is no longer living (RIP Davy and Peter), but the surviving Monkees still put on an amazing show. Michael Nesmith and Micky Dolenz are hitting the road to support their new live album, The Mike and Micky Show.

After all these years, we’re still believers.

24 |

Rolling Stone

|

3 DIGITAL NEWSLETTER

6. Nick Cave, “Red Hand Files” TV SHOW

4. ‘Fargo’ Season Four The anthology noir-drama is back, now starring Chris Rock as a gangster in 1950s Kansas City, trying to move in on the Mafia’s criminal enterprise. Bonus: Jason Schwartzman as a sleazy mobster.

PODCAST

5. ‘The Dating Game Killer’ In 1978, Rodney Alcala, a photographer with a knack for suggestive puns, appeared on The Dating Game and won. But the bachelorette he’d been set up with sensed something was a bit off about her date and refused to go out with him. Good move!

It turned out he was a serial killer in mid-spree.

Here’s the impossibly bizarre story.

April 2020

What started as a way for the punk hero to answer fan questions has turned into a cathartic read that gives insight into his life and work. You can also catch Cave and the Bad Seeds on tour this year.

walking journey through Patagonia, carrying Chatwin’s beloved rucksack with him.

MEMOIR

9. Mark Lanegan, ‘Sing Backwards and Weep’

SINGLE

The former Screaming Trees frontman never felt comfortable being a lowkey grunge icon, so he doesn’t hold back in this novelistic memoir of the Seattle scene.

7. Lila Drew, “Locket” Nineteen-year-old Lila Drew is an R&B-pop artist on the rise, thanks to songs like this dreamily nostalgic track. She wears innocent heartache like bubblegum battle armor.

DOCUMENTARY

10. ‘How to Fix a Drug Scandal’

FILM

8. ‘Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin’ Werner Herzog’s new film documents the work of writer Bruce Chatwin, who died of AIDS in 1989, by tracing his late friend’s

For reviews, premieres, and more, go to Rolling Stone.com/ music

Directed by Erin Lee Carr and based on a ROLLING STONE story, this doc explores how two crooked state-lab chemists in Massachusetts caused a miscarriage of justice — and how authorities covered it up.

My wife checked out my web history the other day and found a bunch of porn sites.

She says watching that is like cheating. What do I do?

—Richie, OH First off, when you get done watching the porn, wipe the history on your computer, you dummy.

Secondly, porn is kind of addicting. Unless you have no other way of having fun, it’s not good.

It’s lame. It’s shallow. It’s not as good as people.

But she doesn’t like you watching it because it’s insulting to her. In any case, just wipe the history. Everyone knows that.

GOT A QUESTION FOR CROZ? Email AskCroz@ Rollingstone.com

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; SCOTT ROTH/INVISION/AP IMAGES/ SHUTTERSTOCK; MUSIC BOX FILMS; ELIZABETH MORRIS/FX; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

1

SINGLE

You can’t live his life for him, but you have to try and get him off. It’s your responsibility as a parent. Get him to a 12-step program. When I first went to one I was like, “What am I doing sitting in a room full of losers?” Then one guy got up and started telling my exact story.

And the dumb-looking guy behind me was eight years sober. He knew something I didn’t.

Look, if you don’t help your kid, one day he’ll overdose and die. You don’t have any choice.

The Mix

PEOPLE POWER Wine protesting in Kampala

RS REPORTS

Bobi Wine, one of Africa’s biggest music stars, wants to kick-start a democratic revolution. Can he survive till election day?

By DAVID PEISNER

W

HEN BOBI WINE was 26, he bought a brandnew Cadillac Escalade with spinning 24-inch rims. He was already a major star in Uganda, and the car, he says, was the first Escalade sold in all of East Africa.

Wine’s music is a sunny blend of Jamaican dancehall and a local Afrobeat style called kidandali, but his persona back then was pure hip-hop. Local media reveled in tales of his trysts with various women and beefs with fellow stars.

One night, as Wine tells the story, he took his Escalade to a club in Kampala, the country’s capital, and was con-

26 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

fronted by a man who bristled at the singer flaunting his wealth in a country consistently ranked as one of the poorest on Earth. The man approached the car, and slapped Wine across the face.

Wine, a talented boxer, eagerly jumped from his SUV. Then the man drew a gun, put it to Wine’s head, and pummeled him mercilessly.

The man, Wine says, was a soldier who worked with Uganda’s head of military intelligence. In other words, well-connected and accountable to almost no one. At the time, Wine’s music leaned on party songs, love ballads, and braggadocio. He occasionally wrote about Uganda’s entrenched problems — poverty, sanitation, the AIDS epidemic — but generally turned a blind eye to the system enabling them.

After all, he was thriving in it.

Initially, Wine was aggrieved by this beatdown. But he was friends with generals, with businessmen, with politicians. He’d seen them inflict similar

wrongs on others while he’d stood by and done nothing. The more he reflected on it, maybe he deserved it.

The incident redirected Wine onto the path where he stands now, at 38, a politician challenging the kind of injustice and impunity that slapped him in the face 12 years earlier. Wine, who was born Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, won a seat in Uganda’s Parliament in 2017. Last year, he announced he’d run against the country’s 75-year-old autocrat Yoweri Museveni in early 2021 to become Uganda’s next president.

Museveni has been the country’s leader since 1986. His tenure has been marked by widespread government corruption and ruthless suppression of his political opposition. In the country’s last presidential contest, in 2016, his main challenger was arrested on election day.

Since Wine — who has been known as “the Ghetto President” for more than a decade — emerged as a challeng-

er to Museveni, he has been prohibited from performing publicly. The government banned the red berets that are a trademark for supporters of Wine’s People Power movement. Wine has been arrested repeatedly and endured brutal treatment in government custody. In 2018, his driver was murdered in what some believe was an attempt to assassinate Wine, or at least serve him a dire warning. (A spokesman for the Ugandan government did not respond to a request to comment for this story.)

All this has only elevated Wine’s stature, not just in Uganda, but across Africa. Legendary South African pop star Yvonne Chaka Chaka called Wine “My Nelson Mandela in Uganda,” a comparison that, while slightly hyperbolic, is not totally off-base. People Power, which thus far is not aligned with a single party, has brought the young and the poor into the political arena. In a country where nearly 70 percent of the population is under 25

ISAAC KASAMANI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Uganda’s ‘Ghetto President’

and poverty is the norm, Museveni has reason to be concerned.

“Museveni recognizes his government is corrupt and incompetent, and people are yearning for change,” says Daniel Kalinaki, general manager of editorial at the Nation Media Group and a political columnist at the Daily Monitor, Uganda’s largest independent newspaper. “He’s never faced someone like Bobi, who represents a real threat, a generational threat.”

FROM TOP: BY COURTESY OF BOBI WINE; BADRU KATUMBA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; JOHN MUCHUCHA/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK

O

N A SATURDAY morning in mid-December, rain pools outside the large, stately white house where Wine lives with his family, on the northern edge of Kampala.

The first few times I knock on the door, there’s no response. After 15 minutes, he opens the door in a white terry-cloth bathrobe, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“Oh, man, I’m so sorry,” he says, an embarrassed smile creeping from the corners of his mouth. “I just woke up.” He got in late last night from Zimbabwe, where he was performing. “Just give me five minutes to get ready.”

The house, which is surrounded by well-kept gardens, rows of banana trees, and a high cement wall, is quiet. Wine recently sent his wife and kids on vacation to a location he’d rather not reveal. “We’ve had some threats against my family,” he says.

Inside, the house is open, spacious, and relatively Spartan, save for a library just off the kitchen. There, family photos adorn one wall, not far from a small acoustic guitar and a hand drum.

A nook contains reams of music and humanitarian awards. Bookshelves line another wall. On the top shelf is a soccer ball with an inscription commemorating the life of Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary, often known as “Africa’s Che Guevara,” who became president of Burkina Faso in 1983, then was assassinated four years later.

Alongside it is a portrait of Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian emperor believed by Rastafarians to be God on Earth. Selassie was also, incidentally, assassinated.

Without his wife, Barbie, a social worker, at home, Wine is a little out of sorts. “I couldn’t find my shoes. I couldn’t find my socks,” he says as he emerges from his bedroom. He’s wearing a blue blazer, a black button-down, and black pants, along with, lo and behold, matching shoes and socks.

We pull out from the side gate of his property, Wine steering his white

WINE’S WORLD Top: Wine performing in his younger days. Above: Wine was arrested on his way to a press conference to announce a show cancellation. Right: Museveni has been Uganda’s leader since 1986. “[My] primary objective is to end the Museveni dictatorship,” Wine says.

Toyota Land Cruiser down the thin, muddy road. Today, he is traveling with an assistant and two bodyguards.

He’s got the surreal challenge of campaigning without being able to tell the public where he’s going to be. If he did, he says, “I’ll find the military and the police deployed there to beat anybody that shows up to say hello to me.” (The police have claimed that Wine’s meetings are unlawful.)

His demeanor turns serious.

“They’re so scared of my interaction with the people. That explains why my concerts were banned. It explains why churches are cleared out when I show up. The regime is very scared of ordinary citizens. As much as they’re oppressing us, they’re very scared of us.”

Wine’s first stop today doesn’t have any political significance: Basil’s Dental Clinic, to get a wisdom tooth pulled.

“I want to go to my Christmas meals in better shape,” he jokes. As he walks

toward the clinic, Eddy Mutwe, one of his bodyguards, laughs. “He’s still got that Kamwokya swagger,” he says.

Wine is slender, with delicate features, and tends to walk with a distinct strut, taking long, graceful strides, his shoulders slightly hunched and his head tipped forward, perhaps the product, as Mutwe suggests, of his upbringing in Kamwokya, a Kampala slum.

After the dentist, Wine and his entourage head there, to a place they call “the barracks,” their de facto headquarters. There’s not much to it — a small office, a bathroom, a boxing heavy bag, and a dozen or so people milling around a dusty yard, all surrounded by an eight-foot wall — but Kamwokya itself is an important part of Wine’s story.

It’s the ghetto, but not just any ghetto. For those who care about Ugandan music, Kamwokya is Compton.

Or Queensbridge. Descending a slope

from the main road, a man hones a machete on a sharpening stone powered by an old bicycle. Small stalls line the road with locals selling green bananas, watermelons, pineapples, and beans.

Goats and chickens amble around, unbothered. An army of boda bodas — the motorbike taxis that are the only effective way to navigate the city’s epic gridlock — zip up and down the street.

Wine grew up and began making music here. The walls of liquor stores, family restaurants, even a local police booth, are tagged with graffiti that reads, “Free Bobi,” “Free Bobi Concerts,” “People Power.”

A few buildings down from the barracks is a dirt road that leads to Dream Studios, built by Wine’s older brother, Eddy Yawe, in 2002. Yawe studied in Holland and the U.S., where he learned music production. He opened Dream at a time when the paucity of decent recording facilities in Uganda was leading artists like Bebe Cool and Jose Chameleone to uproot to Kenya. The place is basically just three soundproofed rooms and a large mixing desk, but in Kampala it was a revelation.

Wine was one of the first artists Yawe recorded here. As Wine’s songs gained traction locally, others noticed. “Most of the musicians turned around, and instead of going to Nairobi, they came here,” Yawe tells me. “Bobi and Bebe Cool formed a group.” They added others and christened themselves Fire Base Crew, which became, for a time, Ghetto Republic of Uganja.

This was the big bang of modern Ugandan pop. Throughout the 1990s, Congolese artists had been dominant on Ugandan radio and TV. In the early 2000s, that changed.

“Bobi Wine, Bebe Cool, Jose Chameleone, these guys created the revolution in music,” says Douglas Lwanga, a music promoter and TV host. All three artists were big fans of dancehall stars like Buju Banton and Shabba Ranks, as well as South African reggae icon Lucky Dube, and injected their influence into the Ugandan mainstream.

In 2007, as Uganda prepared to host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the regime swept vendors, beggars, and hustlers off Kampala’s streets in an effort to polish the city’s image. Wine took it personally. He hadn’t just been writing songs for and about these people; he felt he still was one. “You don’t displace your people to appease foreigners,” he says.

“You don’t hide them away.” He released a song called “Ghetto,” which April 2020

|

Rolling Stone

| 27

The Mix directly accused the government of betraying its citizens. Around this time, friends began calling Wine “the Ghetto President.”

Beside Dream Studios, down a narrow alleyway, is a cramped room where Wine lived as a young artist. A young boxer lives there now and he invites me in. The room has just enough space for a bed and desk, with a sheet hanging between them. Outside the room is an alcove, the back wall of which is dominated by a huge painting of the Rastafarian Lion of Judah, wearing a crown with the words “Fire Base” on it. Wine once identified as Rastafarian, but his beliefs are more fluid now. “I’ve been so many things,” he says. “Catholic, born-again Pentecostal Christian, Bahá’í, Rasta. I’m still all those things because I’ve got deep respect for them.”

Wine landed in Kamwokya by misfortune. He was born in 1982 during the Bush War. The conflict had begun one year earlier, when following a disputed election that put Milton Obote into power, a group of army officers, led by Museveni, initiated a guerrillastyle rebellion. Obote had already been Uganda’s president once before, during an increasingly unpopular stretch from 1966 to his overthrow by army general Idi Amin in 1971.

Before the Bush War, Wine’s family had been politically active and relatively well-to-do. “My family was an ally of Museveni,” says Wine. “My grandfather was killed in the Museveni liberation wars. His house was burned to the ground. My father was arrested

by Obote’s regime, and sentenced to death. But thanks to the crazy corruption, my mother bailed him out.”

Wine’s father went into exile in Tanzania. A veterinarian by trade, he had three wives and at least 34 children — polygamy remains legal in Uganda to this day — but took only his first wife and some of his older children with him into exile. Wine’s mother, a nurse, moved Wine and several of his siblings to Kamwokya, where her father lived.

When the war ended, Museveni emerged as the country’s president and began immediately sidelining potential opposition in the name of national unity. Wine’s brother Steven was arrested for treason and ended up serving seven years. “My mother always warned me we were better off staying out of politics,” Wine says.

Nonetheless, it is, to some extent, the family business. During the 1996 election, Yawe released a song supporting Museveni’s opponent. He was arrested, he says, then beaten and tortured. “They tie a rope on your testicles, then [attach] a car battery and say, ‘Stand up.’ ” Yawe ran for an MP seat in

28 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

2011, which he says he lost due to “massive cheating,” and ran unsuccessfully in 2016 as well. He’s been arrested multiple times, but will run again in 2021.

Wine largely resisted getting entangled in electoral politics until the past few years. The 2016 elections were a turning point. To build enthusiasm for his candidacy, Museveni recruited a host of top artists, including Cool and Chameleone — and paid them handsomely — to record a song called “Tubonga Nawe,” which translates as “We Are With You.” Wine says he rejected an offer of half a billion Ugandan shillings — about $135,000 — to participate.

“He has always sided with the downtrodden, but that was a special moment,” says Yusuf Serunkuma, a doctoral fellow at Kampala’s Makerere Institute of Social Research and a political columnist for the weekly news-

Of Wine’s many arrests, one stands out. “They broke my skull here,” he says, pointing to a spot over his eye. “My back has never healed.

Psychologically, I don’t think it will ever go away.” paper The Observer. “All his colleagues in the industry sided with the government. He singly chose not to.”

Museveni won the election, but something in Wine shifted: “I knew it’d be much more effective if I didn’t only explain, I demonstrated. So I decided to run for office.” He shakes his head and laughs. “And, maaan, it opened a huuuge can of worms.”

I

T DOESN’T take much rain in Uganda to turn the country’s system of largely dirt roads into muddy waterways. Today’s floods will be responsible for at least five deaths in Kampala. In a rural area of the Mukono district, about an hour east, the rain has stopped, but some local men are barefoot, guiding cars and boda bodas through rushing reddish-brown waters. When the volunteers spot Wine in his Land Cruiser, they break into smiles and run toward the car.

“His Excellency!”

“Bobi!”

“People Power!”

They reach in and fist-bump with Wine. As the Land Cruiser pulls from the impromptu river, Wine turns to me. “That’s how it is when people

are sure they’re not going to be beaten up or arrested for showing us love,” he says. Wine is on his way to what he calls “the last rites” for a friend’s father. The man, an influential figure in the community, died last week, and the event is like an Irish wake.

We arrive at a brightly colored house surrounded by multiple white tents.

There’s a long buffet table, and about a hundred smartly dressed people sitting in white plastic chairs, eating. When Wine strides in, the place erupts. He shakes hands with several people at the head table, then the sound system begins playing one of his songs and a rush of bodies press close to greet him.

When the hysteria settles, he climbs a small staircase and gives a speech, reminding everyone “not to forget why we’re here: to make this a better Uganda for the next generation.”

When he finishes, the sound system restarts, and he sings along to “Tuliyambala Engule,” a song he released that’s based on the traditional Christian hymn “When the Battle Is Over.”

His version has lyrics about the country’s dysfunctional health system and a reminder for listeners to get their ID cards so they’re allowed to vote. This is as close as Wine gets to playing a concert in Uganda these days.

When Wine first ran for Parliament in 2017, Museveni’s NRM party poured money into the race in support of his opponent. Wine won in a landslide anyway. It didn’t take him long to grow disenchanted with Parliament. First, it rubber-stamped Museveni’s self-serving (and unpopular) effort to overturn the Constitution’s age limit for presidential candidates. When Wine was repeatedly blocked from performing, Parliament passed a resolution decreeing that he should be allowed to play. “But police said they don’t have to listen to Parliament,” he says. “It was then I knew Parliament was impotent.” He decided to run for president, but only as a way of achieving a larger goal. “The primary objective is to end the Museveni dictatorship, return the rule of law, make sure the independence of the three arms of government is observed.”

Uganda, a landlocked country of roughly 45 million people, is still a young nation. It was a British colony until 1962, and like many former colonies, its borders were somewhat haphazardly drawn to include kingdoms, tribes, clans, and ethnic groups that didn’t necessarily share much history or culture. English is the official language, but more than 40 other languages are more commonly spoken in their regions.

Wine has been arrested more than 20 times since he ran for Par-

liament, according to his lawyer, but one incident stands out. On August 13th, 2018, both Wine and Museveni were campaigning in the northwestern city of Arua in support of opposing candidates in a parliamentary byelection. The government claims Museveni’s motorcade was pelted with rocks, leading to altercations between police and protesters. In the ensuing chaos, Wine’s driver was shot and killed. Wine says he retreated to a hotel where he was eventually discovered by soldiers who knocked down his door with an iron bar, then beat him with it.

According to Wine, he was bundled into a vehicle, where the abuse persisted. “They squeezed my testicles,” he recounted weeks later. “They started hitting my ankles with pistol butts. . . . They used something like pliers to pull my ears. . . . Then they hit my back and continued to hit my genitals.” Eventually, he says, he was bashed in the head and lost consciousness. At least 34 others were arrested, and many were abused, including the opposition candidate who won the election. Wine was charged with possession of a firearm, a charge that was quickly dropped. Then he was rearrested and charged with treason.

After being detained for nearly two weeks, he was released.

The brutality left lasting scars.

“They broke my skull here,” he says, pointing to a spot over his eye. “Every once in a while, it swells by itself. My back has never completely healed. Psychologically, I don’t think it will ever go away.” The episode was clarifying. “It educated me on how low this regime is willing to sink to remain in power.”

The incident was international news.

In an open letter, artists like Chris Martin, Peter Gabriel, and Damon Albarn condemned Wine’s treatment. The attention has been a double-edged sword. While the higher profile has provided some protection for Wine and publicity for People Power, it has also edged an earnest movement close to a cult of personality.

Wine knows he’s not the only one suffering persecution. Kizza Besigye has stood against Museveni in the past four elections at great personal cost: He’s been repeatedly jailed, charged with rape and treason, and for a time, forced into exile. Ziggy Wyne, another member of Wine’s Fire Base Crew, was allegedly tortured to death by authorities in August (the government claimed he died in a motorcycle accident). At a press conference in March, Wine detailed the death or disappearance of 10 other People Power supporters and the imprisonment of dozens more.

At least a half-dozen other artists have announced intentions to run for

SALLY HAYDEN/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES

ON THE TRAIL Wine ness class being mayor. I’ve office, allied with Wine done that. I want to conand People Power. In re- in Hoima, in western Uganda, last year. tribute my legacy to the cent months, both Dr. Hil“[The government] people denied a chance.” derman, a dancehall artis so scared of my Dennis Tumuhairwe, a ist running for Parliament, interaction with the leader of the Uganda Young and Ronald Mayinja, a pipeople,” he says.

Democrats and Wine’s foroneer of politically conscious music also contesting a par- mer political assistant, believes the music community will prove a deciliamentary seat, have at times found sive force. “Having major artists join promoters unwilling to book shows. the opposition to take Museveni down Cynical observers see the increasseems like a done deal for Museveni,” ing politicization of music as a career he says. “We think we’re starting a revmove. “Fact is, music is not profitable,” olution we’re going to win.” says Lwanga. “So when people saw the success Bobi had, he inspired a whole string of artists to join that direction.”

OBI WINE is almost certainly Bebe Cool, a staunch ally and friend going to lose the election in of Museveni’s for decades, is among 2021. That’s if he’s even allowed the cynics. He expects most musicians on the ballot — and alive to see it. Derunning for office will get trounced. spite the semblance of democratic “One, they lack budgets,” he says. norms, Uganda is nothing resembling “Two, they’re not as educated. Three, a functioning democracy. “Museveni when you see crowds, it doesn’t mean controls everything,” says Serunkuma. they transform into votes.”

“He appoints the judges. Most of the Jose Chameleone is running for senior generals come from his area. In mayor of Kampala. He’s heard these 2017, he had the military move into the criticisms, but he’s anxious to con- Parliament and beat up MPs.” vince me — and others — of the sincerSerunkuma describes Museveni’s ity of his campaign. “I’m not going to regime as a constitutional autocracy. become famous being mayor of Kampa- “The autocrats of today operate like la,” he says. “I’m not going to fly busi- ghosts,” he says. “They give you a fa-

B

cade that looks functional. Museveni doesn’t rig an election with obnoxious margins. He’s really smart.”

Museveni has also worked to make himself seem indispensable to the West. He has been a reliable partner in the fight against terrorism throughout and beyond East Africa. Ugandan troops were part of George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing,” and have been deployed as part of anti-terrorism and peacekeeping operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. The U.S. rewards Museveni with nearly $1 billion in development and security assistance every year.

Museveni has further endeared himself to the West by opening Uganda’s borders to the African refugees most of Europe is shutting out. As of late 2018, Uganda had roughly 1.5 million refugees living in the country, and had taken in more than $200 million in humanitarian assistance to help settle them in 2018 alone. All this makes it that much easier to overlook Museveni’s abysmal human-rights record.

Wine makes the point that fighting terrorism is in his nation’s best interest, but “our partners in the fight shouldn’t be Museveni’s partners,

they should be Uganda’s partners.

They shouldn’t work with any individual, they should work with the institutions.” Wine’s politics are unapologetically populist — he’s walked back his previous support for Uganda’s repugnant Anti-Homosexuality Act, which was signed into law in 2014, then subsequently ruled unconstitutional amid international outcry — but he’s no demagogue. He promises to restore presidential age and term limits. He’d even like to offer Museveni amnesty after the election, though he admits that may depend on what happens between now and then. “We want to end this vicious circle of leaders that leave power and have to live in exile.”

There are no reliable polls measuring support for Wine, Museveni, or any other presidential candidates. Some point to the size of the crowds Wine attracts as evidence of broad backing.

Others question whether he has the logistical know-how to get out his supporters, many of whom are young and may not have voted in the past. Wine told me he believes he’d beat Museveni with 80 to 90 percent of the vote in a fair election, though that seems hyperbolic. The conventional wisdom is that April 2020

|

Rolling Stone

| 29

Museveni remains popular with rural voters, who make up a majority of the population. All these projections are little better than guesswork.

The election won’t be free or fair.

There have been consistent charges of ballot-stuffing, bribery, and voter intimidation in the past, and few I spoke to expect anything different in 2021.

Museveni seems intent on countering the threat Wine and his fellow artists pose. This past fall, he appointed several prominent musicians as new presidential advisers. Buchaman, a dreadlocked Rastafarian who’d once been vice president of Wine’s Fire Base Crew, became Museveni’s Special Envoy for Ghetto Affairs.

One sunny afternoon, I trail Buchaman in a two-car convoy to Kasokoso, a Kampala slum that sits alongside a landfill. His musical association with Wine makes him a celebrity in places like this, and when he gets out of the car, he’s swarmed. We arrive at the grassy front yard of a house, where several chairs and a bench have been arranged beneath two trees. For the next hour, Buchaman and his team sit there, holding court. One by one, local residents parade before him, asking for help to build a local health center, to send money for schools, for job training, to fix the roads, to combat crime.

Buchaman is here representing the government, but when I ask about it, he doesn’t exactly embrace Museveni and the NRM. “I’ve not been a supporter,” he says. “Even now, why I am behind Museveni is to help the ghetto people. I’m not part of any political party.” He repeats something I heard when I met with Catherine Kusasira, another singer-turned-governmentenvoy: The problem isn’t that Museveni is corrupt or incompetent, but that the local politicians he’s worked with are. “He has been giving money to the wrong people, to ministers and MPs, and they do nothing for the ghetto,” Buchaman says. “They’ve been eating the money.” He believes he can do better: “I know what pains the ghetto people.”

The whole afternoon feels performative, but people here seem genuinely happy that someone at least bothered to come listen to them. And this is the point. Museveni doesn’t necessarily need them to vote for him.

He doesn’t even need them not to vote for Wine. He just needs to give them something to think about. He may even address some of their complaints. “There’s going to be lots of money poured into the ghetto,” says Kalinaki. “The intention isn’t to cure the long-standing problems but to create lag time between the election out-

30 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

come and people going back to their miserable lives.”

The goal is to avoid the one thing that can actually force Museveni from office: a full-scale, Arab Spring-style uprising by the country’s young and impoverished. “That’s the only threat Bobi Wine presents Museveni,” says Serunkuma. “It’s not an electoral threat.

It’s a threat to mobilize bodies onto the streets of Kampala.”

Indeed, in the past decade, street protests have ousted a series of entrenched African dictators, first in Tunisia and Egypt, then in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Algeria, and Sudan. This is essentially what Wine’s campaign is about: creating momentum and setting

things I used to enjoy,” he says. “Ordinarily, every weekend, I’d have concerts and be making a lot of money.

I’d be driving the latest cars. I’d have spending cash of maybe 100 million [Ugandan shillings],” or about $27,000.

He’s still doing OK. On my final full day in Uganda, I meet him at One Love Beach, a six-acre plot of rolling green lawns, palm trees, and beachfront on the shore of Lake Victoria, south of Kampala’s city center. He bought the property 15 years ago with the intention of building a house and retiring to it when he turned 35. Instead, he opened the beach — and himself — to the public. For less than a dollar you can spend the day here, swimming, barbecuing, playing soccer and vol-

leyball, or dancing to the the conditions to spark a THE FIGHTER Wine in throb of Afrobeat pouring December. “This isn’t revolution. But it’s a seriabout me,” he says. from the sound system. ous gamble. “We’re in the “If it’s all about me, Today is Sunday, and middle of a fight,” Wine when I’m arrested, it Wine looks dressed for says. “Museveni believes all stops.” retirement: blue, floralin violent fight. We believe in logic, and psychological and demo- print, short-sleeve button-down and cratic fight. We know he won’t go with- matching shorts, with dark leggings out a fight. But we’re over 40 million underneath, along with blue highpeople. We know Gaddafi, Bouteflika, tops. “Man, I miss this place,” he tells and Omar al-Bashir wouldn’t go with- me, waving a hand toward the beach.

He used to come every week, but this out a fight. But they went.”

He and his backers are counting is his first visit in nearly three months. on protesters not just going into the He’s invited friends, and has goat, chicken, and fish sizzling on a grill streets, but also staying there once bulwithin a grove of trees. lets start flying. Not everyone thinks His manner today is more subdued they will. Several people I spoke to than the day before. There’s no sense who are broadly supportive of demohe regrets the mantle he’s taken up, cratic change just don’t think Uganda’s impoverished youth have the stom- but he clearly misses some of what he ach for the fight. “People like Bobi un- left behind. “Every once in a while, I’d derestimate what the sound of gunfire love to drink, be tipsy and happy, and dance with my friends,” he says. “But does to people who in many cases have I can’t because I represent something never seen war,” says Kalinaki. “That generation doesn’t know what a Katyu- greater than me.” I tell him he sounds like someone reconsidering that retiresha [rocket launcher] sounds like.”

Wine himself has plenty to lose. ment. He laughs. “The question is, ‘Do Music has made him wealthy, though I ever think I should just retire?’ ” He his inability to play shows here for the smiles. “All the time.”

Wine still records when he can, but past two years has taken a bite from that wealth. “I can no longer enjoy the even his music now must fit within nar-

rower parameters. Anything breezy and carefree is unlikely to see the light of day. “People expect more revolutionary music from me,” he says.

The next year is going to be a tumultuous one — for him, for People Power, for Uganda itself. In a few weeks, he’ll be arrested as he tries to meet with supporters. Police will fire tear gas and bullets to disperse the crowds. (The police claimed Wine had been permitted to have an assembly indoors but not outdoors.) He and other People Power leaders will be held in a crowded cell for most of a day. The government will continue to block his efforts to meet with voters.

He knows he has worse in store.

Multiple criminal charges hang over his head, including the treason charge and another for inciting violence.

When I ask what he’ll do if the government convicts him, locks him up, and declares him ineligible to run for president, he stares at me grim-faced for a long beat. “We shall cross that bridge when we get to it,” he says, then smiles widely. “I mean, what can I say?”

Throwing Wine in prison forever, killing him, or unleashing a violent crackdown against his supporters, would engender criticism from the international community, but that’s probably not what’s stopping Museveni and his regime from doing those things. What is keeping them in check is the fear of triggering the exact sort of revolutionary spark that Wine is hoping to generate. What exactly might trigger that neither side knows. So they grope in the dark toward a line in the sand that may or may not even exist.

Success for Wine may involve reorienting his goals. “The best thing Bobi can do is to make a better connection between people’s welfare and the political choices they make,” says Kalinaki. “If he can build that among young people, then even if he doesn’t dislodge Museveni in 2021, or even in 2026, he’ll have brought some political consciousness to a generation that, when it’s in its thirties or forties, will make the painful decisions necessary not just to get rid of Museveni but to get rid of Musevenism.”

That’s not the end Wine wants, but even if his mission fails, if he ends up in prison or dead and Museveni’s still in power, he’s comfortable with his decisions. “Everything is worth it,” he says. “Already, the awakening people have received is worth it.” He’s looking out past his beach at the late-afternoon sun reflecting off Lake Victoria.

His voice gets quiet. “There are some causes so noble that even a mere attempt is noble enough.”

MARTIN KHARUMWA

The Mix

Virtual Try-On Finding the perfect pair of glasses is easy with Virtual Try-On, even for someone as busy as Rashida Jones.

Try on stylish eyewear starting at $6.95, including prescription lenses. zenni.com/tryon

Try it Now!

The Mix

CHARTS THE BIGGEST ARTISTS, ALBUMS, AND SONGS OF TODAY

Justin Bieber’s Quiet Storm IN 2015, JUSTIN BIEBER was at the top of his game. Purpose, the album he released that year, was a major blockbuster, putting up first-week sales and streaming numbers that easily outpaced those of Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. Over on the singles side, hits such as “Where Are Ü Now” and “Sorry” went far by working clever variations on the EDM-pop sound that dominated the airwaves at the time.

When Bieber returned this February after four years away, he stepped into a very different world. Since the release of

667K

First-week numbers for Purpose and Changes by album units.

232.7K

Purpose 2015

Changes 2020

Purpose, streaming has transformed the music industry, making hip-hop the most popular genre in the U.S. and globalizing the mainstream with hits from Latin America and South Korea. Bieber has grown, too, giving up his tabloid bad-boy days and marrying his girlfriend, Hailey Baldwin.

His new album, Changes, channels that mood into softspoken R&B with no pop-radio hits to speak of. Its first-week performance was accordingly low-key, debuting with about one-third the units that Purpose saw in its first week. Below, see how Changes stacks up among the top debuts in the history of the RS 200, which launched last June. EMILY BLAKE

Top RS 200 Debuts ALBUM UNITS

1

Taylor Swift

2

Harry Styles

3

Post Malone

32 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

Hollywood’s Bleeding

4 5

Kanye West

Music to Be Murdered By

Jesus Is King Tool

Fear Inoculum

7

Justin Bieber

8

BTS

9

JackBoys feat. Travis Scott

10

SuperM

Changes

991.8K

510.1K

500.3K

281.6K

269.3K

248.3K

Harry Styles and Justin Bieber have a lot in common: Both started as teen pop stars, and each has held on to a substantial fan base as he’s matured.

Musically, though, they’ve taken very different paths, as heard on Styles’ Laurel Canyon-ish Fine Line. It’s one of three albums in RS 200 history to move more than 500,000 units in its first week.

‘Changes’ by the Numbers Despite Bieber’s calculated campaign to have his fans stream his songs on loop to boost chart rankings, Changes didn’t stream as well as it sold. While it debuted atop the RS 200, it did so with about 60 percent of its first-week units coming from sales — and lost out to A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s Artist 2.0 as the most-streamed album of the week.

SONG SALES 2% ALBUM SALES 59%

232.7K AUDIO STREAMS 39%

232.7K You and What Army?

Map of the Soul: 7

JackBoys

The 1st Mini Album

218.0K

167.2K

165.7K

There’s a reason they call them fan armies, and when it comes to K-pop, fans are as loyal and disciplined as Marines. Thanks to a massive fan campaign, SuperM’s The 1st Mini Album took over U.S. charts, topping R&B rising star Summer Walker for the gold. Despite being just five tracks long, it became the first K-pop album to top the RS 200.

This list ranks the top RS 200 debuts from June 21st, 2019, through March 2nd, 2020, and is ranked by album units, a number that combines on-demand audio streams, album sales, and song sales using a custom weighting system.

JOE TERMINI

125,000 sales and 122 million streams in its first week on the RS 200.

Fine Line

Eminem

6

BIEBER’S BACK Changes saw more than

Lover

Harry’s Doing Just ‘Fine’

‘I

ALYSSE GAFKJEN

T’S ALL based on a true story,” says Jason Isbell, “and it’s all fiction.” The roots-drenched singer-songwriter’s excellent new album, Reunions, is filled with tales of lost friends and other melancholy memories, but don’t let his gift for novelistic detail fool you: The people he’s mourning didn’t necessarily exist, just as it turns out that the methfueled college misadventures he detailed in 2017’s “Last of My Kind” never actually happened. The onetime Drive-By Trucker’s imaginative gifts served him well in 2018, when he wrote the utterly convincing “Maybe It’s Time” for Bradley Cooper’s character in A Star Is Born. “I’m sure that’s the biggest project I’ll ever be part of,” says Isbell.

On “It Gets Easier,” you write about the challenges of staying sober after many years — a unique angle on the subject. How did you come to write it?

I’m always looking for ways to come at subject matter that haven’t been explored before.

People will write a lot about the first stages of love or recovery or life-changing events.

You write about the funeral; you don’t write about 30 years later, when Dad’s been gone.

I’ve been sober for eight years, and the fact of it is, you still wish that you had that crutch sometimes. . . . I do still have those “slip dreams,” as David Crosby calls them, where I’ll dream that I just had a drink. And I’m like, “What the hell did I just do?”

Crosby is a fan of yours, and he sang backup on this album. What’s your relationship like?

David is like your granddad, if your granddad was really stoned all the time. He’ll call at one o’clock in the morning and he’s really high and he wants to tell you about an idea, and they’re usually good ideas. His voice is still so powerful, and that surprised me because he’s not always taken the best care of himself.

I asked him, “How are you still able to sing like that?”

He said, “I tried everything I could to kill it, but it just won’t die.”

Q&A

Jason Isbell The singer-songwriter on his new LP, ‘A Star Is Born,’ and hanging with Springsteen and Crosby

By BRIAN HIATT The other new song that seems drawn from your life is “Letting You Go,” where you imagine your four-yearold daughter getting married, many years from now.

That is a terrifying thing for a father to imagine. When my father-in-law was walking my wife [singer-songwriter Amanda Shires] down the aisle, when he got up to me, he stopped and would not hand her over [laughs].

And now I think, “Man, I’d probably do the same thing.”

I have this theory about raising a daughter. If she does wind up with a man, and if I’ve misbehaved, she’s gonna think, “This is not so bad,” and tolerate more from guys.

So if I don’t want to deal with an asshole showing up in the driveway to pick her up to go to prom, then I can’t be an asshole myself.

“Letting You Go” is one of your many, many tear-jerking songs, from the cancer tale “Elephant” to “If We Were Vampires,” where a

married couple grapples with the idea that one of them will inevitably die first. Do you, on some level, enjoy making listeners cry?

Well, that or making them laugh — if you make somebody make some type of noise unintentionally, you’re doing a pretty good job as a songwriter. But there’s something about the sad songs where it’s not just sad, there’s a resilience, and I think that’s what really affects people. When you’re painting

a picture of people who insist on pushing through and surviving, that’s where people really get moved, because that is at the heart of the human experience.

When you met Bruce Springsteen a few years ago, he sang one of your songs to you, right?

He goes, “My son brought your record home, and I really liked that song — and then he started singing — “Traveling Alone.” And I’m standing there thinking, “He’s singing my song in Bruce Springsteen voice!” And then I was like, “Yeah, ’cause that’s just what comes out of his face naturally, you know?” But he was supersweet. And I was beside myself. I mean, it’s Bruce Springsteen. He really lived up to all the hype. And he comes from a time when it was possible for people to write those kind of songs and sell millions of records and sell out arenas.

Do you yearn for that era at all?

If I’d come along in the Seventies, I probably would have been a much bigger star, and I would’ve had a lot more money. And I would be dead.

It would not have turned out well. I mean, more is not always better.

You almost turned down the offer to write for A Star Is Born. Why? Before I read the script or anything, I thought it sounded like a terrible idea — the one with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, as much as I love both of them, was not a great movie. And I had been writing a lot, and I just didn’t feel up to it.

And of course my wife, Amanda, was like, “You’re an idiot! You’ve got all these songs laying around, just finish one up.” That’s what I did, and it turned out great.

Bradley came to some shows, and we hung out a bit. He’s a good guy and a good director.

Then Gaga called me while I was feeding my daughter one afternoon. For some reason, I thought it would be hilarious to put them on the phone with each other. So I handed my two-year-old the phone — and of course she could say “Gaga” really well.

April 2020

|

Rolling Stone

| 33

The Mix

MY

OBSESSION A NEW SERIES IN WHICH ARTISTS SHARE THEIR NON-MUSICAL PASSIONS

Brittany Howard’s Bathtub Escape WHEN BRITTANY HOWARD

first began touring the U.S. with Alabama Shakes circa 2010, she’d steal a few moments in the grimy tub of the band’s shared Motel 6 room.

Later, as the band became a Grammy-winning success, she’d enjoy a finer soak. “It’s the place at the end of the day where I am all alone and grounded in comfort,” says the singer, 31. “I like to picture all the stress going down the drain.”

Howard, who released an excellent solo debut last

34 |

PHOTOGRAPH BY

year, makes sure to ask about the bathtub situation wherever she’s traveling now. “These hotels, a lot of them don’t understand how important it is,” she says. “They’ll say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a bathtub’ — and then it’s a bathtub-shower combo, which to me is not a bathtub. That is for children.”

Last fall, Howard created @candlegazing, a secret Twitter account devoted entirely to rating the bathtubs she encounters on the road.

Her handful of followers are treated to reviews of tubs

Magdalena Wosinska

that range from the pitiful (“Yawn,” reads one devastating review; “some calcium buildup under the faucet,” reads another) to the sublime (Manhattan’s Hotel on Rivington is her gold standard).

She uses a one-to-five scale, guided by straightforward criteria like “Location” (“I don’t want to be staring at a toilet”) and less obvious qualities like “Loneliness” (“If it has two headrests, that’s just reminding me I’m alone”).

Howard has endless ideas on the subject of

tub improvement, and she dreams of one day designing bathtubs herself. “Sometimes, they make them a little narrow,” she says. “I need to be able to flip around several times, like a dolphin coming out of the ocean.”

But ultimately, Howard doesn’t think she’s asking for much: a space to relax, talk on the phone, maybe toss in a bath bomb (“I do dabble with Lush”). “Some people meditate, some people go for runs,” she says. “I take a bath.” JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

MONAE EVERETT/EPIPHANY ARTIST GROUP, INC.

Howard in Los Angeles.

She calls this style of tub the “deviled egg”: “It’s like they took an egg and cut it in half, and you’re just sitting in there.”

THE ZERO HOUR CLIMATE CRISIS

There is no stopping climate change — the seas and the temperatures will rise.

But how bad it gets is still up to us

BY JEFF GOODELL 36

ROLLING STONE

I

T’S 69 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT

in Antarctica as I write this — T-shirt weather in the coldest, most remote place on Earth. Bush fires are blazing in Australia — so far, 16 million acres have been burned, and by one count, a billion animals have been lost.

There is a marine heat wave in the Pacific and devastating floods in Indonesia. You probably know this. You might be freaking out. If you are, it’s because you understand a central fact of 21st-century life: The longer we wait to get off fossil fuels, the hotter the world will get, and the faster climate chaos will accelerate.

This is not about saving the planet. For one thing, the planet itself is not at risk — in its 4.5billion-year history, the Earth has been through much worse than anything we can throw at it. It’s civilization as we know it today that’s in trouble.

Second, the whole notion of “saving” anything is a flawed way to think about the crisis we are facing. Yes, it is more important than ever that we eliminate fossil fuels and reduce suffering and loss in a warming world. And, yes, the faster we get off fossil fuels, the better chance we have to make sure we don’t push the climate system past irreversible tipping points, such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which could raise global sea levels by 10 feet.

But no matter how fast we act, we are not going to “fix” the climate like a doctor fixes a broken leg. “The Earth’s climate is not a binary system or a switch that you can toggle on and off,” says Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow and stabilized the Earth’s temperature where it is today, we would still face several feet of sealevel rise in the coming century, as well as collapsing coral reefs and changing rainfall patterns. “The notion that we can avoid climate change is unequivocally false,” says Marvel.

“We’re at 1 degree of warming now, and we’re already seeing the impacts of climate change very clearly with wildfires, flooding, and other extreme weather events. But it’s also true that our actions over the next decade very much matter.”

We have already crossed one of the most important thresholds of the climate crisis: We’ve gone from “Is it happening?” to “What are we going to do about it?” In this new world, there are no solutions — only better and worse choices about where we will live, how we will live, who and what will survive, and who and what will be lost. Above all, it’s a world that will be defined by how hard we are willing to fight for our future.

“We might be living in a horror movie right now, but we are the ones writing the script,” says writer Mary Annaïse Heglar. “And we’re the ones who will decide how this movie will end.”

NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

F

of the climate crisis, scientists have struggled to define the risks of life on a warming planet. “We have understood the basic physics of climate change for more than 120 years,” says Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M. But nobody was too worried at first. The warming of the planet, if it was seen as a threat at all, was viewed as a far-off, distant event, something that would play out over century-long time scales.

The warming is a result of the slow accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which traps heat just like the glass roof of a greenhouse. Unlike other air pollutants, such as the chemicals that cause smog, which vanish as soon as you stop emitting them, a good fraction of CO2 that was emitted while factories forged cannons during the Civil War is still in the atmosphere today, and will remain for centuries into the future.

“The climatic impacts of releasing CO2 will last longer than Stonehenge,” wrote climate scientist David Archer. “Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.” The fingerprints of accumulating CO2 in the atmosphere were also hard to detect, at least in real time. In March 1958, when scientist Ralph Keeling first started measuring it from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, the CO2 level in the atmosphere was 315.71 parts per million. A year later, it was 316.71 parts per million. Why would anyone be alarmed by an increase of one part per million of CO2?

But in the atmosphere, small changes over time can add up to big impacts. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate that the burning of fossil fuels was now altering the Earth’s climate. “Global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-andeffect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming,” Hansen said. “It is already happening now.’’ He and other scientists understood the implications of this warming — droughts, heat waves, sea-level rise. But they didn’t have a clear timeline for when these impacts would occur or how severe they would be.

Big Oil and Big Coal understood the implications of rising CO2 levels all too well. They immediately began cranking out propaganda arROM THE EARLIEST DAYS

least, not directly — from a few more parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

In 1988, under the auspices of the U.N., the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created — an organization of top scientists tasked with issuing periodic reports that assessed the latest knowledge about climate change. The first report, released in 1990, was a weak sketch of the risks, from sea-level rise to drought to increased storm intensity. But it inspired the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where the issue of climate risk was addressed directly for the first time. The summit was a big event, with virtually every nation in the world signing a global treaty called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The goal of the treaty was “to stabilize greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system.” Nice thought, but as Penn State climate A map showing the scientist Michael Mann average temperature later wrote, “Dangerrise over the past ous to whom?” The risks four years; 2016 names like the Global Climate Coalito an islander living on and 2019 were the tion, and poured money into consera low atoll in the Pacific hottest on record. vative think tanks like the Competitive were surely different than Enterprise Institute and the Heritage the risks to the MercedesFoundation, where undermining cliriding diplomats who mate science was job one. crafted the treaty, to say nothing of the outsize In addition, there was a collective-action prob- risks to future generations. In 1995, the IPCC lem. Even if half the nations of the world decid- followed up with a second report, which was ed to slash carbon pollution, if big fossil-fuel more thorough but still full of cautious, bureauburners like the U.S. and China didn’t take ac- cratic language (“potentially serious changes tion too, the problem wouldn’t be solved. Many have been identified”). Nobody but hardcore scileaders saw restrictions on carbon as hobbling entists and activists read it. their economy and thus jeopardizing their poIn 1997, at the climate talks in Kyoto, Japan, litical power. As Dan Dudek, a vice president at UNFCCC members agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, the Environmental Defense Fund, puts it, “What which required that by 2012 developing counpresident or prime minister is going to restrict tries cut total emissions of greenhouse gases by fossil fuels if it means he or she will be turned five percent from 1990 levels. The agreement got out of office?” a lot of press and inspired high-minded speechBut the biggest issue was simply defining the es about the importance of reducing the level of threat of global warming. With nuclear weapons, CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. But it didn’t inthe risks were clear: Start a war, and millions of spire much action. “Part of the problem was that people could die in minutes. The ozone hole was negotiations focused on agreeing on the percentsimilarly clear-cut: If you let deadly levels of ra- age of tons of carbon-dioxide-emission reducdiation hit the Earth, you get cancer and die. In tions, which no regular human being has any both cases, global treaties were effective in re- clue about,” Dudek explains. “How can you build ducing risk. But with global warming, the threat political support around a goal that most people was not so clear. Nobody was going to die — at can’t understand, even if they wanted to?” guing that a warmer world was a better world.

Groups like the Greening Earth Society argued that more CO2 meant plants would grow faster, agriculture would boom, and we would all enjoy more days at the beach. Companies like Exxon (now ExxonMobil) began spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a well-orchestrated campaign to deny, confuse, and block any understanding of the risks of burning fossil fuels.

In the coming years, they organized and funded industry groups with innocuous-sounding

ROLLING STONE

37

CLIMATE CRISIS

T

HE JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER,

on the west coast of Greenland, is the fastest-moving glacier in the world. It is flowing into the sea at a rate of about 150 feet per day.

If you fly along the face of it in a helicopter, as I did a few years ago, you can watch slabs of blue ice fall into the sea every few minutes. They eventually melt into the North Atlantic, adding almost imperceptibly to the level of water in the ocean, which pushes waves a fraction of an inch higher on beaches around the world — the climate crisis in action.

In the 1990s, Greenland also changed how scientists think about climate change. Until then, most climate scientists believed the Earth’s climate was a fairly steady system — that it might grow warmer or colder, but that changes were gradual, like water heating up in a pot. Wallace Broecker, a brash and colorful geochemist at Columbia University, who died in 2019, hypothesized that changes in the Gulf Stream system about 14,000 years ago, during a period known as the Younger Dryas, had caused dramatic temperature swings in the Northern Hemisphere.

Evidence for this was sketchy until the mid-Nineties, when a team of researchers, including Richard Alley, a paleoclimatologist at Penn State, extracted a two-mile ice core from the Greenland ice sheet. By examining the decay of carbon isotope ratios in air bubbles trapped in the ancient ice, Alley found that at the end of the Younger Dryas, the temperature in Greenland warmed by 15 F in less than a decade. It was a remarkable discovery, which demonstrated that the Earth’s climate tended to lurch from one steady state to another. “You might think of the climate as a drunk,” Alley later explained. “When left alone, it sits. When forced to move, it staggers.”

Alley’s work revolutionized how scientists conceptualized changes that are to come. It also pushed scientists to think about climate risk in terms of temperature changes, not carbon-emission rates. In 2001, the IPCC issued its third report, which was far more pointed and urgent than previous reports. It’s remembered today mostly for a single graphic, known as “the burning embers” diagram. It was a simple chart with five bars that corresponded to five categories of climate risk, from “Risks of Extreme Weather Events” to “Risks of Large Scale Discontinuities” (such as the rapid melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets). The bars were shaded from white to yellow to orange to dark red, depending on the severity of the risk, which were calculated on a scale from zero to 5 C of warming. “The diagram was revolutionary,” says Mann. “For the first time, the risks of climate change were intelligible to someone who didn’t have a degree in physics.”

Contributing editor JEFF GOODELL interviewed Gov. Jay Inslee for the November issue.

38

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

In 2010, the UNFCCC threw out the old metric of measuring progress by emissions reductions. Instead, they adopted a goal of stabilizing warming at less than 2 C (3.6 F), which quickly became known as the threshold for dangerous climate change. Where did the 2 C target come from? Think of it as a rough balance between what should be done and what can be done. (“I would avoid thinking about these temperature targets as ever being based in science,” says Dessler.) Although a temperature target was much more coherent to most people than a percentage of emissions reductions, it reinforced an artificial notion that climate change was binary: Below 2 C of warming, all was good. Above 2 C, all hell breaks loose. “That is not how the climate system works,” says Dessler. “Is 1.8 C of warming better than 2 C? Yes. Is 2 C better than 2.5 C? Yes. But there is no bright line here.”

Mann’s question, “Dangerous to whom?” continued to haunt negotiations over climate targets. The better that scientists understood the climate system, the clearer it became that even a warming of 2 C put people in low-lying nations like Bangladesh at risk for increased flooding from rising seas, as well as other climate impacts. Was the 2 C target too high? Was it safe only for the privileged? The counterargument, however, was that a climate target needed to be achievable or nobody would take it seriously. Virtually every study showed that hitting the 2 C target would require a Herculean effort by all the industrialized nations of the world.

At the climate talks in Paris in 2015, even the 2 C target was seen as not strong enough. By then, the impacts of climate change were moving out of the modeling world and happening in real time. Greenland and Antarctica are shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule,” Alley said. Leaders of small island states like Tuvalu and the Maldives argued that the 2 C target was essentially dooming their nations. They pushed for an “aspirational goal” of limiting warming to 1.5 C (2.7 F), which eventually became embedded in the language of the Paris Agreement. Thus, 1.5 C became the new de facto threshold for dangerous climate change. But it was clear that the 1.5 C target was more of a desperate dream than a practical reality. As one observer in Paris quipped to me, “They may as well agree that all fairies shall ride unicorns too.”

half by 2030, and to zero by 2050. “The level of action and coordination necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 C utterly dwarfs anything that has ever happened on any other large-scale problem that humanity has ever faced,” journalist David Roberts wrote on Vox. “The only analogy that has ever come close to capturing what’s necessary is ‘wartime mobilization,’ but it requires imagining the kind of mobilization that the U.S. achieved for less than a decade during WWII happening in every large economy at once, and sustaining itself for the remainder of the century.”

If we blow past the 1.5 C target, as seems likely, where are we headed? Until recently, the IPCC had projected a warming of about 4.5 C by the end of the century if we continue on our current emissions path. That is truly a horrific number, one that would render large swaths of the Earth uninhabitable. But a recent study by Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute in California and Justin Richie of the University of British Columbia demonstrated that this estimate was based on unreal projections of coal consumption and other factors. After they reanalyzed the data, they concluded the business-as-usual scenario may be something more like 3 C. Which would still be hellish, but less hellish than 4.5 C. Even if we achieve the target of holding to 2 C, there will be unfathomable changes to our climate. In 2018, the IPCC published a special report that laid out the differences between a 2 C world and a 1.5 C world. “I was grumpy about the idea of the 1.5 report,” says NASA’s Kate Marvel. “I thought it was just fan fiction. But it had an unexpectedly galvanizing impact on people.”

The report showed that, at 2 C, severe heat events would become 2.6 times worse, plant- and vertebrate-species loss two times worse, insect-species loss three times worse, and decline in marine fisheries two times worse.

Instead of 70 percent of coral reefs dying, 99 percent will die. Many vulnerable and low-lying regions would become uninhabitable and the flow of refugees would rise dramatically.

Beyond future emissions rates, there are two big uncertainties on how fast the climate will warm. One is climate sensitivity, which is the measure scientists use to calculate how much the climate will warm as CO2 increases. It’s tricky to measure, because as the Earth heats up, it tweaks the climate dynamics in subtle ways, changing cloud cover, wind and rainfall patterns, and ocean circulation, among many other things. And all of this can impact warming.

According to Hausfather, the real uncertainty lies with clouds, which are notoriously hard

“THE CLIMATE CRISIS ISN’T AN ‘EVENT’ OR AN ‘ISSUE.’ IT’S AN ERA, AND IT’S JUST BEGINNING. . . .

IT WILL BE MORE LIKE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.”

a climate scientist or energy analyst somewhere in the world who believes that limiting warming to 1.5 C is doable, but I haven’t met him or her. Net emissions would need to fall by

THERE MAY BE

to capture in models, and have a big impact on the Earth’s temperature (high thin clouds trap heat, while low thick clouds shade and cool the Earth). Hausfather points out that the latest climate models, which use more-sophisticated cloud-modeling techniques, are showing a higher climate sensitivity, with potential warming of as much as 5 C if we double the CO2 in the atmosphere.

These new climate-model runs are still in progress and, thus, inconclusive, but this is definitely not good news.

The other big uncertainty about our climate future has to do with tipping points. The latest research is showing some Earth systems may be more resilient than most people thought. The Gulf Stream system, for example, “has been slowing down in recent decades,” says Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “But I don’t think anyone is worried about it shutting down anytime soon.” It’s the same with the melting of the permafrost in the Arctic: The more the permafrost warms, the more methane it releases, the more it warms the atmosphere — but none of the climate scientists I talked to believe there is a point when it runs away with itself. Similarly with the Amazon rainforest: As warming combines with deforestation, parts of it may turn into more of a savannah-like ecosystem. “But it’s not like there is a sudden crash and the entire Amazon disappears,” says Hausfather.

On the other hand, the more scientists learn about what’s happening with the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the more unstable it looks. Earlier this year, researchers in Antarctica found evidence of warm water directly beneath the glacier, which is not good news for the stability of the system.

Eric Rignot, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the top ice scientists in the world, believes that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is beyond its tipping point and in the midst of an irreversible collapse. As Rignot put it recently, “The fuse has been blown.” at images of the bush fires in Australia or the cracking ice shelves in Antarctica, it’s easy to think that it’s too late to do anything about the climate crisis — that we are, for all intents and purposes, fucked. And it’s true, it’s too late for 182 people who died from exposure to extreme heat in Phoenix in 2018, or for 1,900 people in northern India who were swept away in extreme floods in 2019, or the 4 million people who die each year around the world from particulate

SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

WHEN YOU LOOK

fundamental reshaping of finance.” Jim Cramer, CNBC’s notoriously cranky Wall Street guru, said in January, “I’m done with fossil fuels. . . . We’re in the death-knell phase. . . . The world has turned on them. It’s actually kind of happening very quickly.”

“I don’t have any doubt that we will take action on climate,” says Steffen. “But it won’t be the old-fashioned version of social change. It won’t be an orderly transition. It won’t be the climate version of the civilrights movement. It will be more like the Industrial Revolution — a huge social and cultural and economic transition, which will play out over decades, and with no clear leadership and nobody in control.” In Steffen’s view, climate doomers are as blind as climate deniers.

“The apocalyptic is in its very heart a refusal to see past the end of an old worldview, into the new possibilities of the actual world.”

I think Steffen is right. Whenever I feel like we’re fucked, I talk to landscape architects like Susannah Drake, who recently Hamburg, Iowa: completed a preliminary redeToo Late-ism only plays into the Historic flooding, due to climate sign of the National Mall Tidal hands of Big Oil and Big Coal and change, rocked Basin in Washington, D.C., that all the inactivists who want to drag the Midwest last will help restore a more natuout the transition to clean energy as spring. ral ecosystem and embrace the long as possible. Too Late-ism also rising waters of the Potomac misses the big important truth that, River. I talk to entrepreneurs buried deep in the politics and emolike Bill Gross, who has figured out a technoltion of the climate crisis, you can see the birth of something new emerging. “The climate crisis ogy that uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight isn’t an ‘event’ or an ‘issue,’ ” says futurist Alex hot enough to manufacture concrete and steel.

Steffen, author of Snap Forward, an upcoming I talk to kids on school climate strikes who are book about climate strategy for the real world. determined to hold polluters and politicians accountable for trashing their future. Writer Mary “It’s an era, and it’s just beginning.”

Annaïse Heglar, who grew up in Alabama and This new era might be arriving more quickly Mississippi, sees the climate fight as part of a than most people think. According to a new poll from the Yale Program on Climate Change Com- centuries-long battle for racial and social justice. “I don’t care how bad it gets,” she tweeted munication, nearly six in 10 Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about global warm- recently. “I don’t care how many thresholds we pass. Giving up is immoral.” ing. Political support for the Green New Deal Like many people on the front lines of the is rising as fast as the price of clean energy is climate fight, Heglar bristles at lazy questions falling. Greta Thunberg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have inspired a new generation about what gives her hope. “I think hope is reof climate activists who see the crisis as an op- ally precious, and the most precious thing about portunity to create a fairer, more equitable so- it is that you have to earn it,” she tells me. “So, usually when people are asking me what gives ciety. Germany, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, plans to shut down all coal plants by me hope, what they really mean is, ‘Give me 2038. In the U.S., the coal industry is in free- hope,’ and I can’t do that for you. No one can do that for you. You have to go out and make your fall. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the fiown hope. And so that means I hope you get innancial giant that manages about $7 trillion in volved. The type of hope I have is that I hope you assets, acknowledged in a letter to shareholdget off your ass.” ers that climate change is now “on the edge of a air pollution caused by our dependence on fossil fuels. And the way things are going, it’s probably too late for the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro, for large portions of the Great Barrier Reef, and for the city of Miami Beach as we know it.

But the lesson of this is not that we’re fucked, but that we have to fight harder for what is left.

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

39

CLIMATE CRISIS

GRETA’S WORLD How one Swedish teenager armed with a homemade sign ignited a crusade and became the leader of a movement

BY STEPHEN RODRICK

P H OTO G R A P H S BY JAC K DAV I S O N

T

and there is reality in Greta Thunberg. ¶ It is Valentine’s Day in her hometown of Stockholm, but there’s only wind, no hearts and flowers. A few hundred kids mill about, with a smattering of adults. If there were not signs reading OUR EARTH, WE ONLY HAVE ONE, it could be mistaken for a field trip to the ABBA museum. ¶ But where is Greta? I find a scrum of reporters interviewing a child in a purple puffer jacket, pink mittens, and a homemade-looking knit

40

HERE IS PERSONA

ROLLING STONE

hat. It takes me a minute to realize that it’s Greta. She is 17, but could pass for 12. I can’t quite square the fiery speaker with the micro teen in front of me. She seems in need of protection. ¶ Of course, this is emphatically wrong. Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s, which, she says, gives her pinpoint focus on climate minutiae while parrying and discarding even the smallest attempt at flattery. We stand near the Swedish Parliament house, where less than two years ago Thunberg started her Skolstrejk för klimatet, School Strike for Climate.

ROLLING STONE

41

CLIMATE CRISIS

Back then, it was just Greta, a sign, and a lunch of bean pasta in a reusable glass jar. Then it was two people, and then a dozen, and then an international movement. I mention the bravery of her speeches, but she waves me away. She wants to talk about the loss of will among the olds.

“It seems like the people in power have given up,” says Thunberg, taking her hat off and pushing back her mussed up brown-blond hair. She remains on message despite the tourists and teens taking her picture and mugging behind us.

“They say it’s too hard — it’s too much of a challenge. But that’s what we are doing here. We have not given up because this is a matter of life and death for countless people.”

It was my second encounter with Greta in three weeks. Back in January, she was in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum, where billionaires helo into the Swiss resort town and talk about solving the world’s problems without making their lives any harder. Thunberg had appeared last year and made her now iconic “Our House Is on Fire” speech, in which she declared the climate crisis to be the mortal threat to our planet. Solve it or all the other causes — feminism, human rights, and economic justice — would not matter.

“Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t,” said Thunberg with cold precision.

“That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”

The speech made Thunberg the unlikely and reluctant hero of the climate crisis. She crossed the ocean in a sailboat — she doesn’t fly for environmental reasons — to speak before the United Nations. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, conjuring the manic jealousy of Donald Trump, who called the honor “so ridiculous” and suggested she go to the movies and chill out.

In Davos, the illuminati prattled on about planting a trillion trees, even as we are still clear-cutting actual trees from the Amazon all the way to Thunberg’s beloved Sweden. This did not amuse nor placate the hoodie-wearing Greta. She seemed irritated and perhaps a little sick; she canceled an appearance the day before because she wasn’t feeling well. She was in no mood for flattery and nonsense. So when Time editor Edward Felsenthal asked her how she dealt with all the haters, Greta didn’t even try to answer diplomatically.

“I would like to say something that I think people need to know more than how I deal with haters,” she answered, before launching into details from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report. She mentioned that if we are to have even a 67 percent chance of limiting global temperature change to under 1.5 C, the point where catastrophic changes begin, we have less than 420 gigatons of CO2 that we can emit before we pass the no-going-back line.

42

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

Thunberg stated that, at the current rate, we have eight years to change everything.

Thunberg’s face was controlled fury. This was the persona: an adolescent iron-willed truth teller. The Davos one-percenters clapped and rattled their Rolexes. It has become a disconcerting pattern for Thunberg appearances that would be repeated at the European Commission: Greta tells the adults they are fools and their plans are lame and shortsighted. They still give her a standing ovation. A few minutes later, she was gone and the audience dispersed into a fleet of black BMWs and Mercedes, belching diesel into the Alpine sky.

on social media. (According to her mother, locals have shoved excrement into the family mailbox.) Later in February, she would march in Bristol, England, and be met by social media posts suggesting she deserved to be sexually assaulted.

“It’s just the people with 10 accounts who sit and write anonymously on Twitter and so on,” Greta says. “It’s nothing you can take seriously.”

Still, all is not rotten. America has come up with the Green New Deal. In Trumplandia, that seems like a beacon of hope, right?

Nope.

“If you look at the graphs to stay below the 1.5 degree Celsius global average temperature and you read the Green New Deal, you see that it doesn’t add up,” says Thunberg with some imY GRETA TRAVELS featured a Vancoupatience. She references her Davos speech about ver-Zurich round trip and then an how the world only has 420 gigatons of CO2 to L.A.-Stockholm trip. In between, I burn over the next eight years or the 1.5 goal befly from Vancouver to L.A. for anothcomes impossible. “If we are to be in line with er story. It’s the job, but I take stock the carbon-dioxide budget, we need to focus in horror and calculate that my three on doing things now instead of making comflights burn more carbon than the mitments like 10, or 20, 30 years from now. Of yearly usage of the average citizen of more than course, the Green New Deal is not in line with 200 countries. I torch the atmosphere so I can our carbon-dioxide budget.” hear others praise the girl who won’t fly.

Meanwhile, the main criticism of the Green “The phrase ‘A little child shall lead them’ has New Deal at home is that it moves too fast in getcome to mind more than once,” Al Gore tells me ting the United States to zero carbon emission by in Davos, before sharing his favorite Greta mo2050. But Greta doesn’t do politics. ment. It was at the U.N. summit last fall. “She “At least it has got people to start talking about said to the assembled world leaders, ‘You say the climate crisis more,” says Thunberg in a tone you understand the science, but I don’t believe that suggests the slightest of praise. “That of you. Because if you did and then you continue course is a step in the right dito act as you do, that would rection, I guess.” mean you’re evil. And I don’t There’s more to say, but believe that.’” Gore shook his now it’s time to march. The head in wonderment. “Wow.” children’s crusade forms into a He then gives a history lesson: regimented mob. Greta moves “There have been other times to the front and holds a Skolin human history when the strejk för klimatet banner with moment a morally-based social Climate Strike! some other teens. The taller movement reached the tipping fridaysforfuture.org kids lift it too high, and she point was the moment when globalclimatestrike.org nearly vanishes. All you can the younger generation made Join Greta and her see is Greta’s winter hat and it their own. Here we are.” allies this April to mark her gray eyes. That’s enough.

Activist-actress Jane Fonda a month of Global Al Gore was right. A child was so inspired by Greta that Climate Action. In the leads us. she has been hosting a series U.S., three days of of Fire Drill Fridays. “I was protests are planned, just filled with depression TECHNICALLY, Greta Thunberg’s starting on Earth Day and hopelessness, and then I on April 22nd and childhood continues for anothending with a global started reading about Greta,” er year. But she hasn’t been a strike on April 24th.

Fonda tells me one winter afkid for some time. She is one of ternoon in Los Angeles. “She two daughters of Malena Erninspired me to get out there man, an opera-singer-turnedand do more.”

Eurovision-contestant, and But in Stockholm, the world Svante Thunberg, an actor. Acof presidential taunts, former vice presidents cording to the family’s book, Our House Is on slathering praise, and Oscar winners rhapsodizFire, the bohemian clan has endured a scroll of ing seems far away. psychological disorders beginning with Malena, Outside of the Parliament building, Greta tells who suffered from bulimia and still deals with me she doesn’t worry about her safety despite ADHD. Greta’s younger sister, Beata, was diagTrump and others speaking cruelly about her nosed with OCD and ADHD, and [Cont. on 94]

M

GET INVOLVED

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

43

CLIMATE CRISIS

Jasper McTaggart, at home with his family in Queens, New York, finds himself worrying about the future of the planet.

44

ROLLING STONE

PHOTOGRAPH BY

Amy Lombard

CHILDREN OF THE CRISIS A generation of kids faces a more dangerous world as they come of age in the era of eco-anxiety

BY ALEX MORRIS

L

came to the abrupt realization that life as he knew it may be coming to an end. He was nine years old.

It was lunchtime, and he was eating a sandwich in the dining hall of a New Hampshire summer camp. Sitting near him, a fellow camper had just opened a letter from home, and in the envelope was a news clipping with a picture from Paris, where temperatures were reaching record, fatal highs. Jasper looked up from the picture and at the faces of his friends. “We’re not in climate change now, are we?” he asked the table.

“Yes, we are,” his counselor confirmed.

Jasper couldn’t believe it. He sat there stunned.

A New York City kid, he had spent his time at camp that summer basking in the promise and excitement of the great outdoors, a playground big enough to hold a boy’s dreams of adventure. There was danger there, yes, but he would be kept safe. Adults knew how to keep children safe — or so he’d thought.

Now, sipping hot cider in a coffee shop near his Queens home, he shakes his head at the memory of this moment when he realized that maybe they didn’t. “I was shocked,” he says. “I didn’t know climate change was already in effect. I knew it was AST SUMMER, JASPER MCTAGGART

ROLLING STONE

45

CLIMATE CRISIS

going to come — and possibly in my lifetime — but I expected it more in the distant future.”

Jasper took it upon himself to find out more.

He learned that parts of Florida were flooding regularly. “It’s just going to be gone. It’ll be like a hidden state,” he says. When the temperature reached 95 degrees one day, he worried about what that might mean. When he returned home from camp, he told his parents he wanted to participate in the youth climate march in September, and after the march, he joined his school’s Green Team along with his friend Kavi, who now sits next to Jasper in the coffee shop with his own hot drink and shared concerns.

“I’m scared,” says Kavi, who is 10. “Like, at some point, this is all just going to be gone. And there’s going to be no second chances. It’s just going to be game over.”

“The fires in Australia made me really sad,” Jasper adds. “Whenever I think of it, I’m like, ‘Oh no!’ ” It’s hard to predict these “oh no!” moments.

The boys say they’ll come to them unexpectedly, souring childhood memories that older generations have experienced without any emotional undercurrent of despair. Jasper thinks back to the time, a few weeks prior, when he was in his garden having a snowball fight with his dad. “I was in a snow fort, ducking and throwing snowballs, and I was like, ‘I’m so sad I won’t be able to do this with my kids.’ It just came to me that I might not be able to do this with the next generation because the Earth is warming.”

“I try to forget about it, but that doesn’t work,” admits Kavi. “It’s like the world’s going to end — not now, but it’s going to end at some point — and I might be there to experience it. So I’m kind of, like, screaming inside.

“Other generations did not have to worry about this. They didn’t have to try to save the environment.

“And all the people that made this happen and fueled it are just going to be gone by the time it really takes effect. They have the most power, but they refuse to use it.”

Kavi looks down into his cup glumly. “It’s just up to us, a couple of 10-year-old kids, to fix the world’s problems now.”

T

HE WORLD’S PROBLEMS have not usually been the domain of its 10-year-olds, but the climate crisis has changed that, creating a veritable tide of tiny and teenage warriors who have taken to the streets and halls of power to demand that their futures be safeguarded by the actions of today. Behind their signs and placards, their anger and frustration are clear. What is harder to see is their anxiety, the psychological

Senior writer ALEX MORRIS profiled the actress Natasha Lyonne last issue.

46

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

burden of those “oh no!” thoughts that threaten to arise, the private moments of panic and fear felt by a generation that cannot remember a time before the planet’s future was imperiled.

“I grew up in the nuclear era, and I feel like the nuclear threat activated my nervous system at a very young age,” says Renee Lertzman, a psychologist and founding member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, a group of psychology professionals who specialize in addressing climate change. When she began learning about the climate crisis in college, Lertzman felt a similar sense of panic and came to believe that, psychologically speaking, “There are really important parallels: The threats are human-created, and there’s a pervasive, visceral anxiety about the future at all times.” Yet much of Lertzman’s research has been into how the climate-change threat is unique to our time. “Unlike the nuclear threat, we’re talking about how we live,” she continues. “This is about virtually every aspect of our contemporary lives. This is about how I eat, how I get around, how I dress myself, what I put on my face. It’s very intimate.” And as such, it implicates normal people — all of us — in our own potential demise. Which, quite frankly, can really mess with your head.

In 2015, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a policy statement positing that “the social foundations of children’s mental and physical health are threatened by the specter of far-reaching effects of unchecked climate change,” and that “given this knowledge, failure to take prompt, substantive action would be an act of injustice to all children.” Since then, those in the mental health fields have started to see the effects of this specter: children coming to therapists grief-stricken at the thought that they wouldn’t live in a world where it was ecologically sensible to have children of their own; kids arriving at the ER, suicidal with despair about damage to the environment; children who refused to drink water during droughts or who suffered from panic attacks at the thought of human extinction. These may be the more extreme cases, but for many of those who traffic in mental health, they represent a bubbling over of what is just under the surface for scores of young people today.

“This time last year, there was maybe one request a month,” says Caroline Hickman, a British psychotherapist whose particular focus is eco-anxiety in children. “This year, there are two or three a week. I’ve got the NHS, I’ve got the civil service, I’ve got counseling organizations, I’ve got schools approaching me on a weekly basis saying, ‘Can you help?’ ” “I’m struggling to find the words to describe the magnitude of what is being faced from a pub-

lic mental health perspective,” says psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren, who was an expert witness in Juliana v. United States, a 2015 case in which 21 young plaintiffs sued the federal government for infringing upon their right to life and liberty by failing to take substantive action on climate change (the case is currently in appeal). “If we think the storms are bad outside, wait until we see the storms inside,” Van Susteren continues. “You cannot continue to hold up in front of young people the fact that things are only going to get worse and expect that they can create a kind of life that will allow them to thrive.”

Indeed, a December Amnesty International survey of more than 10,000 18- to 25-yearolds in 22 countries identified climate change as the most important issue facing the world in these Generation Z’ers’ minds (pollution came in second). In the fall, The Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of a poll in which 57 percent of American teenagers (ages 13 to 17) said that climate change made them feel scared, 52 percent said it made them angry, and only 29 percent said they were optimistic about the issue. Among young adults (18 to 29), the results were even more stark — with 68 percent of that group reporting feeling afraid and 66 percent saying they feel helpless — implying that distress grows with age.

In 2019, both the National Association of School Nurses and the California Association of School Psychologists endorsed climate-change resolutions, the latter declaring climate change a potential threat to the psychological development of children and calling on “Congress to take effective action on climate change to protect current and future students.”

This came after the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018 that policymakers have only 12 years to act before the consequences of global warming become irreversible, a timeline that young people have latched onto with what has been referred to as “ecological doom.”

The home page of youth activist group Zero Hour features large black numbers counting down the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds to this deadline, like a ticking bomb.

And while it makes sense that young people would be particularly susceptible to eco-anxiety — knowing that they will be the ones inheriting the brunt of the issues — there’s more to it than that. There’s also the particular makeup of young minds, and the way those minds function. “Children are incredibly switched on to fairness and unfairness, and what’s right and wrong,” says Hickman. “They’re also emotionally connected to other species.

How do we teach children how to empathize and

“IT’S LIKE THE WORLD’S GOING TO END,” SAYS ONE BOY. “AND I MIGHT BE THERE TO EXPERIENCE IT. SO I’M KIND OF, LIKE, SCREAMING INSIDE.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY

Amy Lombard

Kavi in Queens, New York: “I try to forget, but that doesn’t work. Other generations didn’t have to worry about this.”

ILLUSTRATION BY Name Here

build relationships? We buy them picture books with rabbits and puppies or kittens. That’s how we teach kids about relationships. That’s how we teach them to care. So, of course, they care.”

Then there’s the reality that young people are sensing the loss of a world they are still in the process of trying to figure out and understand — a heartbreaking form of FOMO (“fear of missing out”) at a time when the vestiges of another, healthier natural world remain. “I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and I still live here,” says Jamie Margolin, 18-year-old co-founder of Zero Hour. “Our bus cards are called Orca cards, but I’ve never seen an orca in my entire life. In the park close to where I live, there are signs that say, ‘Please don’t feed the resting seal pups.’ I’ve never actually seen any seals or wildlife in that park for as long as I’ve lived here. Ever.”

This sense of impermanence matters, as a child’s process of making sense of the world is best accomplished when that world is seen as fairly immutable, if not entirely predictable. “I remember thinking it was so weird that all these adults were saying that so many different things were true,” says Jane Nail, a 20-year-old college student who grew up in Alabama and first heard about climate change when Barack Obama was running for president. “It was one of the first times that the adults in my life weren’t all on a united front. The concept of good and evil was in my head, and I remember thinking that one side had to be good and one side had to be evil. One of them was obviously lying, but I didn’t necessarily know which side. I remember being really jolted by that.”

There’s also the growing knowledge, in our age of attachment parenting, that “attachment to the natural world is just as important in terms of security as our attachment to other human beings,” says Elizabeth Haase, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and a founding member of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance. “That’s actually a radically new concept in psychology.” Just as children need to trust that a caregiver will be there for them in order for healthy psychological development to occur, they need to trust that their environment will be there as well. That it may not be — or not as it is now — creates a sense of insecurity, a sense of loss that can’t cycle through the normal stages of grief because it’s a loss that’s ongoing. “When you have a traumatic loss or any kind of disruption that’s very painful, you can come out of it by going back to trying to do it the way you did it before, right?” Haase asks me. “Which is mostly

48

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

what you hear from people: ‘I can’t wait to get things back to the way they used to be and just get back that sense of security, or get another dog, or rebuild my house after the hurricane.’ ” Not only do children not have enough life experience to envision that sort of regenerative cycle as effectively as adults can, but they also don’t conceive of climate change that way. For them, there’s no going back to how things were, which is leading to a type of dread that’s some-

times referred to as solastalgia (a sort of anticipatory grief caused by the climate crisis) or pre-traumatic stress disorder, in which, as Haase puts it, “the focus is not on being constantly vigilant to what has happened, but constantly vigilant to what can happen.” The limited studies of Pre-TSD — often done on soldiers before they entered a war zone — shows that those who have it are far more likely to develop Post-TSD if something bad does in fact happen — they are, in a sense, primed to have their stress systems kick into overdrive.

“As animals, we are wired to react to trauma and danger — the fight-or-flight system, right?” says psychiatrist Beth Mark, who has worked at the counseling center at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 20 years. The response is not just psychological but physical: Heart rates and inflammation go up, immunity goes down.

“The dilemma that seems completely new to humankind is that we’re having a pre-traumatic response. We can look ahead and think about what’s going to happen, which has to be raising our fight-and-flight response in a low-grade way.

We are more and more at this constant edge, and it creates a chronic state of depletion with negative impact on how we are going about our days.”

And for kids who assume that most of their days are still in front of them, it can also create a

sense of paralysis. “I’m not even sure if I’m going to go to college,” 18-year-old Alejandro Vasquez tells me from the sidewalk in front of New York’s City Hall, where every week he protests as part of the Fridays for Future campaign. “What’s the point of having an education if we’re not going to have a future?” When I interviewed Zero Hour’s Margolin, she was on her way to a college interview, the irony of which did not escape her: “I’m talking to you about my fear of there not being a future, while I’m going through the motions of preparing for my future. I’m still preparing for a future that doesn’t exist, out of hope that it maybe will.”

Almost none of the teens I talked to want to have kids, though some said they had wanted to before learning about climate change. “I feel like it would be cruel to myself and to children to bring them into such an unstable world,” said 15-year-old Fiona Jarvis, a member of the New York chapter of the youth advocacy group Extinction Rebellion, which has its own Slack channel devoted to mental health. “If I think 20 years out, I get stressed out, to be honest. It’s very much on a day-to-day basis for me.”

All of which may explain why, according to the National InstiJasilyn Charger, tutes of Health, nearly one in who led protesters at three teenagers in America will Standing Rock, experience an anxiety disorder, says activism and why anxiety disorders in this gave her group rose 20 percent between friends hope.

2007 and 2012. “Climate crisis affects our mental state more than we know and more than we actually understand,” says Jasilyn Charger, 23, one of the original founders of the Standing Rock encampment, where thousands of Native American youth moved to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. Though the movement is famous, what is less known is that it grew out of group called One Mind Youth, which was created to combat the spate of teen suicides that plagued the Cheyenne River Reservation. The encampment gave its young people singular purpose, reigniting a sacred connection to the land that their culture prized — and for its duration, suicide rates on the reservation plummeted. When the youth lost their battle with the fossil-fuel industry and were forcibly moved from the encampment, rates spiked again.

“Standing Rock really helped a lot of my friends with their mental problems — depression, PTSD, anxiety, insomnia. A lot of people felt at home,” says Charger. “But when people started coming back from the en- [Cont. on 96]

DAWNEE LEBEAU

CLIMATE CRISIS

Madigan Traversi’s family evacuated her Sonoma County home 20 minutes before it was destroyed by fires.

“I still don’t feel like it’s real,” she says.

PHOTOGRAPH BY Cayce Clifford

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

49

CLIMATE CRISIS

THE DOOMSDAY BANK Despite knowing the danger for decades, Chase lends more money to the fossil-fuel industry than any other bank — it must be stopped before it’s too late

B

ANKERS LIKE NUMBERS. Numbers tell the story. No

emotion gets in the way. So let’s look at the numbers: Over the past three years — that is, in the years after the world came together in Paris to try to slow climate change — JPMorgan Chase lent $196 billion to the fossil-fuel industry. Over the past three years, JPMorgan Chase lent more money to the fossil-fuel industry than any bank on Earth — 29 percent more. And over the past three years, JPMorgan Chase lent more money to the most expansionary parts of the fossil-fuel industry (new pipelines, Arctic drilling, deep-sea exploration) than any other bank — 63 percent more. ¶ That’s not to say that other banks don’t do plenty of damage: Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America are all in the hundred-

50

ROLLING STONE

BY BILL MCKIBBEN

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y MIKE MCQUADE

CLIMATE CRISIS

billion-dollar club. But Chase is in a league of its own. It’s the First National Bank of Flood and Fire. It’s Hades Savings and Loan. It is the Doomsday Bank.

Chase — under extraordinary pressure from activists planning a massive campaign of civil disobedience for late April — mostly whiffed in its first attempt to deal with the issue. In late February, at its annual investor day, it unveiled a plan to restrict some financing for coal and particular projects in the Arctic. But that left untouched most of the financing that activists have targeted. “[We need] a mature conversation that doesn’t include beating up on fossil-fuel companies,” Chase’s CEO whinged. But maybe he better have the conversation with the bank’s own economists. A few days before the investor-day announcement, a Chase report prepared for highend clients leaked to the press. Climate change, it said, could produce “catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened.” It added, “Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.”

The story of Chase Bank is a big part of the story of how the planet warmed 1 degree Celsius, melted the Arctic, and burned a billion animals in Australia over Christmas. And the fight to change Chase is a big part of the fight to keep that 1 degree from becoming 3 degrees, and the planet from becoming a wasteland.

Chase Bank had its birth in a different, smaller environmental disaster. New York in 1798 had 60,000 residents, and 1,000 of them died in a yellow-fever epidemic. No one knew the cause, but Aaron Burr seized the moment to form the Manhattan Co., with the ostensible aim of bringing clean water from the Bronx River down to Wall Street. According to historian Gerard Koeppel, who details the Machiavellian backstory in his book Water for Gotham, it was really more of a front for launching a new bank to rival Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of New York.

Burr managed to insert into the charter for his water venture a clause allowing the company to “employ surplus capital” in “any monied transactions or operations,” giving it powers “nothing like any company that existed in America.” The “unsuspecting believed a water company had been born,” Koeppel writes. “Burr knew he had sired a bank.” It did lay water pipes under some of Lower Manhattan, but few customers were served, and epidemics continued; the company’s monopoly prevented the city from building its own system for decades, producing “an enduring agony for New Yorkers.”

A century and a half after its shady birth, the Manhattan Co. merged with Chase National Bank, which had in turn acquired the Equitable Trust Co., owned by the original oilman, John D. Contributor BILL MCKIBBEN wrote about the U.S. pulling out of the Paris Agreement in 2017.

52

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

Rockefeller. (Chase Manhattan settled on its logo in 1961 — the stylized octagon is supposed to represent the primitive wood water pipes of Burr’s original company.) At various points along the way, Chase acquired giant Chemical Bank (which had itself acquired the slightly less giant Manufacturers Hanover Corp.) and also JP Morgan and Co., named for the most important 19th-century banker and the man who helped found U.S. Steel and General Electric. All of which is to say: an incredibly big, incredibly rich, and incredibly well-connected bank.

Its most prominent leader was David Rockefeller, grandson of the oil pioneer, who ran it from 1969 to 1980. He established it as a global giant — some of his internationalism seems prescient now (he set up the first U.S. banking operations in Moscow and Peking) and some less so (he helped get the Shah of Iran to America for medical treatment, which helped reignite hostilities still ongoing).

Whatever your take on Rockefeller’s politics, he didn’t subscribe to the “money is the only thing that matters” ethos that marked Wall Street’s next generations. When Rockefeller was in his nineties, his granddaughter Miranda Kaiser remembers accompanying him to a meeting at the bank. “Jamie [Dimon] was presenting with all the other top officials to a very select group of investors,” she recalls. “All of their presentations were very focused on one thing: how they were going to maximize returns.

Grandpa was the last one to go. ‘All that is great,’ he said, ‘but let’s not forget our social responsibility as a major corporation.’ He was not well-received — as I remember, there was a lot of glowering. The guys in the expensive suits, they looked jazzed-up when Jamie was talking about returns, but when Grandpa was talking they looked profoundly uncomfortable.”

The Rockefeller family, outspoken in their efforts to combat Exxon, their original family business, over climate change, are now beginning to challenge Chase. Says Kaiser, 48, who runs the refugee resettlement charity USAHello, “It is disturbing that JPMC has continued to be the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels despite the clear role of that industry in climate change and its devastating global effects.”

pany, and has built it into the biggest bank in the country. He’s reaped the requisite rewards — a net worth nearing $2 billion, a $10 million Park Avenue apartment, and a Westchester estate in Bedford, New York, where, according to Vanity Fair, he’s “perfectly happy spending his twoweek vacation alone, making his own coffee and wandering around the local Target in his jeans.”

(Perhaps some adviser should tell him that these are hobbies one can pursue with mere millions.)

Anyway, Dimon was friendly with President Obama, and has insisted that he wants “a more equitable society,” and added, apropos of Jesus, “I do think we’re our brother’s keeper.” On climate change, especially, his public statements are fairly progressive: In the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, he joined with other financial executives to say, “We call for leadership and cooperation among governments for commitments leading to a strong global climate agreement.”

When Trump pulled the U.S. out of the climate accord, Dimon said, “I absolutely disagree.”

But maybe not that much. Unlike Tesla CEO Elon Musk or former Disney Chairman Bob Iger, the Paris decision didn’t cause Dimon to resign from Trump’s various business advisory boards.

Instead, he told reporters that Trump “is the pilot flying the airplane,” and that “when you get on the airplane, you better be rooting for the success of the pilot,” and that “I’d try to help any president of the U.S. because I’m a patriot.”

And really, who cares what he said, because what his bank was doing was at least as damaging to the Paris accord as Trump’s pronouncements. Presidents can do only so much — Trump hasn’t even been able to stem the collapse of America’s coal industry. But bankers can supply the thing the fossil-fuel industry needs above all, which is money.

Here’s the score: In the years since the Paris accord, Chase has been the biggest global funder of liquefied natural gas; the biggest American funder of coal mining and of tar-sands oil; the biggest Arctic oil-and-gas funder in the world; the biggest funder of ultra-deepwater oil-and-gas drilling on the planet; and the second-biggest funder on Earth of fracked oil and gas. Right before the Paris climate accord was signed, scientists at the journal Nature published a landmark study detailing precisely which fossil-fuel resources absolutely had to be left in the ground. It’s as if Dimon and his bankers took the list and used it as a guide for booking business: If you had a particularly damaging project in mind, the kind that would open up a whole new area for oil development or some infrastructure that would lock us in to depending on fossil fuels for decades to come, then Chase

IF THE BANK TOOK A REAL STAND — DECIDING TO STOP LENDING TO THE FOSSIL-FUEL INDUSTRY — THE RESULTS WOULD REVERBERATE EVERYWHERE.

one of the two key characters in this story. The son and grandson of stockbrokers, Dimon started his career at American Express, where his father was an executive VP. Dimon worked with Sandy Weill to form Citigroup and, after a falling out, ended up as CEO of Bank One; when that was purchased by Chase in 2004, he became president and CEO of the comJAMIE DIMON IS

PREVIOUS SPREAD: IMAGES IN ILLUSTRATION BY JOSEA. BERNAT BACETE/MOOMENT/GETTY IMAGES; MIGUEL SOTOMAYOR/MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: PATRICK SEMANSKY/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES

was the window you lined up at. “Chase is number one with a bullet,” says Jason Opeña Disterhoft, a senior campaigner for a Rainforest Action Network team that tracks banks and their fossilfuel investments.

To explain that — to explain how Chase became more than garden-variety bad, how it became first-in-class, all-chips-in-the-middle bad — requires more than Dimon and his hypocrisy. You need to meet the second player in this drama, a man named Lee Raymond. He’s not high-profile like Dimon, always jetting off to Davos. In fact, until very recently, if you googled news stories about “Lee Raymond,” you’d mostly get accounts of an actor named Raymond Lee who features in HBO’s Made for Love; another man named Raymond Lee who is currently director of public works for the city of Amarillo, Texas; and a longtime photographer at the South Bend Tribune named Joe Raymond, who once took a famous picture of a Notre Dame running back named Lee Becton. That all changed in early February, when a shareholder advocacy group, Majority Action, called for Raymond’s ouster from Chase.

Despite his relative invisibility, if there’s a single Bond villain of the climate crisis, it’s Raymond; this is the guy sitting at the head of the table stroking his cat as destruction nears. Or maybe that’s too harsh — let’s assume he wasn’t hoping for the inferno. But the fact is that no single human being was better positioned to do something that Top: Under CEO might have slowed Dimon, Chase has the chaos now engulfinvested more in fossil ing us. fuels than any other bank. Above: Raymond, Short course: Lee the former head of Raymond went to Exxon, led a decadeswork at Exxon after long campaign of earning his Ph.D. in climate denial. chemical engineering. He spent his entire working life there, joining its board in 1984, becoming president of the company in 1987, and eventually winding up as CEO from 1993 to 2005, a job that paid him $686 million, or $144,573 a day. Long before his retirement from Exxon, he also joined the board of Chase, and he has remained there ever since, becoming, in 2001, lead independent director, the closest thing Dimon has to a boss.

That is to say, he has led the biggest oil company and the biggest oil lender from the beginning of the global-warming era to the present.

And he has done more than lead them. Here’s how Majority Action put it when it launched the campaign to get him removed from the board: “He was the architect and public face of ExxonMobil’s efforts to promote denial of the risks and likelihood of climate change, even after Exxon scientists warned executives of the dan-

ger.” Thanks to intrepid investigative reporting from the Pulitzer-winning InsideClimate News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Columbia Journalism School, we know that beginning in the late 1970s, Exxon’s scientists started intensive study of global warming (of course they did — they were the largest private company on Earth, and their product was carbon). Those scientists

reported accurately and frequently to senior executives about how much and how fast it would warm — one chart, discovered in an archive, showed a spot-on, perfect prediction for what CO2 concentrations and temperatures would be in 2020. And they were believed — Exxon actually began building its offshore oil platforms higher in order to compensate for the rise in sea level they knew was coming, and they started plotting their Arctic drilling schemes for the days when they knew the ice would be melted.

So, in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen went to Congress to say that global warming was real and underway, one possible version of history could have gone like this: Exxon President Lee Raymond could have said, “You know, our researchers have found much the same thing.” Had he done that, no one would have been likely to describe Exxon as a climate-alarmist Chicken Little. But he didn’t. Instead, Exxon, with its peers in the oil, gas, coal, and utility businesses, set about the job of supplying the money to the endless front groups that concocted a phony debate about whether or not global warming was “real,” a debate that has consumed decade after decade, when we could have been hard at work. So instead of beginning with mod-

est steps, like a small carbon tax, to bend the curve of emissions, we went full speed ahead with business as usual. Humanity has produced more carbon since that day in 1988 than in all of human history before it, and as a result, we now face almost impossibly steep cuts in emissions if we are to meet climate targets.

Raymond, arguably the most important oilman on Earth, didn’t spend much time talking to reporters even then, but there are a few moments when his behind-the-scenes role broke through. In October 1997, he addressed the World Petroleum Congress in Beijing. The timing was crucial — it was two months before the world would meet in Kyoto, Japan, for the first attempt at a global agreement to limit greenhouse gases.

The Clinton administration was on board, but unlike Dimon and his “the president is the pilot” rhetoric, Exxon was not. (“I’m not a U.S. company, and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.,” Raymond once explained.)

There’s no video of that speech in Beijing, just a smudgy Xerox of the typescript, but it ranks as one of the most irresponsible addresses an American has ever delivered (granted, there’s stiff competition). Bloomberg News summarized his words like this: “First, the world isn’t warming. Second, even if it were, oil and gas wouldn’t be the cause. Third, no one can predict the likely future temperature rise.” In fact, Raymond went even further, telling the Chinese — then beginning to embark on the fossil-fueled expansion that would make China the world’s biggest carbon emitter — that the Earth was cooling. Even if the scientists were right about the greenhouse effect, he said, “It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected by whether we act now or 20 years from now.” As it turns out, nothing could be further from the truth: Because we didn’t act then, we’re in a crisis now, and one we may have waited too long to solve.

I

find anyone at Chase who wants to talk on the record about Raymond — the closest I came was a former managing director, John Fullerton, who now runs a nonpartisan think tank called the Capital Institute. Raymond “was the one director management feared,” says Fullerton, “because he ran the compensation committee and is a hardass.” His nickname at Exxon, according to Steve Coll’s magisterial book Private Empire, was indeed “Iron Ass”; even The Wall Street Journal once noted his “disdain for gay rights” and his “strikingly politically incorrect character for a modern-day, big-company CEO.” Given Exxon’s global-warming record under Raymond’s leadership, Fullerton continues, “how he is not on trial for crimes against humanity is beyond me.”

It’s hard to know what Chase thinks about any of this. Dimon joined some other CEOs in T’S HARD TO

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

53

CLIMATE CRISIS

GET INVOLVED

54

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

a transition. Line 3 is the equivalent of 50 new coal-fired generators. What we need is renewables and efficiency.”

Or go to Australia, or the Marshall Islands, or Paradise, California, or Bangladesh, or anywhere else on a long and growing list. Dimon could even ask the 2,900 Chase employees relocated from their downtown headquarters after Hurricane Sandy crashed into Manhattan in 2012.

A

LMOST 40 YEARS AGO, a few months out of college, I was a newly minted staff writer at The New Yorker. I persuaded the editor to let me do a Talk of the Town story on recent grads arriving at Chase for their first jobs in finance.

I joined the first three days of Credit Course 8-2, meeting on the 10th floor of those Lower Manhattan headquarters. In only 200 days, a second-vice-president assured them, they’d be ready to “go out there and lend some money.” The highlight of those opening classes was a trip to the vault in the bank’s basement, which was described not only as “the world’s largest,” but also as “A-bomb-proof.” Everyone got to touch the gold bars.

I thought of that experience in January, when I was sitting in the Chase branch nearest the U.S. Capitol with a dozen other protesters, waiting to be arrested (I noted the energy-efficient LED lighting). We were helping launch what is turning into a nationwide spring offensive that will culminate April 23rd with protests at thousands of Chase branches in the 40 states where it operates. Maybe it’s all pointless and hopeless —

ERIK MCGREGOR/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES

2019 at the Business Roundtable for a discussion of “purpose” in the Protesters modern corporation, explaining storm Chase headquarters that “major employers are investin Manhattan ing in their workers and communiin 2019. ties because they know it is the only way to be successful over the long term,” adding that “these modernized principles reflect the business community’s unwavering commitment to continue to push for an economy that serves all Americans.”

Since that is a little short on specifics, I’ve repeatedly sent Chase representatives lists of questions and requests for interviews with Dimon and Raymond, and received back only a few paragraphs of what one spokesman called “broader context.” This included the news that Chase “promotes inclusive economic growth and opportunity in communities where it operates,” that it is “installing efficient LED lighting across its operations,” and that it has a “commitment to facilitate $200 billion in clean financing by 2025.” I’ve asked what that money is going for and have gotten no reply.

It’s much easier to track down the people trying to deal with the projects that Chase bankrolls. Consider, for instance, the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring tar sands down from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf of Mexico. For more than a decade now it’s been the subject of fierce opposition from indigenous people along the route in Canada and the U.S., from farmers and ranchers who don’t want their land taken to scientists who point out that these are the Divest From Chase stopthemoneypipeline.com kind of projects we must abandon if we have any hope. (Hansen, who delivered the original greenA coalition of environmental house-gas warning to Congress, once declared groups has formed to take on that pumping the economically recoverable oil Chase and other fossil-fuel from the tar sands would be “game over” for the funders. Actions will be taking climate.) Nonetheless, year after year, TC Enerplace at Chase locations across gy, the Canadian firm building the pipeline, has America on April 23rd, which been Chase’s single biggest fossil-fuel client, takyouth climate leaders have designated as Finance Day, part ing 6.7 percent of all of Chase’s energy financing. of the 50th anniversary of Earth “I would ask Mr. Dimon to come visit us here Day. Visit the Stop the Money in the middle of America, where we protect our Pipeline campaign website to land and water with everything we have because find the protest closest to you. the land is everything we have,” says Jane Kleeb, the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, who has devoted much of her life to fighting the pipeline. “Our culture, identity, and livelihoods are tied to the land. If he met us, if he sees the land, says Winona LaDuke, leader of the native group I’m confident he would stand with us. It’s easy Honor the Earth (and a Harvard undergrad in to forget us and discount us and instead focus on the years that Dimon was at the university’s busiyour shareholders when you don’t have to look ness school). “Enbridge is militarizing the north us in the eye and tell us we don’t matter.” country, funding hate, and shackling pristine Or go a little farther north, to Minnesota, lakes to a dirty-oil pipeline. After 60 hearings where Chase-funded Enbridge is hard at work and 68,000 people testifying against this pipetrying to build another tar-sands pipeline, this line, Enbridge is going to cause a civil war in one called Line 3, which would double the capac- northern Minnesota — there will be blood,” she ity of current pipes and reroute them through says. “And after $38 million of military represcountry held sacred by Ojibwe bands and other sion at Standing Rock [the Dakota Access Pipeindigenous groups. “It’s time to move on, Jamie,” line was another Chase-funded project], we want

JOSH HANER/”THE NEW YORK TIMES”/REDUX

maybe it would have been wiser (certainly more lucrative) to stick with the gold bars.

But there’s reason to think that stopthemoney pipeline.com might work. For one, Chase’s lending to the oil-and-gas industry is vast, but it’s only about seven percent of its business — it’s not like Exxon, which has no real option but to fight.

And if the electoral map is tilted toward the red, the money map goes the other way: The people Chase really cares about, the ones with funds to invest, are mostly in those pockets of blue, where people care deeply about the climate crisis. (That’s why BlackRock, the biggest asset manager on Earth, started moving some money out of fossil fuels in January. BlackRock wasn’t alone; in the past few months, Goldman Sachs announced that it would stop lending for coal projects and drilling in the Arctic, and the European Investment Bank, the world’s largest public bank, swore off fossil-fuel lending altogether.)

Perhaps it was the prospect of thousands of people cutting up their credit cards or moving their accounts that made Chase decide to pull back on coal and some Arctic projects — Jane Fonda joined young climate activists and faith leaders in a call for action on April 23rd (the day after Earth Day) in branches across the country. “If you don’t move your money, we’ll move ours,” she said. All the polling indicates that for young people, the climate crisis is the numberone political issue, so maybe the Doomsday Bank will even find it hard to recruit the next class of bright-eyed young loan officers for the trip down to the vault.

Chase blinked the previous March, after a long campaign by people calling it to task for lending to private prisons. So who knows? Right after our January arrests, a Chase spokesman told Politico, “We have a significant amount of work underway to further build upon our efforts on climaterelated risk and opportunity, and we look forward to sharing more in the coming years.” Activists will have a harder time forcing broad action on fossil fuels than on prisons, because oil and gas make a lot more money for Chase. But if the bank took a real stand — deciding to stop lending to the kinds of projects that expand an industry that every scientist agrees must now contract — the results would reverberate everywhere, bouncing from one stock market to the next. The speed of that reaction — far faster than political change is likely to come — might let us start catching up with the physics of global warming.

Given the stakes, it’s worth a full-on try. Maybe you’re one of that fast-growing group of people beginning to feel queasy about the climate crisis — beginning to feel like you need to do more to make a difference. You probably don’t have a coal mine in your neighborhood, or a fracking well in the cul-de-sac. But the odds are high there’s a Chase Bank branch not far away. So here’s your chance to take a stand.

CAN WE PLANT ENOUGH TREES?

The trillion-tree project may sound like corporate greenwashing, but there’s real science behind the idea BY TIM DICKINSON AS TEMPERATURES rise and wildfires rage from Canada to Australia, forests have become a symbol of danger in a warming world. They may also be one of our best hopes for capturing and storing the unsustainable levels of carbon dioxide that humans have released into the atmosphere. “If we can do it right,” says British ecologist Thomas Crowther, “the conservation and restoration of forests can potentially buy us some time as we try to decarbonize our economies.”

A recent study that Crowther coauthored in Science points to nearly a billion hectares of nonurban, nonagricultural land on Earth that could be reforested — to capture as much as two-thirds of the atmospheric carbon released since the dawn of the Industrial Age. Crowther says we have long known about the role of forests as carbon sinks. “But this helps to understand the scale of what is possible.” (Basic Earth-science refresher: Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into wood. This trapped carbon is stored not only in the living trees, but also, over time, in the soils of the forest floor.)

The undertaking would be massive — replanting an area the size of the United States — primarily across Russia, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Brazil, and China. But the study also cautions that the window of opportunity is closing. If allowed to rage

APRIL 2020

unabated, global warming will soon destabilize and diminish existing forests.

“Restoration will achieve nothing if we do not conserve what we currently have,” says Crowther.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Trump highlighted the One Trillion Trees initiative, which seeks to jumpstart global reforestation.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce and a trustee of the WEF, took credit for getting the idea in front of Trump in an interview with ROLLING S TONE . Benioff touts the appeal of a project he believes can unite governments, industry, and activists, through the platform that he and WEF are building at 1t.org. “We need to cut emissions, and we need to sequester carbon — and we all need to get on it,” says Benioff, who ballparks the cost of reforestation at $300 billion. If the Trump administration can get behind reforestation, he believes, that’s an important first step. “I hope that Democrats and Republicans can come together and agree on the tree. If the tree is not the ultimate bipartisan issue,” he says, “I don’t know what is.”

Some environmentalists fret, however, that tree planting could be used as “greenwashing” by carbon polluters while avoiding the much harder work of rejecting fossilfueled growth. “Planting trees is good,” said Greta Thunberg, “but it’s nowhere near enough.”

Scientists back her up. “If tree planting is just used as an excuse to avoid cutting greenhouse-gas emissions,” Crowther says, “then it could be a real disaster.”

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

55

CLIMATE CRISIS

THE MEN WHO SOLD THE WORLD

The CEOs, oilmen, financiers, politicians, and ideologues who are robbing us of a stable climate

Donald J. Trump

Rupert Murdoch

Warren Buffett

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

INTERNATIONAL MEDIA MOGUL

CEO OF BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY

Trump has been a godsend for the fossil-fuel industry, gutting the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior while stocking each agency with former fossil-fuel-industry executives and lobbyists. He has auctioned off millions of acres of public land to oil-and-gas drilling and rolled back close to 100 environmental regulations, paving the way for 200 million more tons of carbon to be pumped into the atmosphere per year. But Trump insists he’s one of the good guys. “I’m an environmentalist,” he said last fall after bailing on a climatefocused meeting of the G-7. “A lot of people don’t understand that. I think I know more about the environment than most people.”

The billionaire executive chair of News Corp. and founder of Fox News, Murdoch started a network of media properties that has been instrumental in the propagation of climate-change skepticism, both in America and abroad. As climate-fueled wildfires decimated his home country of Australia, Murdoch’s outlets spread disinformation — The Australian dismissed the fires as “nothing new.” It’s even worse in the U.S., where Fox News has been a platform for climate deniers for years. In 2019 alone, its guests called climate science “fake,” argued the climate is bound to change “with the Earth rotating at 1,000 miles per hour,” and claimed that pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere couldn’t be bad because “we exhale carbon dioxide.”

The “Oracle of Omaha” is a little shortsighted when it comes to the climate crisis. The billionaire financial guru has long been pumping money into the fossil-fuel industry, and it doesn’t look like he has plans to stop. In 2019, Buffett invested $10 billion in Occidental Petroleum’s interest in the Permian Basin, marveling to CNBC how “incredible” it is that the region is producing 4 million barrels of oil a day. He’s rationalized his climate-killing investments by arguing that his first priority is to enrich his shareholders, not save the environment. Nevertheless, Buffett has described the climate crisis as “an incredibly important subject.” Thanks for your concern, Warren.

Andrew Wheeler ADMINISTRATOR OF THE EPA

Since taking the helm of the EPA in 2018, Wheeler has curtailed the agency’s ability to use scientific data when establishing regulations, rolled back clean-water protections that prevented polluters from dumping chemicals in streams and wetlands, and waged campaigns to strip numerous emissions regulations — from checks on methane to tailpipe-exhaust restrictions in California. He came to the EPA after spending years as a fossil-fuel-industry lobbyist.

“Wheeler is the embodiment of the anti-regulatory ‘deep state’ in Washington,” Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, told us in 2018. “He’s playing the long game. And that’s exactly what makes him so dangerous.”

56

ROLLING STONE

Robert Mercer THE MERCER FAMILY FOUNDATION

Billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who directs the Mercer Family Foundation, have spread millions of dollars across America’s most influential climate-sciencedenying groups, including the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute.

Tax filings made public in December showed they scaled back such donations in 2018, but they did send more than $8 million to Donors Trust, a Koch-funded dark-money group, and $300,000 to the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, whose founder Arthur Robinson, an “alt-science” pioneer, once said increasing CO2 levels would result in a “host of beneficial effects” for the environment.

Charles Koch CEO OF KOCH INDUSTRIES

Koch Industries pumped more than 25 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2017, according to a University of Massachusetts study, more than Chevron, BP, and a host of other fossil-fuel-industry powerhouses. Charles and his brother David (who died in 2019) began funding climate denial long before the crisis went mainstream. In 1991, Charles’ Cato Institute hosted a conference for skeptics titled “Global Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics?” They continued to work to prevent congressional action on climate change for decades, founding and funding anti-science advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners. Charles, 84, isn’t slowing down, either. In 2019’s Kochland, author Christopher Leonard quotes Charles telling allies in 2018 that they’ve “made more progress”

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: J SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; CHRISTOPHER SMITH/INVISION/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AP IMAGES/ SHUTTERSTOCK; J SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; SEAN ZANNI/PATRICK MCMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES; PATRICK MCMULLAN/GETTY IMAGES; PATRICK T. FALLON/”THE WASHINGTON POST”/GETTY IMAGES

BY RYAN BORT

tamping down federal climate action “in the last five years than I had in the previous 50.”

Myron Ebell PROFESSIONAL CLIMATE-CHANGE SKEPTIC

Ebell has made a career out of casting doubt on climate science (though he has no scientific training himself), most notably through his role at the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank that has taken millions from the fossil-fuel industry. In 2016, he led Trump’s transition team at the EPA, helping to put in place a team to dismantle Obama’s policies, and he has continued to advocate for harmful rollbacks like replacing the landmark Clean Power Plan with weaker regulations.

Robert Murray FOUNDER OF MURRAY ENERGY

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: SHUTTERSTOCK; PETER MACDIARMID/SHUTTERSTOCK; JOHN L MONE/ AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; JAE C HONG/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; ALBIN LOHR-JONES/EPA/ SHUTTERSTOCK; SENATE ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE; MICHAEL BROCHSTEIN/ SOPA IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; WILFREDO LEE/AP IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; SHUTTERSTOCK

The founder and former CEO of Murray Energy saw his coal behemoth — which, as America’s largest privately owned coal company, produced 76 million tons of coal annually — go bankrupt in 2019, but Murray’s influence extends beyond his floundering dirty-energy company.

For years, he pumped money into a diverse portfolio of conservative groups that continue to push disinformation about the climate crisis. Murray also had an oversize influence on Trump’s climate policy, donating $300,000 to his inaugural committee before handing the president a literal wish list of rollback requests, many of which were dutifully carried out by the administration.

Marco Rubio and Rick Scott UNITED STATES SENATORS FROM FLORIDA

Florida is one of America’s most vulnerable states when it comes to climate change, but you wouldn’t know it from how its Republican senators have punted on the issue. When he was governor, Scott even had the words “climate change” and “global warming” removed from official reports. Though both men took a small step forward in 2019 by acknowledging climate change is real, they both bashed the Green New Deal and prescribed, as Rubio put it, “adaptive” solutions to a “manageable” problem. This is to say: solutions that don’t upset the fossil-fuel industry. Rubio and Scott both have a 100-percent approval rating from the Koch-backed climate-denial group Americans for Prosperity.

David Bernhardt UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR

Since joining Trump’s Department of the Interior, Bernhardt has shown complete deference to the wishes of the extractive industries that he long served as a fossil-fuelindustry lobbyist (clients included Halliburton and the U.S. Oil and Gas Association). In 2018, he led an effort to strip protections from 9 million acres of the imperiled sage-grouse habitat, opening up the land to oil drilling. More recently, his department has worked to lease portions of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for, you guessed it, more drilling — a decision so destructive that even a number of major banks have vowed not to fund oil-and-gas operations there. Executives with the Independent Petroleum Association of America, one of Bernhardt’s former clients, were recorded in 2017 bragging of their “direct access” to Bernhardt and of having “conversations with him about issues ranging from federal land access to endangered species.”

William Happer SCIENTIST AND CLIMATE DENIER

An 80-year-old professor emeritus of physics at Princeton, Happer has deep ties to the Heartland Institute, one of the most influential pushers of climate denial in the U.S. In 2018, he joined Trump’s National Security Council, but his plans to discredit the government’s own climate reports were so extreme the White House rejected them for fear they might hurt Trump’s ability to get re-elected. Happer resigned from the administration in 2019, but the man who once compared the demonization of CO2 to the “demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler” hasn’t quit pushing climate denial. He appeared at a Heartland Institute forum to counter the U.N.’s climate conference last December, where he called the climate movement “a bizarre environmental cult.”

Jim Inhofe UNITED STATES SENATOR FROM OKLAHOMA

The longtime Republican senator literally wrote the book on climate denial (The Greatest Hoax) and is best known for presenting a snowball on the Senate floor as evidence that climate change isn’t real. The 2015 stunt is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg. Inhofe, who has introduced bills to gut the EPA (which he once likened to the Gestapo and, in 2017, claimed was “brainwashing our kids”) and been a regular fixture at high-profile climate-denial conferences, now has a network of disciples carrying out his agenda. EPA head Andrew Wheeler used to work

in Inhofe’s office, as did the agency’s chief of staff, Mandy Gunasekara, who encouraged Trump to leave the Paris Agreement. “It gives me comfort,” Inhofe told The Washington Post of his former staffers who are now influencing Trump’s environmental policy. What’s fueling Inhofe’s climate denial? In 2012, he cited the Book of Genesis, arguing that humans aren’t “able to change what [God] is doing in the climate.” It could also be that he’s received more than $2 million in donations from fossil-fuel interests over the course of his congressional career, with his biggest donors being Koch Industries and Murray Energy.

Kelcy Warren CEO OF ENERGY TRANSFER PARTNERS

Billionaire Texan and Republican mega-donor Kelcy Warren is the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline (which extends the DAPL into Texas), and several other terminals across North America. The DAPL and the ETCO have sprung several leaks — including a 4,998-gallon spill in Tennessee in 2017 — while another pipeline, Rover, spilled 2 million gallons of drilling fluid into Ohio wetlands, one of several of that pipeline’s environmental violations. Warren has pushed to expand despite the leaks — including a move to double the capacity of the Dakota Access — and quipped in 2018 that two activists who drilled holes in an empty pipeline should be “removed from the gene pool.”

Daniel Jorjani SOLICITOR OF THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

Jorjani first worked for the DOI during George W. Bush’s presidency, a tenure that included a stint counseling for Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett, who in 1997 compared environmentalism to Marxism in its restriction of individual rights. He later went to work for the Charles Koch Institute and served as a general counsel for the Koch-funded Freedom Partners, which doled out millions to conservative politicians and causes, including deregulating the fossil-fuel industry. Since joining Trump’s DOI as solicitor, Jorjani has issued several controversial legal opinions, including one allowing mining companies to set up shop near Minnesota’s Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness, which had been protected under the Obama administration, and another shielding energy companies whose operations killed protected birds. “The way Interior has acted under the Trump administration is the textbook definition of a political cartel, using state resources to help special interests,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said.

“It sure looks to me like Mr. Jorjani has been a key member of the cartel.”

ROLLING STONE

57

CLIMATE CRISIS

XR in the Netherlands last December

THE NEW ECO-RADICALS

O

last April, an Englishman named Simon Bramwell glued himself to a glass door at Shell’s London headquarters and refused to leave.

Bramwell, 47, is a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, a two-year-old climate-activist group dedicated to the belief that real change will only come through mass civil disobedience. For the next 10 days, XR, as the group is known for short, launched a series of coordinated actions targeting several sites throughout London — blocking traffic outside the stock exchange, interrupting train service at Canary Wharf, and generally bringing the city’s business to a snarling standstill.

The atmosphere was more jovial street fair than window-smashing anarchist mob. Activists

58

NE MONDAY MORNING

ROLLING STONE

brought potted trees to the middle of Waterloo Bridge and danced to a samba band while shutting down Parliament Square. More than 1,000 people ended up being arrested — teenage students, octogenarian retirees, teachers, construction workers, doctors and nurses, and a 41-yearold marine biologist who was seven-months pregnant — many of them for the first time.

Extinction Rebellion is part of a new generation of activists treating global warming not simply as an environmental problem, but an existential one — and amplifying their tactics accordingly. With the science growing increasingly dire, and the world’s governments still refusing to act (or worse, denying there’s a problem), marches and calls to Congress, these groups say, aren’t enough. “Unfortunately, people just don’t pay attention to petitions,” says Liam Geary

Baulch, 26, an action coordinator with XR. “Movements win by causing disruption.”

Or as another activist put it: “You can have a million people marching each week and no one cares. But you block a road, people take notice.”

XR has positioned itself in explicit opposition to older, more established groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, whom XR views as insufficiently confrontational for the crisis at hand. One of XR’s very first actions was to occupy Greenpeace’s office in London, where protesters delivered cake and flowers to the staff while simultaneously imploring them to up their game. “Failure to do things differently, when everything is failing,” an XR statement said, “can only be described as complicity.”

Greenpeace, of course, is no slouch in the law-breaking department, with a long history

ANA FERNANDEZ/ECHOES WIRE/BARCROFT MEDIA/GETTY IMAGES

The fiery activists of Extinction Rebellion reject the environmental protests of old for campaigns of mass civil disobedience and disruption BY JOSH EELLS

of provocative actions and hard-won victories.

But even some leaders acknowledge that their more targeted, small-scale approach — while effective — has been outpaced and dwarfed by the sheer enormity of the problem. “The movement has evolved because it wasn’t working,” Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace USA, has said. “The science is stronger than ever, and we’re still losing.” Now, even Greenpeace is starting to take a page from XR’s civil-disobedience book, co-organizing Jane Fonda’s Fire Drill Fridays, in which the actress and her supporters get arrested the first Friday of each month.

At first blush, the concept of a “rebellion” to combat climate change might sound extreme.

But given both the incomprehensible scale of the catastrophe and the inertia we must overcome, it also seems almost comically pointless to, for example, stand outside a grocery store holding a clipboard, asking people if they have a minute for the environment. If society is going to change as drastically and urgently as we need it to, some level of painful disruption seems necessary.

But how much? At one end of the spectrum, emails and petitions seem too easy to ignore. But disrupt too much — start getting people fired because they can’t make it to work on time, or prevent an ambulance from reaching a hospital — and you risk turning off the exact people whose support you need. What, then, is the proper degree of nuisance for a climate activist? How far is too far — and how far is not nearly far enough?

In some ways, this new breed of aggressive climate activists hearkens back to the earliest environmental radicals who broke the law in defense of the planet. Although groups like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front had much narrower goals (wildlife conservation, stopping animal testing) and much more destructive tactics (vandalism, firebombing), the challenge they faced was more or less the same. “It is not enough to write letters to congressmen, deliver sermons, make speeches, or write books,” author and activist Edward Abbey wrote way back in 1983. “The Earth that sustains us is being destroyed. . . . We need more heroes and heroines — about a million of them.”

“Yes . . . we must continue to take part in political action,” Abbey added. “But at some point we must also be prepared to put our bodies on the line.”

E

was started in Stroud, a quaint, bohemian town (population 30,000) in the rolling hills of southern England. Several members had roots in the Occupy movement; others were vets of anti-fracking and air-pollution campaigns. But they all agreed that what they’d been doing wasn’t working. They devised a name for their group that would be XTINCTION REBELLION

alarming on purpose, to jar people out of com- Ukraine. (He’s joked that he has a Ph.D. “in how placency. For a logo, they chose the extinction to cause trouble effectively.”) “We have to be symbol: an hourglass — as in, time is running out. clear,” Hallam has written. “Conventional cam“I think [XR] really came out of a sense of frus- paigning does not work. Sending emails, giving tration and a deep grief that so many different money, going on A-to-B marches. Many wonderenvironmental groups had tried so many things, ful people have dedicated years of their lives to and it’s still getting worse,” Baulch says. “Maybe all this, but it’s time to be honest . . . You cannot it’s time to take bigger risks.” overcome entrenched power by persuasion and From the start, the group set out to adopt the information. You can only do it by disruption.” so-called civil-resistance model — forcing change “We need to get arrested,” Hallam writes in by peacefully breaking the law. According to its his book. “Tens of thousands of us. No more proresearch, history’s most successful mass upris- tests or petitions. Instead, nonviolent disobediings — from the American civil rights movement ence, lots of it and on a large scale. Close down to the British suffragettes to the Arab Spring — cities until the politicians take action.” had some key things in common. First, they XR’s public debut came in October 2018, when were absolutely nonviolent. Second, they in- a few dozen activists, including Greta Thunberg, volved a critical mass of people gathering in a gathered in front of a crowd of 2,000 at the U.K.’s capital city, where the media and power reside. Parliament and issued a “Declaration of RebelAnd third, they broke the law and got arrested. lion.” They had three demands: First, that we “Politicians seem to be much more afraid of as a society collectively tell the truth about how large numbers of people getting arrested than fucked we are. Second, that the government a small number of people doing a higher-risk commit to reducing greenhouse emissions to thing,” says Baulch. “The idea was, how can we net-zero by 2025. And third, that Britain estabget people to move from being concerned, to lish a democratic Citizens’ Assembly — free from saying, ‘I’m going to make a sacrifice. I’m going corruption and special interests — to best decide to risk legal action and sit down in the road.’ how to deal with the threat of climate change.

In a way, we were lowering Baulch was one of a the bar for entry by saying dozen XR activists arrestyou don’t need special skills ed that day. “It was really like driving a boat. So rathimportant that we showed er than have people saying, our strategy from the begin‘Oh, those environmenning,” he says. But it was six talists over there, they’re months later that XR truly really brave, they’re doing entered the mainstream, Extinction it for us,’ this was about with its massive protests Rebellion ‘How do we make this evin April 2019. Tens of thourebellion.global eryone’s concern? How do sands of regular people, Find a schedule of we make it so everyone is from elementary schoolXR events, local implicated.’ ” ers to nonagenar ians, groups, and where “There’s something mahelped lock down locations to join a protest. terially different about throughout London. “To be going on a march on a Sathonest, I didn’t think we’d Sunrise urday morning versus going be able to occupy any of the Movement out and getting arrested,” sites for more than a day,” sunrisemovement.org says Clare Farrell, 37, anBaulch says. “And someSunrise ranks the other XR co-founder. “It’s how we managed to occupresidential candidates’ environmental about calling out the govpy all of them for at least records. They also ernment — saying the social a week.” list local politicians contract is broken, and this The campaign cost Lonwho back the Green is a dereliction of your pridon more than $20 milNew Deal, and you mary duty to protect your lion in police overtime, can find opportunicitizens.” plus untold millions more ties to volunteer.

XR’s strategy is most fully in lost productivity. The aclaid out in a manifesto by tion won huge attention for co-founder Roger Hallam, XR and, more important, called Common Sense for widespread public support. the 21st Century. Hallam, a 53-year-old organic- Within a month, Parliament had given into their farmer-turned-academic, did his doctoral work first demand and declared a climate emergency. on the history of civil disobedience and radi- There are three key things to note about the civcal movements — from Gandhi and the strug- il-resistance model as practiced by XR. First, gle for Indian independence to the revolution in it isn’t all doom and gloom. The [Cont. on 97]

GET INVOLVED

ROLLING STONE

59

CLIMATE CRISIS

JANE FIGHTS ON She’s been an activist for five decades, and even at 82, Jane Fonda is still willing to put her body on the line for the sake of the planet

BY STEPHEN RODRICK

O

winter day, Jane Fonda pops out of a side room, looking every bit the Hollywood celebrityactivist that Trumpistas hate. The blond hair someone once described as needing its own agent is perfect, and her white blouse is stylish. She cradles her lapdog Tulea in her arms.

We are at the Wing, a women’s workplace in West Hollywood, for a talk on the climate crisis.

It doesn’t seem like Tulea has a speaking role.

Instead, Fonda hands her to a friend and sits on a stool near a microphone with climate activist Lauren Davis. The 500 or so women and four men give her an ovation. Fonda smiles and then does something contrary to the movie-star stereotype: She drops serious knowledge.

“I’m more scared because, on a granular level, things are starting to unravel,” says Fonda, a twotime Oscar winner. She then makes a persuasive argument for cutting emissions by 50 percent in the next 10 years because, well, we really have no choice.

And if we don’t?

“There will be 200 million climate refugees.”

She pauses for a moment. “And we now have a migration program that says nobody can come in. When you go home tonight, just lie in bed and imagine what this means.”

Fonda has been an activist for 50 years, starting with the anti-war movement. Along the way she has advocated for female reproductive rights, opposed the Iraq War, and stood in solidarity with Native Americans at Standing Rock.

Her journey began while she was living in Paris in the 1960s, dissatisfied with her life as wife to libertine French director Roger Vadim. She

60

N A RECENT

ROLLING STONE

knew next to nothing about the Vietnam War, but what she saw horrified her. So she read Jonathan Schell’s The Village of Ben Suc, an account of the erasing of a Vietnamese village by American troops. That led to full-time activism involving Fonda being smuggled into American bases to meet with anti-war soldiers and then traveling to North Vietnam, where two weeks of productive work was reduced to her being labeled Hanoi Jane when she was photographed smiling while sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. Fonda was labeled a traitor, with conservatives calling for her to be charged with treason.

Her path to environmentalism has been similar. She says she was rejuvenated by her friend Naomi Klein’s On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal and was, once again, horrified.

“There aren’t two sides to this story anymore,” says Fonda as the women sit silent. “Ninetyseven percent of the climate scientists agree that we are facing a potential catastrophe. But there’s hope that we can do something about it.”

Fonda is fond of the grand gesture — e.g., her Hanoi trip — so she called her friend Annie Leonard, the director of Greenpeace. Now 82, Fonda offered to camp for a year in front of the White House. Leonard politely declined, and Fonda went in a different direction. Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate Fridays, Fonda came up with the idea of Fire Drill Fridays, where activists would protest against a different climate calamity — whether it be new fossil-fuel licenses or the proliferation of plastics in our oceans — that would end with civil disobedience. Fonda went out and bought a stylish red coat so she could serve as the beacon of the fire drills. “It’s the last new item of clothing I’m ever

going to buy,” Fonda tells me. “Well, except for maybe underwear.”

What started as a small protest transformed into a minor phenomenon in a few months.

She told newbies to eat a good meal before arrest because there was no telling how long they might be held. Fonda was arrested five times — “The plastic handcuffs are much less comfortable than the old kind” — and found herself in holding cells with Americans a third her age, from every background. Soon, Fonda had stars like Joaquin Phoenix asking to join. It also broke Fonda out of a psychological funk.

“The minute that I got to D.C. and started meeting with all of these activists, and some of them were 13 years old, the depression and the anxiety went away,” Fonda says. “I never really realized so directly how much that affects me.”

After the talk, Fonda strokes Tulea and sits in a plush white chair with a view of Santa Monica Boulevard. I want to give her a moment to catch her breath, but she jumps right in. I can’t tell if Fonda is joking when she mentions asking Netflix exec Ted Sarandos if they could delay shooting the last season of Grace and Frankie, her comedy with Lily Tomlin, for more activism.

“He said the contracts had already been signed,” Fonda deadpans. Then she smiles.

“I’m back here now in L.A., and it’s business as usual, and I’m going to work. But I’m still doing marches, so I haven’t sunk back into depression.”

Fonda’s activism isn’t generic; she is working for specific changes. She was scheduled later in the week to meet with California Gov. Gavin Newsom to push for the banning of fracking and closing oil wells that are within 2,500 feet of residences. She is also advocating for California

rejoinder. “I realized during these four months, two-thirds of the peoFonda at a protest in L.A. “I look back at ple were women. And the women all the people that tended to be older women, because wanted to kill me,” what the fuck do we have to lose?” she says. “Where She insists that after Grace and are they now?”

Frankie wraps she is going to take two years off to just fight the climate crisis. “I’ll be almost 84. I don’t know what kind of parts I could get at that age, so I may never work again. I don’t know.”

I remind Fonda that she has described 1968, with the Tet Offensive and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, as “apocalyptic.” Does she feel that same way now?

Fonda answers simply, which is not her nature. “Way worse,” she says. “We’re living at a time that’s never happened before. Humankind has never been faced with global catastrophe.”

A

to stop issuing new fossil-fuel exploration permits, reasoning that if California weans itself off gasoline, it’s not much of a victory if the state just starts exporting oil to developing countries or converting petroleum into more soda bottles.

“Exxon recently said publicly, ‘Our future is in plastic,’ ” says Fonda. “If you could read what I’ve been reading about what plastic is doing to the ocean, you would not sleep anymore.”

Despite her legendary career, Fonda has often talked about her need for male approval, ranging from her father, Henry Fonda, to her three husbands, including the tycoon Ted Turner and the late activist Tom Hayden. “I feel that I’m liberated from the men in my life,” says Fonda, although she still finds herself wondering, “What would Tom say?” about Fire Drill Fridays.

Regarding her age and gender, Fonda has a sharp

PHOTOGRAPH BY Yana Yatsuk

GET INVOLVED Fire Drill Fridays firedrillfridays.com janefonda.com

After leading protests in Washington, D.C., last fall, Fonda has taken the fight to California.

Check the web pages above to see where she’s protesting next, how you can start your own fire drill and demand local action.

FEW DAYS LATER, on

a sunny L.A. day that could delude you into thinking all is fine with the world, Fonda is outside City Hall in her red coat and red hat. She gives 97-year-old Norman Lear a hug and waves to Joaquin Phoenix, who is here for the first California Fire Drill Friday. She speaks against a backdrop of anti-fracking and fossil-fuel posters, and one guy waving a “Hanoi Jane Lock Her Up” sign. Fonda doesn’t see or doesn’t care. Her voice quavers with emotion.

“Oh, my God, I keep looking around and seeing faces of people I love so much,” she says. She doesn’t remain sentimental for long. She hits her point on California being the front line for climate change. “We can have all the solar panels in the world, but if we allow fossil-fuel companies to continue to drill, we’re going to cancel out all the gains we make with renewable energy.”

She then leads the crowd on a march to Maverick Natural Resources, which operates a large number of California oil-and-gas wells. They take over the lobby, and Fonda proclaims, “We are here at Maverick to send a message to California leadership that we need to choose our communities over fossil-fuel companies.”

Between marches and speeches, I ask her what keeps her protesting in the face of Trump, advancing years, and the billions that corporations spend to thwart progress.

“You just have to go on. It’s funny, because I look back at all the people that wanted to kill me,” says Fonda with a sly grin. “People who tried to pass resolutions to keep me from going into their state, Nixon who wanted to get me on treason. Where are they now?”

She points straight forward with her hand as if issuing a command.

“You’ve got to take a leap of faith.”

ROLLING STONE

61

CLIMATE CRISIS

RISING TIDES, TROUBLED WATERS

The ocean is undergoing unprecedented changes.

What does it mean for marine life, the planet, and us?

DAVE FLEETHAM/NEWSCOM

BY JEFF GOODELL

62

ROLLING STONE

A giant kelp forest off Santa Barbara Island

ROLLING STONE

63

CLIMATE CRISIS

T

at first.

In the summer of 2013, a highpressure ridge settled over a Texas-size area in the northern Pacific, pushing the sky down over the ocean like an invisible lid. The winds died down, and the water became weirdly calm. Without waves and wind to break up the surface and dissipate heat, warmth from the sun accumulated in the water, eventually raising the temperature by 5 degrees Fahrenheit — a huge spike for the ocean.

When scientists noticed this temperature anomaly in the satellite data, they had never seen anything like it. Everyone knew about heat waves on land, but in the ocean? “As the Earth heats up, the ocean is changing in very dramatic ways,” says Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist and former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “It is less predictable, and we are seeing more surprises. The heat waves are one of those surprises.”

Nick Bond, a climatologist at the University of Washington, nicknamed the Pacific heat wave “the Blob,” after a campy 1958 sci-fi movie about a gelatinous monster that arrives on Earth in a meteor and eats up a small town. But this Blob would turn out to be far more deadly than anything Hollywood imagined.

The hot water killed the phytoplankton — a form of microscopic algae — that live in the top few hundred feet of the ocean. The tiny organisms that feast on them starved, including krill, the small shrimplike creatures that swarm the ocean by the billions and are the preferred food for whales, salmon, seabirds, and many other creatures. The population of herring and sardines, an important food source for many larger fish and marine mammals, also declined.

By killing phytoplankton, the Blob disrupted the entire Pacific food chain.

Over the next two years, it drifted down the coast of Alaska to California, eventually responsible for thousands of whale and sea lion strandings on beaches along the coast; the collapse of the Alaska cod fishery; the bankruptcy of fishermen and worker layoffs at fish-processing plants; the vanishing of great kelp forests on the Pacific coast; and the starvation and death of a billion seabirds — the largest single mass mortality of seabirds ever recorded. Dead murres littered beaches like washed-up plastic bottles.

And its destruction was not limited to the ocean: The Blob changed the weather on the Pacific coast, pushing heat inland and altering rainfall patterns, contributing to the California drought. “It raised temperatures on the coast all the way from British Columbia down to Southern California,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scien-

64

/

HE BLOB WENT UNNOTICED

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

A dead whale in how tightly all life on Earth is linked tist at UCLA. The big question is how Pacifica, California, to the ocean. Because we live on land, much the Blob accelerated wildfires; 2015, amid an ocean we often think of the climate crisis as 2017-18 saw historic blazes, including heat wave that a terrestrial event. But as the planet the Camp Fire in Northern California, disrupted the food heats up, it’s what happens in the the largest in the state’s history, which chain in the Pacific ocean that will have the biggest imburned more than 150,000 acres and pact on our future. killed at least 85 people. Swain says the Blob increased nighttime temperatures in the western third of the state, where EARTH WAS NOT BORN with an ocean. Water arrived many of the wildfires flared. “Firefighters will here from the cold depths of space with icy tell you that’s really important, because wildasteroids and comets, which bombarded the fires often lie down at night, burning more slowplanet during the first few million years of its ly and behaving less erratically, becoming less existence. It’s been a watery world ever since. dangerous to approach for human crews. While Today, 97 percent of the Earth’s water is in the the Blob was off the coast, that didn’t happen.” ocean, which covers more than 70 percent of All in all, the Blob was a slow-rolling climate the planet. The ocean was the petri dish for the catastrophe. It’s also compelling evidence of creation of life, and we carry that early history

IMAGINECHINA/NEWSCOM

within us. The salt content of our blood plasma is similar to the salt content of seawater. “The bones we use to hear with were once gill bones of sharks,” says Neil Shubin, professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago and author of Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body. “Our hands are modified fish fins, and the genes that build our basic body architecture are shared with worms and fish.”

Despite our intimate connection to the sea, for most of human history the ocean has been as strange to us as a distant planet, a realm of monsters and mayhem. Humans stuck close to the shore, mostly, and our ignorance about the ocean was profound. It still is. Scientists have only a vague understanding of exactly how ocean currents are driven, or how ocean tem-

peratures impact cloud formation, or what creatures thrive in the depths. Far more people have been to the moon, which is 240,000 miles above us, than have been to the deepest part of the ocean, which is seven miles down. Eighty percent of the ocean remains unmapped, unobserved, unexplored. Marine biologists don’t know how sharks sleep or an octopus learns to open a jar.

But scientists know enough to know that the ocean is in trouble. Largely because of overfishing, 90 percent of the large fish that were here in the 1950s are now gone. One metric ton of plastic enters the ocean every four seconds (at this rate, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050). But the biggest problem, thanks largely to our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels, is that

the ocean is heating up fast. The past five years have been the five warmest ever measured in the ocean, with 2019 the hottest ever. According to one study, the amount of heat being added to the ocean is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and night.

Until now, the ocean has been the hero of the climate crisis — about 90 percent of the additional heat we’ve trapped from burning fossil fuels has been absorbed by it. “Without the ocean, the atmosphere would be a lot hotter than it already is,” says Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But the heat the ocean absorbed has not magically vanished — it’s just stored in the depths and radiated out later. By absorbing and slowly releasing heat, the ocean reduces the volatility of our climate, cushioning the highs and lows as temperatures change from day to night, winter to summer. It also means the heat will continue to seep out for centuries to come, slowing any human efforts to cool the planet.

“The ocean is the main driver of our climate system,” Hans-Otto Pörtner, a scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, tells me. One of the central functions of the ocean, Pörtner says, is to redistribute heat from the tropics toward the poles via deep currents like the Gulf Stream system, which begins in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, flows across the equator, up to the Arctic and back again. “Even small changes in that system can have large impacts on things like the size and intensity of storms, rainfall patterns, sea-level rise,” says Pörtner, “and of course the habitats of all the creatures that live in the ocean.”

The ocean is also one of the main drivers of many regional economies. In Alaska, one of the fastest-changing parts of the planet, the seafood industry employs more than 50,000 workers, earning $2 billion in total annual income. Across the U.S., fishing, ocean farming, shipping, ocean tourism and recreation support 3.25 million jobs and contribute about $300 billion to the U.S.’s annual gross domestic product. No one thinks this blue economy is going to vanish overnight, but as fish and other species migrate to cool waters or die off from temperature changes, there can be profound impacts on local fisheries — just ask the cod fishermen in Alaska, or shrimpers in the Gulf of Maine, who have been wiped out by rapidly warming waters in the Atlantic.

Pörtner is one of the lead authors of a recent report on the ocean and cryosphere by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was the IPCC’s first report to focus specifically on the world’s oceans and ice — it was a massive project, the work of 105 scientists over a three-year period. There is a lot of nuance in the report, but the basic message is clear: In the coming decades, the ocean will get hotter, more acidic, with less oxygen and less biodiversity. Seas will

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

65

CLIMATE CRISIS

rise, flooding coastal cities. Ocean circulation patterns will shift, driving big and unpredictable changes in the weather, with scary implications for the global food supply. The report’s summary was blunt: “Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions.”

M

ONTEREY BAY is a crescent on the Northern California coast, a place haunted by the ghosts of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. The old sardine canneries are now T-shirt shops and touristy restaurants. From the pier, you can watch sea otters playing in the surf and, if you’re lucky, whales breeching just offshore. A deep canyon delivers cold, nutrientrich waters into the bay, creating one of the most diverse ecosystems in the Pacific, including giant kelp beds that grow along the coast all the way up to Alaska. In good times, these kelp beds are teeming with life — otters, seals, sharks, rockfish, lingcod. “The kelp beds are the rainforests of the Pacific,” Kyle Van Houtan, the chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, tells me.

But like everything in the ocean, the kelp beds are changing fast. On a recent Saturday morning, I pulled on scuba gear and jumped in the water near Monterey to have a look for myself.

What I saw was not the rainforest of the Pacific.

Instead, I was greeted with nothing but rock and water and hundreds of purple sea urchins, their thorny spikes like medieval armor. A voracious horde had invaded the once-magnificent kelp forest and devoured everything (“purple urchins are the cockroaches of the sea,” one scientist told me), leaving only some empty abalone shells, a rockfish poking around, and a few pathetic kelp stipes. And this spot is just one fragment of a bigger picture. As a result of the Blob, many of the kelp forests along the coast from California to Oregon have vanished, done in by warming and the army of purple sea urchins, which thrive in a hotter world.

“If a 200-mile-long stretch of forest in the California mountains suddenly died, people would be shocked and outraged,” says Laura Rogers-Bennett, a marine scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, who works at the Bodega Marine Lab just up the coast. “We’re talking about the collapse of an entire ecosystem. But because it happened in the ocean, nobody notices.”

Rogers-Bennett was one of the first scientists to understand the impact of marine heat waves like the Blob. In 2013, she was diving in Northern California when she saw a sea star that looked like it was melting. “When I touched it, its skin came off in my hand,” she recalls. And it wasn’t just one sea star, she discovered. This was the beginning of a mass die-off of 20 species of sea stars in the Pacific from a condition known

66

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

as “sea star wasting disease,” which is linked to warming waters. With the loss of sea stars, which are one of the main predators of purple sea urchins, the urchin population exploded and devoured the kelp forests. “It’s very scary,” Rogers-Bennett says. “The Blob shows you how fast a tipping point can happen.”

In the past decade, scientists have detected marine heat waves around the world: The Mediterranean was hit in 2012, 2015, and 2017. In 2018, a marine heat wave appeared off the coast of New Zealand and helped spike land temperatures to record highs. Along the coast of Tasmania, giant kelp once stretched over 9 million square meters. Today, thanks to warmer water and an invasion of urchins, the kelp covers fewer than 500,000 meters. Off the Uruguayan coast, a blob of hot water covers 130,000 square miles of ocean, an area nearly twice as big as Uruguay itself. It has caused a massive die-off of clams and mussels, an important food source for tens of thousands of people who live on the coast.

“Last fall, another heat wave started building in the northern Pacific,” says Andrew Leising, a scientist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “It couldn’t come at a worse time — the fisheries are just beginning to recover from the Blob.”

Marine heat waves are driving a massive reorganization of underwater life, with many creatures migrating to cooler waters.

“Right now, you can go diving off the Monterey pier and see spiny lobsters,” says Van Houtan. “They are a subtropical species that are normally found down in Baja. It’s absurd to see them up here.” (Attention swimmers: Van Houtan also says warmer waters are encouraging juvenile great white sharks to linger in the area). At the Bodega Marine Lab, scientists documented 37 species that had never been found so far north before. Bull sharks have been hanging off the coast of North Carolina, 500 miles north of their habitat in Florida. Lobsters have all but vanished from Long Island Sound. These migrations are radically changing underwater ecosystems, as well as the lives of people who depend on healthy fisheries. A recent study by scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, showed that nations in the tropics would be hit hardest by fish migration. By 2100, some countries in northwest Africa could lose half their stocks as fish move to colder water. “If you know you are losing a stock, then the short-term incentive is to overfish it,” said James Salzman, a professor of environmental law at UC Santa Barbara and co-author of the study. “What have you got to lose? The stock’s going to move anyway.”

Marine heat waves are also inflicting massive damage on coral reefs (where they are often called “bleaching events”). Reefs are the most bio-diverse ecosystems on the planet — they occupy less than one percent of the ocean floor, but are home to more than 25 percent of marine life. Reefs are created by millions of coral colonies that build calcium carbonate skeletons.

For the past 100 million years or so, corals have thrived in a happy marriage with microscopic plants called zooxanthellae that live embedded in their tissues. Zooxanthellae produce 85 to 95 percent of corals’ food through photosynthesis.

In return, corals give the plants protection, nutrients, and carbon dioxide, one of the ingredients for photosynthetic food production. This marriage, however, is exquisitely sensitive to changes in ocean temperature. One or two degrees of warming, and the zooxanthellae become toxic to the corals. The corals spit them out like an abusive spouse and eventually starve to death, leaving only their bleached skeletons behind.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the crown jewels of the natural world, has been hit hard by warming. The reef stretches about 1,400 miles along the east coast of Australia — it’s the largest structure built by living organisms on the planet, so big it’s visible from space. Since 1998, the Great Barrier Reef has suffered four bleaching events, including devastating backto-back heat waves in 2016 and 2017.

According to Terry Hughes, a marine scientist at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, 93 percent of the corals in the Great Barrier Reef have been impacted by some level of bleaching. “We’ve now added enough greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that mass bleaching of the reef is at risk every summer,” Hughes says. “It’s like Russian roulette.”

“WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE COLLAPSE OF AN ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM,” SAYS A MARINE SCIENTIST. ”BECAUSE IT WAS IN THE OCEAN, NOBODY NOTICES.”

at a few drops of ocean water under a microscope, you’ll see a wild world of bizarre-looking creatures swimming around, fighting and devouring each other. Many of these animals — forams, pteropods — have thin shells made of calcium carbonate. And thanks to the rising acidity of ocean waters, their shells — like the shells and skeletons of many other creatures in the sea — are slowly dissolving.

Acidification is primarily a consequence of rapidly rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The IPCC report notes that carbon pollution so far has decreased the average ocean pH, which is based on a logarithmic scale, from 8.2 to 8.1, meaning the ocean is 25 percent more acidic today than before the Industrial Revolution.

If we manage to hold global warming to 2 C, IF YOU LOOK

COURTESY OF KATIE SOWUL/CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND WILDLIFE/UC DAVIS

Purple sea urchins — the “cockroaches of the sea” — thrive in a hotter world, and they devour giant kelp forests.

we could limit ocean acidification to 40 percent by 2100. But in a highemissions scenario, the ocean could become 150 percent more acidic than it was before we began burning fossil fuels. In effect, we’re running a giant chemistry experiment in the ocean, and nobody has a clear understanding of how it will turn out.

The increasingly acidic waters in the Pacific are already impacting the shells of Dungeness crabs, jeopardizing the $200 million crabbing industry on the West Coast. To prevent the acidic waters from dissolving those shells, oyster farmers in Oregon and Washington have to raise baby oysters in incubators before planting them on the beach to grow to adulthood.

In lab experiments, scientists have found acidification can do strange things to a fish’s mind. Clown fish, for example, normally stay

close to home in coral reefs. But as the water becomes increasingly acidic, they wander farther and farther away, making them more likely to be eaten. Greater acidity also “impairs their ability to discriminate between the smell of kin and not, and of predators and not,” according to Philip Munday, a professor at the Coral Reef Studies center at James Cook University in Australia.

Over time, the biggest threat from acidification is the impact it could have on the food chain.

Pteropods, a.k.a. “the potato chips of the sea,” are a food source for everything from seabirds to whales. Their thin shells are extremely sensitive to changes in ocean pH. A collapse of the pteropod population would have a domino effect on the entire ocean food chain, especially in the Southern Ocean.

On coral reefs, most of which are already weakened by bleaching events, acidification attacks the calcium skeletons that they build to support themselves. “By midcentury, pretty much every reef in the world will be eroding away,” says Stanford’s Ken Caldeira. That’s astonishing. Coral reefs have been around for about 250 million years, evolving into some of the most complex, diverse, and beautiful living structures on Earth. And yet if nothing changes, within 40 or 50 years, they will be crumbling ruins.

“I think if we stopped emitting C02 tomorrow, some reefs would probably survive,” Caldeira says. “But if we go on a few more decades, I think the reefs are gone. Over geological time scales, they will come back, depending how long it takes the ocean chemistry to recover. But it’s likely to be at least 10,000 years before anyone sees a reef again.”

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

67

CLIMATE CRISIS

S

EA-LEVEL RISE

is driven by a number of physical processes, including the fact that as the ocean warms, its water expands. And even though scientists often talk about “global” sea-level rise as if the ocean were one big bathtub, there is actually considerable local variation due to changes in the tug of gravity from melting ice sheets and the rising or sinking of land along the shore. But for the future of coastal cities, what really matters are two things: the rate of carbon emissions in the coming decades, and how sensitive the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are to the warming from those emissions. Greenland holds enough ice to raise sea levels about 22 feet; Antarctica holds enough to raise them more than 200 feet. According to the IPCC report, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are now contributing 700 percent more to sea levels than two decades ago. In both cases, the ice melt is being driven largely by the warming of the ocean.

On a research expedition I took to Antarctica last year with British and U.S. scientists aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, the big question scientists were trying to answer was how much warm circumpolar deep water was upwelling onto the continental shelf and how much of that warm water was getting beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, melting it from below. “The ocean holds the key,” one scientist told me. “To understand what is happening in West Antarctica, you have to understand what is happening in the Southern Ocean.”

The more scientists learn about ocean and ice-sheet dynamics, the more concerned they get. The latest IPCC assessment puts the range of sea-level rise by 2100 at two feet in a low-emissions scenario, or up to 3.6 feet in a high-emissions scenario, which is about 10 percent higher than predicted in the last IPCC report, in 2018.

But this is, as Pörtner tells me, “a conservative number. We are basing it on what we know, not on processes that we think could happen.”

In fact, virtually every scientist I know who studies sea-level rise thinks the risk is understated, even if they don’t yet have enough data or sophisticated-enough climate models to say by how much. As Richard Alley, a geophysicist at Penn State and one of the most respected ice scientists in the world, recently argued: “It could be two feet of sea-level rise, it could be 15 or 20 feet [by the end of the century]. There is no good to offset the bad. And the chances of something really bad are really there.”

In West Antarctica, the ice sheet is particularly vulnerable to melting from below, due to its contact with ocean water on the edge of the continent and because the ground beneath the ice sheet is a reverse slope — warm ocean water could run down the slope and penetrate deep underneath the glacier, which could begin a cas-

68

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

of the Gulf system is a decades- and centurycading collapse in which enormous sheets of ice scale risk, not an overnight event. But the Gulf begin falling into the sea like a giant pile of ice Stream doesn’t have to collapse to wreak havoc. cubes. A big concern is how much warm circumThe IPCC report noted that the Gulf Stream syspolar deep water is upwelling near Thwaites glatem slowed down 15 percent in the 20th century. cier, a chunk of ice the size of Florida that is In the coming years, the report says, it will likely basically the cork in the bottle for the West Antcontinue to weaken, intensifying storms and arctic Ice Sheet. If it goes, the rest of the glabringing frigid weather to Northern Europe, as ciers behind it could collapse quickly, raising well as shifting the path of the West African monsea levels more than 10 feet. How fast could this soon season, which 300 million people in one happen? No one knows for sure. of the poorest, most climate-vulnerable areas In Antarctica, small changes in ocean temdepend on to grow food. perature have big implications. A change of even one or two degrees in the waters that wash up against the base of the glaciers could cause the NATURE IS CHANGE. But humans have stomped on ice to melt. “Before our trip last year, I think I the accelerator. We are dumping carbon dioxwas already convinced that extensive retreat of ide into the atmosphere about 10 times faster Thwaites is almost inevitable,” Robert Larter, a than volcanoes did 250 million years ago, which marine geophysicist and the chief scientist on cooked the planet, triggering the End-Permian my trip to Antarctica, told me. “But the more reextinction that wiped out 96 percent of the spesearch results I see from our trip and others, the cies on Earth and turned the ocean into a lifemore certain I become.” less, slimy Jacuzzi. “No one knows Sea-level rise is not the only where our modern experiment potential consequence of melting with geochemistry will lead,” glaciers. Thirty years ago, Walwrites Peter Brannen in The Ends lace Broecker, a pioneering cliof the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, mate scientist at Columbia UniLethal Oceans, and Our Quest to versity’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Understand Earth’s Past Mass ExObservatory, saw a very different tinctions, “but in the End-PermRebuild climate catastrophe developing in ian, massive injections of greencoral reefs the North Atlantic. Broecker unhouse gases into the atmosphere coral.org derstood that as the Greenland led straight to the cemetery.”

Donate to the Coral Ice Sheet melted, it would dump Despite all the massive climate Reef Alliance, an huge volumes of fresh water into impacts that are transforming the NGO working to the North Atlantic. This would ocean now, it’s a long way from establish 45 adaptive interfere with circulation of the dead. “If we stopped putting carreefscapes around the Gulf Stream system, which debon in the atmosphere today, world by 2045. pends on the sinking of dense, most of the species in the ocean Support salty water in the Atlantic to drive would bounce back,” says Calfisheries the great deepwater current that deira. “It might take some time, oceanconservancy.org circulates warm water from the but they will make it back.” Unfortropics up to the North Atlantic. tunately, we are not going to stop Join the Ocean Conservancy’s “The Gulf Stream system is why putting carbon into the atmocampaign to pass the East Coast of the U.S. is much sphere today. And it’s less clear Congress’ Climatecolder than the western coast of that, even if we did, we could staReady Fisheries Act Europe,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, bilize the ice sheets. But we can to help fisheries a climate scientist at the Potsdam certainly reduce the risk of cataadjust to the changing Institute for Climate Research strophic collapse. marine migrations. in Germany. “If the Gulf system Tragic images of sea turtles were to slow down or stop, it wrapped in fishing lines and dead Make better would have a major impact on the whales on the beach with hunseafood weather of the Northern Hemidreds of plastic shopping bags in choices sphere.” Broecker (who died in their stomachs have helped peoseafoodwatch.org 2019) hypothesized that the shutple connect the dots between Check out the down of the system could plunge what they buy at Target and what Monterey Bay Northern Europe into a reign of happens in the ocean. As a DemoAquarium’s Seafood snow and ice — which is more or cratic presidential candidate, ElizWatch program and less the scenario that plays out in abeth Warren championed “the learn how to make the most sustainThe Day After Tomorrow, a cheesy Blue New Deal,” which addresses able, ocean-friendly 2003 disaster flick. everything from streamlined perfood choices.

“The Hollywood scenario is mitting for new offshore wind not going to happen,” says Rahmfarms to climate-smart managestorf. In his view, the shutdown ment of wild fisheries. Globally,

GET INVOLVED

KYDD POLLACK/ARC CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR CORAL REEF STUDIES

A healthy reef in Palmyra Atoll. “By there is a big push by scientists and gry people. We can adapt to changes. mid century, pretty conservationists for a U.N. treaty As the water warms, we can move. As much every reef that would protect 30 percent of the the ocean chemistry changes, we can will be eroding,” says world’s ocean from human activity by change our practices. Ocean farming one scientist.

2030 (right now, only about two perwill produce the seafood of the future, cent is protected). The rise of aquaculand it’s starting now.” ture gives hope that, if it’s done intelliFormer NOAA director Jane Lubgently, the ocean can become a steady source of chenco says it’s time to stop thinking of the low-carbon, high-protein food. Matthew Moretti, ocean as a victim of climate change and start the 36-year-old CEO of Bangs Island Mussels in thinking of it as a powerful part of the solution.

Portland, Maine, grows 300,000 pounds of musA recent study that Lubchenco co-authored sugsels and 100,000 pounds of kelp each year on gests that by developing renewable energy from seven acres of ocean. Mussels, which grow on the ocean, including tidal power and offshore fuzzy ropes that hang down from the company’s wind farms, as well as eating more fish and less rafts in Casco Bay, filter the water, removing nired meat and substituting kelp for traditional trogen and carbon. Kelp, a highly nutritious food feeds for farm animals, as much as one-fifth of that is increasingly popular in everything from the carbon-emission reductions needed to hit pickled salads to animal feed, grows nearby, the 1.5 C target could be found in the ocean. To sucking up carbon and de-acidifying the water Lubchenco, we have spent far too long focused around the mussels. “Aquaculture is hope,” says on the problems and not enough on the soluMoretti. “I see so much potential to do a lot of tions. “For the last few decades, the narrative good, to produce a lot of food for a lot of hunabout the ocean is that it’s too big to fix,” says

Lubchenco. “Coral bleaching, gross plastic pollution, ocean acidification, heat waves, collapsing fisheries. It’s been one disaster after another.

But now a new narrative is beginning to emerge, one that recognizes how central the oceans are to mitigating climate change, to adapting to climate change, to providing food security, to so many things that we care about. The new narrative is far more hopeful, and it says the ocean is too big to ignore.”

But we are in a race against time. Every ton of coal and every barrel of oil we burn heats up the atmosphere a little bit more, and that heat makes its way into the ocean, changing currents in nearly imperceptible ways, bringing new droughts and storms, shifting rainfall patterns, melting ice, eroding coral reefs, spawning toxic algae blooms, and moving the ocean a little closer to a world dominated by jellyfish and slime. “The future of the ocean,” says marine biologist and ocean activist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, “is in our hands.”

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

69

CLIMATE CRISIS

BUILDING A GREEN NEW DEAL T

essentially, no Green New Deal before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was just a slogan rolling around the mouths of newspaper columnists and environmental activists until the 30-year-old political phenom put her star power behind it. Just a month after she was sworn in as the youngest congresswoman in history, Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey debuted a 14-page resolution outlining the principles she hopes will form the foundation for a slew of climate legislation over the next decade. A jobs program to save the planet shouldn’t be all that controversial, but skeptics along the political spectrum found something to hate. The concept was ridiculed by Republicans even as some attempted to co-opt it (Rep. Matt Gaetz’s Green Real Deal), and deemed too audacious by liberal Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But the Green New Deal’s ambition was always the point, and in just one year, it has already dramatically changed the way Washington talks about the climate crisis. In January, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a plan committing to a 100 percent cleanenergy economy by 2050 — three times longer than the Green New Deal’s 10-year timeline, but a quantum leap from the toothless regulations that typified past policy conversations. Ocasio-Cortez sat down with ROLLING STONE to reflect on her first year in office, her climate anxieties, and her blueprint to fix what’s broken in our country.

70

HERE WAS,

ROLLING STONE

The congresswoman on her vision for a postfossil-fuel future and an economy that works for working people

BY TESSA STUART PHOTOGR APH BY DANIEL DORSA

ROLLING STONE

71

CLIMATE CRISIS

A lot of people have an “Oh, shit” moment with climate change — something that wakes them up to the scale and severity of the crisis.

What was your moment?

I think it happened in two phases. The first moment happened at Standing Rock. I was there with native communities and leaders. It was their land, secured via treaty with the United States, that we decided to violate because a fossil-fuel company had essentially purchased our politics. Just standing there, [seeing] people organized against these massive tanks, these armed guards. [But] it wasn’t the U.S. military that people were standing up against; it was a militarized corporation — a fossil-fuel corporation. That, to me, was the “Oh, shit” moment in terms of what it’s actually going to take — because it’s not just about the science, it’s about the systems that protect all of the power that goes into defying the science.

But in terms of the cost and the scale, the second “Oh, shit” moment happened with Hurricane Maria the following year. I lost my grandfather in the aftermath of Maria.

I didn’t know that. What happened?

He was in a hospital in the storm, on the Western half of the island. And these are the kinds of casualties that are not counted. Power went out across the entire island, and roads and bridges, infrastructure was so compromised. Medicines couldn’t be transported. And my grandfather passed away while he was in the hospital. And the thing is, I can’t say, “Oh, the hurricane killed my grandfather.” Right? But we don’t know. Did he not get medicine in time? There was little to no power, or communication to my family. This was also a time when the government was saying that only 64 people died. We know that the number is actually in the thousands.

The Green New Deal was a top priority for you when you came to Congress. There was an idea that the resolution was worded vaguely to bring in the broadest possible coalition.

How confident are you about getting a broad coalition signed onto specific details?

The Green New Deal [was] worded very deliberately, because what was very important for us is that we had to put out a comprehensive vision with underlying principles. No matter what kind of policy we’re talking about, it had to be bound by three things. The first is a drawdown of carbon emissions on a 10-year timeline. The second is the creation of jobs — having this be industrial policy to create millions of jobs and provide an economic stimulus for working people, not for Wall Street. And the third was to center frontline communities, to make sure that this policy was not just prosperous and scientifically sound but that it was just.

Staff writer TESSA STUART profiled Stacey Abrams in the March issue.

72

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

Bringing that broad coalition into agreement on those three core principles is extraordinarily important because it cuts down on a lot of our fights in the future. The traditional divide in climate fights has been an artificial conflict created between labor and environmental organizations, and this resolution rejects that fight outright.

And by adhering to these principles, we have environmental organizations saying, “Listen, we have committed to economic prosperity for everyday people.” And we’ve got labor groups saying, “We have committed to carbon drawdown and centering the most disparately impacted.”

How did you go about getting the first draft of the resolution together?

Well, it was an extremely complicated process because we were committed to drafting legislation that was truly bottom-up. The extra challenge was that even among nonprofits, there’s still something of a hierarchy, right? A lot of D.C. groups can be heavily white or heavily affluent.

We took a lot of input from groups in D.C., but we did a lot of work to reach out to experts in front-line communities. We were able to work with organizations like the Climate Justice Alliance, which brings together indigenous perspectives, black perspectives, Appalachian perspectives. So a lot of it had to do with making sure we were partnering the science and the economics with the realities on the ground.

So much work went into the resolution, then you have this big rollout and the narrative is hijacked by the GOP over the fact sheet [released by your office with language about “farting cows” and supporting people “unwilling to work”]. What was that like?

Well, on one hand, we did know that there was going to be a huge backlash.

I was already six-months deep into a nonstop assault by Murdoch and Fox News. On the other hand, it was intensely frustrating. I had not seen the fact sheet that had gone out — it was an internal document, it had not been approved. I focus a lot on having strong internal systems and discipline on our team, and that was a lapse on something that was critically important. So I’d be lying by saying it wasn’t intensely frustrating. But all the arguments that they ended up with were arguments we knew they were going to run with no matter what. Tired arguments — “Preserving our planet is going to kill our economy” — because the GOP is Chicken Little. Their job is to say the world is ending if we allow any sort of progressive idea to succeed.

I’m curious what you think it would take to have a genuine debate with Republicans about the climate crisis?

Well, it takes [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell being out of office. It takes a new president. It’s going to take a post-Trump world, my belief. But I do think that because they have put so many eggs in this Trump basket, even they are concerned with how deeply leveraged they are with their commitment to the president.

I was on a flight back from Iowa this weekend, and I ran into a Republican congressman and he said, “How’s it going on the ground?” And I told him, “The energy is really great. There’s a lot of grassroots organizing going on, there’s a lot of turnout and a lot of enthusiasm.”

And he said, “Yeah, yeah — Trump is coming next week. So that’s going to bring a lot of energy too.” And I thought that comment was so interesting, because that is where all the energy is: on this one person. The president has the monopoly on energy, which is why the party has so much fealty to him. But when it is so pegged to one individual, that poses a very real problem for them. So while I can see that there’s very little that will be done in a McConnell-Trump world, this legislation was not written for a McConnell-Trump world. The whole goal was to write legislation for 2021.

You’ve spoken about how entrenched the fossil-fuel lobby is, how the Koch brothers essentially purchased the Republican Party.

How have you seen that manifest since you’ve been here?

Republicans will pretend that they are unique individuals committed to certain values, but ultimately it’s a performance because they all vote exactly the same. Most Republicans vote the same way [Iowa Rep.] Steve King votes. Steve King is a white supremacist, and most Republicans — as much as they try to distance themselves from him in rhetoric and appearance — they all vote the same way. So the way that I see it manifest is that they’ll call me “young lady” and they’ll hold the elevator door for me, but they will still vote in ways that will gut our communities and families.

That being said, I do think they’re getting scared. I have seen, in the last year since we introduced the Green New Deal, increasing discomfort with their climate-denial position. At the beginning of last year we were hearing “Climate change is a hoax, the science is not clear,” et cetera. At the beginning of this year — one year later — we’re hearing “We all care about the climate.

It’s important to draw down carbon emissions.

Let’s focus on a business-based approach.” And that shift for the Republican Party is pretty massive. I think it shows how uncomfortable they are getting because they know this is the issue for the future, and they know that they’re increasingly losing the future. And ever since the flood-

“WE’RE NOT INTERESTED IN TURNING OIL BARONS INTO SOLAR BARONS. WE’RE HERE TO MAKE SURE WORKERS ARE CENTERED IN OUR ECONOMY.”

MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

Ocasio-Cortez

ing in the Midwest, they know they’re with Sanders last year, introducing not just losing the future, they’re losa bill to reduce ing the present. carbon emissions What about the Democrats? In in public housing 2009-10, they had a majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate, and they were unable to pass a much more modest climate bill. Can you trust the party to address climate change in a meaningful way?

This is where I find who takes the White House to be important. In terms of the party itself, those basic tendencies are absolutely still there.

There is an extraordinarily pro-corporate wing of the party that will block a lot of meaningful change. If we had the ACA [Affordable Care Act] fight today, we would still have people trying to kill the public option. Back then there was [Senator] Joe Lieberman; that was that clinch vote.

Today it’s [Senator] Joe Manchin — and Manchin is way worse. That’s why you need that muscle from the White House. Obama ultimately saw what was going on and his priority was to win over Republican votes, and that’s where there was this kind of rollover on the public option.

And we didn’t get any Republican votes anyway.

What’s the strategy for pushing a climate agenda forward under a Bernie Sanders presidency versus under a Biden presidency?

Bernie inherently understands those three principles outlined in the Green New Deal. And he’s been making that effort for a very, very long time. He will not be afraid to corral the votes he needs to corral. And I think he acknowledges the inherent bad faith that the Republican Party now operates in, which a lot of members do

not. They have been here a long time, and they think we can get back to the Nineties or something. And that ship has sailed. It is gone. And I think Senator Sanders understands that. Biden doesn’t. He thinks that Trump is an aberration and that once Trump is gone, everything will go back to normal and that he can, I don’t know, play baseball with some guys and win them over. And I just don’t think that that’s the reality anymore. While I understand the deep, deep desire to get past this polarized period, this is the moment that we’re in and we need to deal with it.

It doesn’t mean lean into [the polarization], but it also doesn’t mean to worship bipartisanship for bipartisanship’s sake. The PROMESA Act that gutted Puerto Rico and is the reason why people are dying, was bipartisan. Going to war is bipartisan. The largest tax giveaway before the GOP tax scam was the permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts — that was bipartisan. These are some of the most corrosive pieces of legislation we’ve had in the last decade. And so it’s not just about, “Let’s pass this thing because it has a Republican vote on it.” It’s about, Are we actually improving people’s lives?

In 2016, Hillary Clinton, while talking about transitioning fossil-fuel workers to other jobs, said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and companies out of business.” It didn’t go over very well. What is the strategy for phasing out coal while protecting workers’ jobs?

I’m glad you bring this up because it shows how the Green New Deal approach is fundamentally different than traditional Democratic climate pol-

icy. It is a winning policy. We are winning swing elections on a Green New Deal. Virginia ran on a Green New Deal. The gubernatorial race in Kentucky — he won largely on a Green New Deal message. And the reason for that is because we actually center these communities. And it’s not just, “Oh, here’s a six-month apprenticeship transition plan” and then there’s nothing real for those people. I’ve met with coal workers, and we have committed to bailing out their pensions. Because while all of these coal companies use their workers to get bailout after bailout, once they get that money, they never give it to their workers.

It doesn’t go to those families with black lung. It doesn’t go to fully funding coal miners’ pensions.

And we’re here to have that fight. Because we’re not interested in turning oil barons into solar barons. We’re here to make sure that workers are centered in our economy.

What do you say to people who think Democrats aren’t doing enough on climate and who want to support a Green Party candidate in November?

If you want a true third party — a strong Green Party, independent party, et cetera — you need to actually build the party. The presidency doesn’t do that. You need to make sure that you grow those caucuses. That’s, frankly, what a lot of Democratic Socialists of America members are doing across the country. They’re not trying to mount a third-party presidency. They’re capturing city councils and state assemblies and getting things done from the ground up. That happens to be my take. And I do think that the stakes are too high right now. We need to acknowledge that this regime is authoritarian and it’s a threat to a lot of people, and we need to make sure that we elect a Democrat this year.

Do you think we can continue growing the economy while radically cutting emissions?

It’s a GOP talking point, but there are goodfaith actors who say progress requires a shift away from consumerism and will result in a shrinking GDP. I think it depends on how we measure our economy, right? It does pose a threat to the fossilfuel industry, and that is one of the Republican Party’s main sources of income. So for Republicans it ends a great degree of the economic power they rely on. [But] I think that this transition represents an increase in prosperity for everyday people, because fossil fuels are reliant on a system that is dependent on obscene levels of inequality. This is an extractive economy — you need to extract from land and from people in order to grow.

If you wake up at 3 a.m., freaked out about the climate crisis, what’s on your mind?

I worry about families that don’t have the ability to run away. I worry about the interconnectivity of our systems, the compounding effects of climate change. For example, a huge amount

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

73

CLIMATE CRISIS

of the internet’s infrastructure is on the Eastern Seaboard. Let’s say you have a massive storm — far larger than Hurricane Sandy — and even if it’s temporary, due to the storm, you have flooding of major internet servers and whole portions of the internet go down at the same time that emergency responders are trying to figure out where they need to go. Then airports are flooded so you can’t land with relief materials, and workers can’t get to the airport because mass-transit systems are shut down. Now people can’t eat for 24 to 48 hours. They can’t have access to clean water. I mean, my family has lived through a mass-casualty event: Thousands of people died in Puerto Rico, and that was on one small island.

What happens when you get a major event that hits a population far larger? That keeps me up at night. And Republicans make fun of me for saying I have anxiety around [having] kids. I do.

I was going to ask you about that — how the climate crisis has changed the way you envision your life. Where you’ll live, whether you’ll have kids . . .

I live in and represent a city that is going to experience huge changes in its geography in my lifetime. Just the shape of New York City on a map is going to change dramatically, and that is going to necessitate a lot of people moving around. I was reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, and it talks about the bell curve of possibilities: from the most conservative [estimates], if we cut climate emissions immediately, to [an increase of ] 4 degrees Celsius. Four degrees Celsius means half of the Earth is uninhabitable to human beings. I worry about that.

The fact of the matter is, Mitch McConnell is not going to be alive for that. It’s just math.

I’m sorry to say it. I know a lot of people say it’s crass, but Donald Trump isn’t going to see that world. His grandchildren will, and it’s stressful.

How do you fight that feeling of futility?

How do you keep from getting nihilistic?

I think I get a lot of that from my family. I don’t think it’s optimism. I’m not here to say, “Oh, we’re going to come in and save the day.” But seeing how my family has adapted to a postMaria world — I think what’s happening in Puerto Rico is what a lot of people will experience in 10 years. In one way or another. It’s a possibility.

But the way I’ve seen them adapt and move forward has been helpful to me. It’s not fun by any means, but I do think there’s an aspect where one way or another communities will endure.

But I don’t want to be irresponsible in saying that, because I think they’ll be looking back at us today and thinking about how privileged we were. At any given moment, we are living at the hottest it has ever been and the coolest it will be for a very, very, very long time.

74

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

Ortley Beach, New Jersey, in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy

THE GREEN NEW DEAL IS CHEAP, ACTUALLY

Decarbonizing will cost trillions of dollars, but it’s an investment that will have big returns — for the economy and the environment

O

PPOSITION to the Green New Deal is often framed as a matter of cost. President Trump’s re-election campaign blasted the “radical” plan, claiming it would “cost trillions of dollars, wreck our economy, and decimate millions of energy jobs.”

But science shows that the costs of unchecked global temperature rise are far higher than transitioning to clean energy — which will, in fact, boost the economy. “Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, you have to spend a huge amount of money,’ ” says Mark Jacobson, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Stanford University.

“Well, yeah, there’s an upfront cost, but this is something that pays itself back.”

The price of not acting on climate change is staggering.

The Paris climate accord aims to limit global temperature rise to 2 C. But a recent study in Nature shows that settling for that outcome — rather than a more ambitious limit of 1.5 C — will cost the world $36 trillion in climate damages. Global warming lowers global GDP,

according to a 2019 paper co-authored by Cambridge University economists, who project that “a persistent rise in temperature, changes in precipitation patterns and . . . more volatile weather events” will slow productivity and investment, as well as damage human health. Holding warming to 2 C can limit the negative impact to one percent of global GDP per capita by 2100. But runaway climate change would crater that GDP figure by seven percent worldwide, and by 10.5 percent in the United States.

“Climate change is pain,” Michael Mann, a top climate scientist, recently testified to Congress.

“Anyone who tells you differently is selling something — most likely fossil fuels.”

The heart of the Green New Deal is a commitment to largely transition America to renewable energy by 2030, and wholly by 2050. That will require an upfront investment of $7.8 trillion, says Jacobson, who recently published a study in the journal One Earth that modeled the economic and climate impacts of moving

to 100 percent clean energy in the U.S. These upfront costs, however, are a true investment.

“It’s not just a doling out of government money with no return on it,” Jacobson says. By 2050, this transition avoids $3.1 trillion a year in climate damages. The green energy itself is also cheaper — saving $1.3 trillion a year for consumers over the fossil-fueled status quo. Ending combustion would also save 63,000 lives a year otherwise lost to air pollution. Most surprising: The study projects that a carbon-free economy increases energy employment. While 2.2 million fossil-fuel jobs would be lost, they would be replaced by 5.2 million permanent clean-energy jobs.

America has the clean-power technology it needs to transition to a combustion-free economy.

The only thing that’s missing, Jacobson says, is political leadership to drive action with the urgency the climate crisis requires.

“You need somebody who really understands the problem,” he says, “and knows you can’t have a half-ass solution.” TIM DICKINSON

TIM LARSEN/NEW JERSEY GOVERNOR’S OFFICE

OCASIO - CORTEZ

THE TRUE COST OF CARBON H

EAT-TRAPPING POLLUTION is invisible in the atmosphere. And the unit used to measure the gas at the heart of the climate crisis — metric tons of CO2 — doesn’t translate to the lived experience of most people. Can you visualize your own CO2 emissions? Or how changing your behavior might help limit your damage to the climate?

Consider a gallon of gasoline. Burned in your car’s engine, that single gallon will produce 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. The average American car, driven over a year, will create 10,000 pounds of CO2 — or 4.6 metric tons. That’s far more than double the mass of the car itself, but, because it’s a gas, the CO2 occupies a far greater volume.

How to imagine that pollution in the atmosphere? Picture a hot-air balloon — the kind you might ride on a tourist excursion in Napa or New Mexico. The yearly CO2 emissions from that average car would overflow the volume of that balloon.

Now picture four hot-air balloons. The average American generates that volume of CO2 emissions every year — roughly 16 metric tons in all. If you can imagine all 330 million Americans launching a total of 1.3 billion CO2-filled hot-air balloons — this year alone — to join billions of other bal-

No More Meat Close to a quarter of CO2 emissions come from food production, and more than half come from animal farming. Americans eat, on average, 270 pounds of meat a year.

loons, launched over decades, that have never come down, you’ve begun to visualize the scope of the U.S. contribution to the climate crisis.

Limiting that pollution will require big, systemic changes — to power our homes and industry, grow our food, and move us around without fossil fuels.

In the meantime, daily individual choices make a difference. It takes roughly 6 pounds of CO2 emissions to put a quarter-pound of beef on your plate, for example, while a quarter-pound of tofu requires less than one-tenth of that. Driving to work releases nearly a pound of CO2 every mile, but you could travel 10 miles on a commuter train with the same output. As the chart below illustrates, some frequently touted suggestions for reducing your carbon footprint (e.g., changing your lightbulbs) have a modest effect, while the biggest impacts are achieved by forgoing things like large families — with each additional child locking in emissions for generations — and air travel. Private jets exact a staggering toll. Take the travel habits of Bill Gates.

It’s been estimated that the billionaire’s 59 flights on a private jet in 2017 produced a colossal 1,629 metric tons of CO2 — or the equivalent of the yearly output of 100 average Americans. TIM DICKINSON

Green Power This stat assumes a house’s energy needs are met using strictly carbon-free sources, such as solar and wind.

About 17 percent of American energy comes from renewables.

U.S. residential washing machines emit a whopping 179 metric tons of carbon a year, equal to powering 21 million homes. The average household washing is 289 loads annually.

Stay Grounded

Ways to reduce your CO2 emissions *

117.7

Air travel produces two to three percent of global CO2 emissions annually. Avoiding one long-distance flight has eight times the impact of recycling for a year.

Annual reduction in tons of CO2

4

3

2

One Less Child

Go LED

*DATA SOURCE: Seth Wynes and Kimberly A. Nicholas 2017 Environmental Research Letters

This stat accounts for the generational carbon impacts of having a child (who will have children). Caveat: An American produces 40 times more carbon than someone from Bangladesh.

H av le e o ss n ki e d

on ’t a use ca r D

Sw el i tc ec h tr to ic a ca n r

C a at n c e la l a nt t ic ra fli ns gh t

Bu y en gre er en gy

ar di ian et

et Ve g

he W s as co h ld ot cl

e Re cy cl

an g H

Switching out incandescent bulbs for compact-fluorescent or LED bulbs is one of the actions recommended to reduce carbon emissions at home, but the impact is modest.

la u to nd dr ry y

1

lig Up ht gr bu ad lb e s

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: CANADAPANDA/SHUTTERSTOCK; BRANKO DE LANG/ KEYSTONE/REDUX; OLEKSANDR DELYK/SHUTTERSTOCK; ANDREY YURLOV/ SHUTTERSTOCK; SOMCHAI SOM/SHUTTERSTOCK; DMITRY LOBANOV/SHUTTERSTOCK

Cold Wash

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

75

CLIMATE CRISIS

TRUMP’S WAR ON SOLAR Expanding access to renewable energy is the key to a future free of fossil fuels.

So why are we moving so slowly?

BY TIM DICKINSON

S

OLAR POWER’S great leap forward over the past decade has been stunning.

Solar energy can now supply nearly 14 million homes in the U.S., up from fewer than 800,000 in 2010, and the price for solar generation has plunged by 90 percent. Over the same time, our solar workforce — primarily installers — has more than doubled, to nearly 250,000. Southern states like Florida, South Carolina, and Texas are starting to realize their solar potential, ranking behind only California in new installed capacity last year, when solar accounted for nearly 40 percent of new electrical production nationwide. “Today, solar is cheaper than pretty much any other power technology you can install,” says Jigar Shah, the founder of SunEdison, who now helms the green-investment firm Generate Capital.

76

ROLLING STONE

Solar’s growth is no thanks to President Trump, who has used the powers of his presidency to champion fossil fuels — his latest budget request includes $500 million for clean-coal research — while mocking climate change and pulling America out of the Paris Agreement. When it comes to renewables, Trump habitually blasts “ugly” windmills, which he falsely claimed cause cancer. And he’s used high tariffs and his budget authority to slow the deployment of solar. The administration is creating “speed bumps,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). California’s energy commissioner prefers a different metaphor: “It’s a great example,” says David Hochschild, “of us shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Trump’s hobbling of solar is particularly grievous because it has the rare ability to bypass partisan fights about global warming. Americans

across the political spectrum have embraced rooftop solar as a way to lower their electrical bills and survive blackouts and superstorms.

For many conservatives, solar-energy autonomy is appealing. “Solar provides some choice from being tethered to these government-created monopolies,” says Debbie Dooley, who leads the Green Tea Coalition, an offshoot of the Tea Party.

“Solar equals freedom.” In a rare mark of political unity, the federal tax credit that offsets the costs of installing solar panels enjoys support from 89 percent of Americans — including 83 percent of Republicans.

If we have any hope of significantly confronting the climate crisis, solar is a linchpin technology. In the U.S. alone, solar deployment has already reduced carbon output by the equivalent of planting 1.3 billion trees. Mark Jacobson, a professor of engineering at Stanford University, has modeled how America can reach zero emissions by 2050 with massive deployment of existing solar and wind technologies. Following his road map, America would need to install 2,000 gigawatts of solar by 2050 — a huge leap from our current 75 gigawatts of U.S. capacity.

Closing the gap would require year-over-year growth of 36 percent, but even the most optimistic projections from the solar industry today are running at half of that. At that rate, “you’ll eventually transition everything, except it will be too slow,” Jacobson says. “If you really want to solve the problem,” lawmakers need to pursue a solar revolution like “you’re in World War II.” Instead of putting the country on a war footing against climate change, Trump has gone to war with solar, obscuring his attack within his broader trade hostilities. Asian countries lead the world in solar-panel production, and U.S. manufacturers have long cried foul about statesubsidized foreign factories dumping their overproduction here. (Solar installers, by contrast, welcomed the influx of cheap panels that boosted their businesses.) In early 2018, the Trump administration imposed steep tariffs on foreign solar panels. Trump’s tariffs are estimated to have blocked 10.5 gigawatts of solar capacity from coming on line, enough to power 1.8 million homes with carbon-free energy, according to the SEIA. U.S. prices for solar panels are now among the highest in the world.

At the tariff signing ceremony, Trump highlighted the hardships of domestic solar manufacturers. “Our companies have been decimated,” he said. And he promised that the solar tariffs would mean “those companies are going to be coming back strong,” adding that tariffs would translate into new opportunities for “a lot of workers, a lot of jobs.” In reality, the Trump taxes have put tens of thousands of Americans

COLLIN CHAPPELLE/”THE NEW YORK TIMES”/REDUX

out of work. The import restrictions did spur the growth of about 2,000 domestic solar-manufacturing jobs, according to an analysis by the SEIA. But that was more than offset by solar-panel sticker shock — Americans chose to forgo nearly $19 billion in solar investments that could have supported 62,000 solar-installation jobs.

It’s not hard to understand why 31 service jobs would be lost for every manufacturing job gained. American manufacturers cannot compete with Asian producers on labor costs, so they’ve invested in automation. In 2017, I toured the Oregon-based factory of SolarWorld, one of the companies that petitioned Trump for tariffs.

The massive 465,000-square-foot complex was eerily devoid of people — almost all of the work was performed by robots. The passage of tariffs has not boosted worker fortunes here. The plant has changed ownership twice, benefiting large, foreign-owned corporations that bought and sold it, but not local workers. Solar production now employs just 250 people here — down from a peak of 800. Most of the building is now used as a server farm.

Trump dealt solar another bad hand in the 2020 budget deal he signed in December. The solar-investment credit, available to both homeowners and utilities, was not extended, and has begun winding down, from 30 percent in 2019 to 26 percent in 2020. In two years, it will end for homeowners. “Congress definitely dropped the ball,” Hopper says. “Extending the tax credit was really a tool to help address the climate crisis.”

Solar still makes economic sense for many homes and businesses, but capacity would “grow much

more quickly, and reduce the carbon much more quickly, if we had Trump’s tariffs that additional incentive,” she says. killed business that would Trump’s solar slowdown is a have supported gift to the utility sector, which has 62,000 solarwarned since 2013 that a rapid rise installation jobs. in distributed solar power could prompt customers to live off-thegrid, sparking a “utility death spiral” in which remaining rate payers receive higher and higher energy bills to sustain aging electrical plants — prompting ever more customers to declare energy independence. The utilities don’t oppose solar technology, per se, but they do want to develop it themselves, in large-scale, centralized installations, similar to legacy power plants, allowing them to continue to make a profit. The Trump administration has their backs. In keeping with Trump’s agenda of opening public lands to industry, the Interior Department recently approved a record $1 billion, 690-megawatt solar plant to be built on a federal desert outside Las Vegas, to the benefit of NV Energy, owned by billionaire investor Warren Buffett.

The positive news is that states and localities are stepping up to address the void in federal leadership. “In response to the Trump administration, the states have been doing more than we thought they would,” says Shah. New York Protect Rooftop Solar state has passed aggressive clean-energy legislaoursolarrights.org tion and celebrated reaching more than two gigawatts of solar power in December, with a goal of Big utilities are attacking “net metering,” an arrangement that six gigawatts by 2025. And standards passed by incentivizes homeowners to New York City will require green roofs or solar invest in rooftop solar because arrays on new and renovated buildings. they can sell their excess enCalifornia continues to be the runaway leader ergy back to the grid. Join the in solar with more than 10 gigawatts installed, Coalition for Solar Rights for and it passed 1 million solar rooftops last year. state-by-state updates on camIn January, the state began enforcing a mandate paigns, petitions, and legislation that new homes be built with solar panels suffito protect net metering. cient to cover the home’s electricity needs. “We build about 120,000 homes a year in California,” Support Solar says Hochschild, who notes that solar homes freResearch quently lead their owners to adopt other green and Deployment technologies, like electric cars. thesolarfoundation.org Hochschild points to a growing number of states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Donate to the nonprofit Solar Rico, that have followed California’s lead in Foundation, which produces adopting 100 percent renewable-energy mancritical research, including the dates, now covering nearly 30 percent of Amerauthoritative National Solar Jobs Census, and spearheads ica’s population. “States have a huge amount of essential programs, such as power,” Hochschild says. “California should be connecting U.S. Army veterans understood as a postcard from the future for to solar-jobs training and dewhat U.S. policy can be” on solar energy. “It’s ploying solar microgrids in postbeen a win for us, very clearly,” he says. “That’s Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico. why I’m hopeful that we can see a lot more progress on clean energy under new leadership in the White House.”

GET INVOLVED

ROLLING STONE

77

CLIMATE CRISIS

ON THE EVE OF EXTINCTION

The effects of climate change on the natural world are devastating, with as many as 1 million species at risk of disappearing in the coming decades

BY ANDREA MARKS & HANNAH MURPHY I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y L I S E L J A N E A S H L O C K

I

N 1996, a biologist named Camille Parmesan observed that an obscure breed of butterfly living in the Western mountain ranges of the U.S. — the Edith’s checkerspot — had shifted its migratory range about 60 miles north in search of cooler temperatures. It was one of the first studies to document “the fingerprints of climate change,” as Parmesan put it — evidence that global warming was being felt in the animal kingdom. Twenty-four years later, these ripple effects are so common, says Wendy Foden of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, they’re barely even publicized. In 2016, Foden and other scientists took inventory of climate change’s impact on our entire ecosystem, and found that 83 percent of all biological processes had already been altered.

Foden calls these dramatic changes the “bootprints of climate change.”

Global warming has set off a cascade of disruptions to the web of life, changing animals’ breeding habits, food supply, and their very DNA. They are in distress not only from climate instability but also from the loss of habitat and pollution produced by unchecked human consumption. In the past century, species have been wiped out at a pace 100 times greater than the natural rate of extinction, and as many as 1 million species are at risk of going extinct in the coming decades, according to a United Nations report released last spring. There is perhaps no better bellwether of the peril we face than this dwindling biodiversity. “The evidence is crystal clear,” said Sandra Díaz, one of the co-chairs of the U.N. report. “Nature is in trouble. Therefore, we are in trouble.”

78

ROLLING STONE

COQUÍ

HABITAT

North Caribbean islands

Anyone who’s been to Puerto Rico knows the insistent chirp of the coquí, a singsong trill that echoes through the warm island air, especially at night. What you might not know, unless you’re a herpetologist, is that the tiny frog, about the size of a ping-pong ball, is fast disappearing. Among the 17

THREAT

species of coquí native to Puerto Rico, three are already extinct, and 13 are considered endangered or at-risk.

And in recent years, the coquí’s signature call — which sounds just like its name — has actually been an alarm: A 2014 study found that as temperatures in Puerto Rico have risen, coquís’

Temperature rise bodies have gotten smaller and their chirps higher-pitched. This seemingly innocuous modification could ultimately make it more difficult for females to recognize mating calls, causing an already fragile population to decline even faster. Sadly, the news is part and parcel of sweeping changes

in the amphibian world, whose vulnerable species, dependent on both land and water habitats, have been on the decline for decades.

Last year, scientists announced that climate change had enabled a disease in the common frog that could wipe out entire populations in the next 50 years.

GREEN SEA TURTLE Gentle giants that can clock in at 700 pounds, green sea turtles cross entire oceans to reach their preferred nesting beaches, where they bury their eggs in coastal sandy pits. But strong storms can destroy the nests, and rising seas

RINGED SEAL The ringed seal’s entire life cycle is tied to the Arctic ice: They mate under it, give birth on top of it, and dig caves in the snow on its surface to keep their young warm. As Arctic temperatures rise, the decrease in snowfall has made digging those caves impossible in some places. And the shortened life span of ice sheets — which are forming later and

HABITAT

Arctic ice floes

melting earlier every year — is forcing seal pups into the ocean before they’re mature, making them especially vulnerable to predators.

A 2004 study projected that more than 80 percent of the seals’ ice in the Baltic Sea would be gone by 2100.

In 2012, in an effort to protect that habitat, ringed seals were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species

Warm waters in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, with nesting beaches in more than 80 countries THREATS Temperature sensitivity, habitat loss HABITAT

threaten to erase beaches altogether, a problem compounded by fancy hotels and waterfront vacation homes.

“Beaches everywhere are constrained by development,” says Aimee Delach, policy analyst at Defenders of Wildlife.

THREAT

“[Turtles] can’t migrate inshore.” On the U.S. endangered species list since 2016, these turtles face another dilemma.

The temperature of the nesting site decides the sex of their hatchlings — the hotter it is, the more babies are born

female. A 2018 study on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef found “virtually no male turtles are now being produced” on the warmer northern beaches, home to one of the largest green sea turtle populations in the world. (More than

99 percent of juvenile turtles were female.)

Other reptiles, including crocodiles and some lizards, also have temperature-dependent sex determination, so the problem is expected to increase as global warming escalates.

Habitat loss

Act. As they struggle, so too will their fellow ice dwellers — and primary predator — polar bears.

“We’re maybe not seeing population declines immediately, but we know with certainty it is going to happen,” says Nikhil Advani of the World Wildlife Federation. “For ice-dependent species like polar bears and ice seals, they’re basically facing a total loss of habitat.”

ROLLING STONE

79

CLIMATE CRISIS

ATLANTIC PUFFIN HABITAT

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

APRIL 2020

HABITAT

Rocky coasts and islands of the North Atlantic THREAT Food

Mainly the Pacific Ocean; they make a yearly 12,000-mile round-

scarcity

trip migration from Northern Mexico to Arctic waters. THREAT Food scarcity

The Atlantic puffin feeds on long, narrow fish — white hake and herring are favorites. But a key part of their habitat, the Gulf of Maine, which stretches from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, is experiencing the warming effects of climate change at a faster rate than 99 percent of the global ocean, sending puffins’ choice fish into colder, deeper, and more outof-reach waters. As a substitute, the adaptable, foot-tall birds have been diving for wide, flat butterfish instead.

The problem: Butterfish are too round for young puffins to swallow, leading chicks to die of starvation. In 2012, according to a study by the Audubon Society, only 31 percent of puffin pairs successfully raised a chick at Maine’s largest colony, compared with the typical 77 percent. “We could certainly be looking at losing puffins from Maine,” Delach says. “Sea birds are tremendously susceptible to climate change, because their dietary patterns are based on where their prey has always been, and it’s pretty easy for the prey to move, but not for the birds to move.

Puffins have a really high site fidelity — they won’t shift where their colony is.”

80

GRAY WHALE

In 2019, the gray whale experienced what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defined as an “unusual mortality event.” In a heartbreaking sight that repeated along the Pacific coast from Mexico to Alaska, carcasses of the majestic creatures washed ashore at four to five times the typical rate. Many died emaciated. While the whale was removed from the endangered species list in 1994, it is clearly in peril again. The likely culprit? Global warming. The spring melting of Arctic ice releases nutrients that trigger a plankton bloom. Small animals such as krill feed on the plankton, and gray whales, in turn, feed on the krill, following their feast north with the retreating ice. In 2018, however, unexpectedly warm southerly winds caused ice in the Bering Sea to reach record lows; insufficient ice, scientists theorized, depleted the food supply along the whales’ journey. The situation is not forecast to improve — the Arctic has warmed 0.75 C in the past decade alone, altering migrations for several species of whale.

KOALA HABITAT

Bushland on the east coast of Australia

THREATS

Dehydration, rising temperatures, fire

When wildfires tore through 25.5 million acres of Australian bushland earlier this year, koalas did the one thing they know how to do when they’re in danger — climb high into the trees and curl into a tight ball. But their only defense mechanism was completely ineffective against climate-change-fueled fire and smoke. By one estimate, more than 25,000 koalas may be dead in the wake of the fires, as much as half the population. That disaster was only their most recent challenge in adapting to the climate crisis: In 2018, Australia faced its worst droughts in 400 years. The marsupial typically doesn’t drink water — it gets all of the moisture it needs from the eucalyptus it eats. But as the drought dried up the country’s plant life, stories emerged of koalas wandering into bird baths or simply dropping out of trees from dehydration.

REINDEER HABITAT

Arctic tundra and adjacent boreal forests of Greenland, Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, and Canada THREAT Food scarcity

You could be forgiven for thinking the reindeer is just a mythical creature of holiday lore.

The iconic sled-hauler, called caribou in the United States, went extinct in the lower 48 just this past winter, when the last remaining herd in the Pacific Northwest was found to be down to its last member.

They’re also struggling farther north. Through the Arctic winter, when the grasses and vegetation that comprise their usual diet are long dead, these herbivores survive by digging up nutrient-rich lichen from underneath the snow. But as the Arctic

warms twice as quickly as the rest of the globe, there’s less snow and more rain in winter, which creates hard, icy layers that block the deer from reaching the lichen. Over the past two decades, the Arctic reindeer population has plummeted by half; 200 of them died of starvation this past winter alone. “How many species can we pull out before the metaphorical Jenga tower collapses?” says Delach. “We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of how many species we should let go extinct. We should be trying to save as many as we can.”

BRAMBLE CAY MELOMYS HABITAT

An island off the coast of Australia

THREAT

Habitat loss

This tiny rodent was the world’s first mammal to be wiped out by climate change.

The entire species lived on a 12-acre island above the Great Barrier Reef called Bramble Cay, which it is thought to have colonized via driftwood or a land bridge lost to sea rise. In 2008, when its population dipped below 100 after decades of decline, the Australian government created a recovery plan. But when scientists returned in 2014, they didn’t find a single melomys; it is believed to have been wiped out by storm surges and rising sea levels. “The Bramble Cay melomys was a little brown rat,” said Tim Beshara of the Wilderness Society. “But it was our little brown rat, and it was our responsibility to make sure it persisted. And we failed.”

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

81

CLIMATE CRISIS

MOOSE

HABITAT THREAT

Weighing in at around 1,800 pounds, with antlers that can span six feet from end to end, adult bull moose have few predators to worry about. But thanks to milder winters, a deceptively small pest is threatening their young.

With less snowfall and warmer temperatures over the past 10 to 15 years, ticks are thriving.

A study tracking moose

RUFA RED KNOT Annual migration from the southernmost tip of South America to the central Canadian Arctic THREAT Food scarcity HABITAT

This small, robin-size shorebird flies 19,000 miles per year in its sweeping migration from Tierra del Fuego, at the very tip of South America, to the Canadian Arctic tundra, where it breeds, and then back again. To fuel this epic journey, the knot carefully times its spring break with horseshoecrab mating season in the Delaware Bay, where it stops to feed on the crabs’ pebble-like eggs, doubling its weight in the process. But warmer temperatures are now prompting horseshoe

82

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

crabs, already struggling due to overfishing, to lay their eggs earlier in the year. By the time the knots arrive, they’re left with scraps. And the crab-egg feast isn’t the only meal these birds are missing: In Virginia, rising ocean acidity is depleting the population of blue mussels that knots feed on, and in the Arctic, warmer temperatures are causing insects to hatch earlier, depriving knot chicks of their first meals. In 2014, after its population bottomed out at just 12,000

APRIL 2020

birds, the rufa red knot was listed under the Endangered Species Act, the first bird to have climate change named as its “primary threat.” According to the National Audubon Society, two-thirds of North American birds are threatened from global temperature rise.

“Birds are important indicator species,” said Audubon’s director of climate watch, Brooke Bateman, in a report on the study, “because if an ecosystem is broken for birds, it is or soon will be for people too.”

Northern United States and Canada Pests calves in New Hampshire and Maine counted an average of 47,000 of the blood-sucking parasites on any given calf — a problem that puts them at severe risk of death by anemia. Seventy percent of the calves being tracked perished over the course of three years. Moose populations in the U.S. are declining, and “the abundance of pest species is

seriously concerning,” says the IUCN’s Foden, who notes that warmer weather in Hawaii has brought malaria-carrying mosquitoes to higher elevations than before, and proliferating tsetse flies have rendered large parts of Africa unfit for cattle farming. “The stress of climate change will make all species more susceptible to diseases and parasites.”

MONARCH BUTTERFLY North America, Hawaii, Portugal, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere in Oceania HABITAT

THREAT

Habitat loss

Like most butterflies, monarchs are highly sensitive to weather and climate. The species’ famous 3,000-mile migration from Canada to their winter home in Mexico is a trip made in search of optimal conditions: They need temperatures between 55 F and the low 70s along the route, and rain while they hibernate; an ideal body temperature is also crucial for mating, fertility, and egg-laying, which they must do where their caterpillars’ only food source, milkweed, is abundant.

But storms and extreme temperatures are disrupting the monarchs’ routines. Once a summertime fixture, dappling backyard gardens from coast to coast, these crucial pollinators are disappearing.

“They’re experiencing freezes in their winter-

SNOWSHOE HARE Occupying a lower rank of the forest food chain — a meal for lynx, foxes, coyotes, and birds of prey — the snowshoe hare must hide to survive.

Its coat changes from brown during warm months to bright white in winter to match the snowy landscape. This camouflage, however, is becoming less effective as the planet warms. When snow arrives late and melts early, the hares end up “mismatched” to their surroundings — think bright white on a dark forest floor of dirt and leaves — making them extra vulnerable to predators. (Researchers in Montana have seen mismatched hares die at a rate seven percent higher than those that blend into their environment.) In response, the animals are moving to colder climes.

While the effect is not yet profound, WWF’s Advani says it’s just a matter of time: “They’re pretty maladapted.”

HABITAT

North American mountain ranges

THREATS

Compromised camouflage, habitat loss

ing habitat, and drought and heat waves along their route,” Advani says.

Higher temperatures may also be driving monarchs’ summer breeding grounds farther north, making their migrations longer and more difficult. One study recorded a 4.9 percent increase in their wing size over the past century and a half — an adaptation that likely arose to help them make the longer journey.

Though monarchs aren’t endangered yet, their numbers are dropping.

In 2018, there was a 15 percent decline in butterflies in Mexico compared to the previous year, and an 80 percent decline over the previous 20 years. One set of models predicts the population may drop so steeply in the next two decades, it won’t be able to recover.

GET INVOLVED Protect the Refuge defenders.org

Join Defenders of Wildlife’s campaign to prevent drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, home to hundreds of vulnerable species, including the largest remaining herd of caribou.

Plant Seeds of Change worldwildlife.org

With the World Wildlife Fund, you can apply to become a WWF community organizer, or join its Monarch Squad and plant milkweed, the butterfly’s food source.

APRIL 2020

/

R O L L I N G S TO N E

/

83

©2020 STIHL 20STFP2-12-144113-2

Music

PEARL JAM’S GROWN-UP GRUNGE The band’s first album in seven years is a potent balance of rage and maturity

By KORY GROW

Pearl Jam Gigaton REPUBLIC

4

O

NE OF Eddie Vedder’s idols, Roger Daltrey of the Who, once said that the secret to keeping “My Generation” fresh onstage half a century after it was written isn’t nailing the song’s stutter, but believably channeling its anger. It’s a sentiment Vedder would definitely endorse; the Pearl Jam frontman’s rage has always burned bright (this is a guy who once sounded super pissed-off singing about how people should play more vinyl). But as he’s matured, the youthful fury that fueled PJ’s golden-age grunge has grown with him, turning into a finely burnished middleage indignation.

Now, on Gigaton, the first record Pearl Jam has mustered during the ILLUSTRATION BY

Simon Prades

Reviews Music

Trump administration, the group has blended the miasmic angst of “Jeremy” and “Alive” with a sense of tenderness and even flashes of hope.

Although Trump is not the sole focus of the record, Vedder gives the president (“a tragedy of errors,” in EdVed’s words) plenty of airtime. On “Quick Escape,” a chunky anthem with an echoey, U2-like riff, Vedder details his journey “to find a place Trump hadn’t fucked up yet.” On the surprisingly Springsteen-y standout “Seven O’clock,” he name-checks indigenous leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, mythic insurgents who stood up to the U.S. government, and calls the president “Sitting Bullshit.” He praises the titular character from Sean Penn’s Trump-inspired satirical novel Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff between avalanche riffs in “Never Destination” and paints a bleak picture on the gospel-tinged closing track, “River Cross,” describing how “the government thrives on discontent . . . proselytizing and profitizing as our will all but disappears.”

Yet, where the Vedder of 20 years ago might have hollered (or hooted) his blues, he mostly keeps his cool on Gigaton. Album opener “Who Ever Said” doubles as Vedder’s mantra for hope, as he sings, “Whoever said, ‘It’s all been said,’ gave up on satisfaction,” between Pete Townshend-inspired licks and a New Wave-style guitar solo. The music itself can be surprisingly upbeat — from the danceable electro-tinged curveball “Dance of the Clairvoyants” to the Soundgarden-size grunge-hulk “Take the Long Way,” penned by drummer Matt Cameron, to “Superblood Wolfmoon,” fun frat-party garage rock with “Louie Louie”-esque nonsense lyrics.

As the band’s first LP since 2013’s Lightning Bolt, there’s an attention to sonic and emotional detail, a focus on musical light and shade, which reflects the album’s lengthy gestation. The record is sequenced with the rockers upfront and slower, more meditative songs at the back, as if the band is exhaling.

“Come Then Goes” is a poignant acoustic eulogy for a fallen friend (perhaps the late Chris Cornell), and on “River Cross” Vedder begs us all to “share the light” over his own pump-organ line. Gigaton is a testament to how Pearl Jam’s own deeply held dissatisfaction still burns brighter than ever.

MCBRYDE DIGS EVEN DEEPER

A country maverick sings about career dreams and small-town dramas By JONATH AN BER NSTEIN

T

HE PAST DECADE in country music has been a boom time for small-town truth tellers — artists like Brandy Clark, Angaleena Presley, and Kacey Musgraves — who countered Nashville’s trucksand-tailgates formula with stripped-down realism. In

Ashley McBryde Never Will Warner

4

2018, Arkansas native Ashley McBryde released one of the most striking country LPs in recent memory with Girl Going Nowhere; her music honored Townes Van Zandt and John Mellencamp, and she sang with plain-spoken vulnerability about everyday stuff like her platonic room-

mate or the folks back home who told her she’d never make a living from her art, delivering each song with a conviction that felt mythically down-to-earth.

McBryde’s second majorlabel release, Never Will, is just as daring and deep, sometimes deceptively so.

BREAKING

Rina Sawayama’s Dance-Floor Euphoria JAPANESE BRITISH singer-model Sawayama made a splash in 2017 with her debut EP,

Rina. Her first album, Sawayama, is even splashier, suggesting the type of music you dream of hearing at an unbearably cool party, meticulously unique and fun from beginning to end, whether she’s showing off her love of Eighties glam, aughts pop, or nu metal.

“Every time you see me/It’s like winning big in Reno,” she sings on the fantastic single “Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys),” making a very credible case that this rising artist might just become the new decade’s reigning dance-floor queen. BRITTANY SPANOS

86 |

Rolling Stone

+++++ Classic | ++++ Excellent | +++ Good | ++ Fair | + Poor

On the surface, the record is centered around her long and winding dirt road of a career.

The decade of roadhouse gigging she first sang about on Girl Going Nowhere’s stunning title track informed songs like the Bob Seger-ish “Hang In There Girl” and the Heart/ Fleetwood Mac-channeling “Never Will,” anthems of self-determination amid life-changing success.

With Jay Joyce returning as producer, the heartland rock of Girl Going Nowhere is the primary palette, but McBryde shows off more of her varied influences this time around.

The LP’s most exciting tracks sound like little else on country radio: “Velvet Red” is an Emmylou Harris-gonebluegrass ballad about an Appalachian Romeo and Juliet. “First Thing I Reach For” conjures the Telecaster wisdom of Merle Haggard.

Despite her first-person songwriting safety zone, McBryde is at her best here singing about other people, telling tales of forbidden romance, small-town piety, and honky-tonk hair of the dog. Transgressive lust is a defining theme, from the adulteress murder ballad “Martha Divine” to the dark sensuality of “Voodoo Doll” (“Feel the pretty black dress slipping off her back”) to the straightforward portrayal of casual sex on “One Night Standards.” “How it goes is/ Bar closes,” McBryde sings on the latter, “There’s no king bed covered in roses.”

McBryde’s small-town heroes are as iconoclastic as she is. In “Shut Up Sheila,” a family sits around a hospital room with their dying grandma; when someone’s churchy girlfriend suggests a chorus of “Amazing Grace,” these smokin’, drinkin’ unbelievers shoot back with their own agnostic gospel: “We just go about letting go in our own way.” Going her own way is what McBryde does best.

RATINGS ARE SUPERVISED BY THE EDITORS OF ROLLING STONE.

FROM TOP: DANIEL MEIGS; HENDRIK SCHNEIDER

PE ARL JAM

Quick Hits Ten new albums you need to know about now

Waxahatchee

Saint Cloud Merge

The Strokes

The New Abnormal RCA

Lilly Hiatt

Walking Proof New West

Hinds

The Prettiest Curse Mom + Pop Music

Kelsea Ballerini

Kelsea Black River Entertainment

Ed O’Brien

Earth Capitol

Niall Horan

Heartbreak Weather Capitol

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JUAN CARLOS EQUIHUA; IMAGESPACE/ SHUTTERSTOCK; MARK ZALESKI/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK; SAMIR HUSSEIN/WIREIMAGE; IMAGESPACE/SHUTTERSTOCK; GINNETTE RIQUELME/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK

Brian Falon

Local Honey Lesser Known

5 Seconds of Summer

Calm Interscope

Morrissey

I Am Not a Dog on a Chain BMG

WAX ON Kate Crutchfield’s latest is a gorgeous depiction of recovery told from the inside, toning down her guitar-heavy indie rock for a brighter folk-rock sound that can recall Lucinda Williams.

4

DIFFERENT STROKES Their first LP since 2013 is a low-key party record full of Miami Vice guitars and space-cadet romance, with less second-guessing than anything they’ve done since the mid-aughts.

#

JANGLE GEM Hiatt proves herself to be

Nashville’s indie-rocker-to-watch on this collection of Big Star-worthy jangle anthems (“Brightest Star”) and introspective psych-folk (“Scream”).

GARAGE TRIP The third album from these cool Spanish garage-rock primitivists adds a sweet sun-bleached studio haze to their sound, making for spacey songs that never lack for sass, bite, or beauty.

# #

J BALVIN’S POP OF MANY COLORS The Colombian reggaeton star finesses his globetrotting style

C

OLOMBIAN artist J Balvin established himself as the globe-trotting James Bond of reggaeton with chart-toppers like “Ginza” and “Mi Gente.” On his fourth solo album, Balvin seems more interested in fine-tuning his sound than crafting the next big hit. Colores is a sophisticated showcase of his sonic palette, from the playful, horn-driven “Amarillo” to the J Balvin Colores

NASHVILLE NICE Country’s most pop-friend-

ly upstart fleshes out her millennial musings on this conversational set; she’s the rare artist who can feature Halsey on one song and Kenny Chesney on the next.

#

SPECIAL ED Radiohead’s guitarist takes

the spotlight for the first time, beautifully deploying ambient guitar textures and falsetto vocals. The results could’ve been Hail to the Thief bonus tracks.

#

NEW DIRECTION One Direction’s resident Irish bard stretches out on his ace second solo album, mourning a breakup while going for a laid-back Yacht-pop vibe. Even with a bruised heart, he’s a charmer.

#

DAD FOLK The New Jersey roots-punk rocker leans into moody folk on this sweet, solid collection about fatherhood and quitting cigarettes, sounding like the National, if they were from New Brunswick.

3

BOYS The fun Aussie boy punks show genuine R&B-pop chops, teaming up with Ryan Tedder, Charlie Puth, and other hitmakers. But their fourth record lacks the innocent fun of their first hits.

@

LOW MOZ Despite some great titles — “Bobby, Don’t You Think They Know,” “What Kind of People Live in These Houses” — this charming man’s bowshots at English society can get repetitive.

@

#

atmospheric ballad “Rojo” and the blushing “Rosado” (featuring Diplo). Balvin’s right-hand man and producer Sky Rompiendo puts his freestyle skills to the test amid the dancehall-accented bounce of “Verde,” and Balvin dusts off his guitar for the unmistakably made-in-Medellín tracks “Azul” and “Gris.” The best moment, “Arcoiris,” sees Balvin reprise his cosmopolitan jet-setter persona as he teams up with Nigerian Afrobeats envoy Mr Eazi. The pair finesse hook after hook, drawing out a timeless groove and effortlessly summing up decades of Afro-Caribbean music tradition. SUZY EXPOSITO

Balvin

CONTRIBUTORS: JONATHAN BERNSTEIN, JON DOLAN, KORY GROW, ANGIE MARTOCCIO, CLAIRE SCHAFFER, ROB SHEFFIELD, SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON

TV

Normal People

STARRING

Hulu’s ‘Normal People,’ an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s acclaimed novel, presents a millennial romance for the ages

T

HE FIRST thing you notice about Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell (Paul Mescal) are their faces. They are young, relatively innocent faces, wide open to us but hidden from their schoolmates. They only light up when they’re looking at each other, as if trading glances is how they get through the day.

Again and again throughout Normal People — an excellent miniseries adapted by Sally

88 |

Rolling Stone

April 29th

AIR DATE

NO ORDINARY LOVE

ALAN SEPINWALL

Hulu

NETWORK

Rooney and Alice Birch from Rooney’s bestselling novel — director Lenny Abrahamson (Room) simply lingers on those faces. He trusts his actors’ expressions to tell us what we need to know about why Marianne and Connell fall in love — and, almost just as often, out of it.

The second thing you notice is their breathing.

When they first hook up as teenagers in a small Irish town, she is a virgin and he is not, but they are almost immediately in sync as sexual partners. You can tell this as much by the sounds of their breaths rising and falling, growing faster and slower, as you can from the way their bodies move or the flush on their cheeks. Love scenes on film more often than not feel perfunctory, no matter how attractive the actors and how

acrobatic the positions. But the ones here feel genuinely sexy, which is a crucial step to explaining the bond between Marianne and Connell. They fit together beautifully in many other ways — at least, when their respective demons aren’t keeping them at odds — but it’s when they’re in bed together that the match is the most obviously right.

Daisy Edgar-Jones Paul Mescal Sarah Greene Fionn O’Shea Eliot Salt

$ The story follows the pair from secondary school through college, with each 30-minute episode checking in on them at a different stage of their ever-evolving relationship. As we first meet them, she’s the school outcast, and he’s a popular jock. But his mother, Lorraine (Sarah Greene), cleans Marianne’s palatial family home, which

Mescal and Greene

+++++ Classic | ++++ Excellent | +++ Good | ++ Fair | + Poor

ENDA BOWE/HULU; HULU

Edgar-Jones and Mescal are students navigating intimacy.

gives them a chance to get closer, and to find something good together — until it isn’t.

Later, when they both wind up at Trinity College in Dublin, the roles have reversed, with her the social butterfly and him the brilliant loner.

They drift in and out of each other’s lives, sometimes in big dramatic ways, sometimes when one or both just isn’t paying attention. He is periodically awful to her without meaning to be, while she has a tendency to pull away for reasons beyond her control.

Yet they share not only an intense sexual chemistry, but also a weakness for living too much inside their own heads.

Connell spends much of their early romance desperate to keep it a secret from his judgmental friends; later, he finds out they knew all along, and “no one even cared.”

This is delicate, extremely interior material, at times told in leisurely sequences where we simply watch one or both of them lost in thought, at others in quick, impressionistic bursts conveying the rush of feeling brought on by the latest complication between them. Of the show’s two young stars, much is asked, and even more is given. They are spectacular, apart but especially together, at conveying the vulnerability and longing essential to making a love story like this work.

Things get messy for both along the way. She explores S&M (in a way that feels psychologically honest rather than exploitive), and he struggles with depression.

But there are moments — a bike ride through the Italian countryside during a school holiday, an all-night Skype call when one badly needs to feel near to the other, and, especially, an important declaration made in a car on a dark and painful night — when they, and Normal People, couldn’t be more perfect.

Because the most important thing you notice about Marianne and Connell, thanks to the artistry and care with which their story is told, is how badly you want things to work out for them — for their deep, complicated, but unmistakably real love to win.

Performing Arts

WATCH LIST What to stream, what to skip this month

Dormer gets supernatural in Penny Dreadful.

DARK ARTS Penny Dreadful: City of Angels

Showtime

NETWORK AIR DATE

FROM TOP: JUSTIN LUBIN/SHOWTIME; KEN WORONER/HBO; APPLE TV+

@

April 26th, 10 p.m.

The original Penny Dreadful was an Avengers of iconic 19th-century British literary characters like Frankenstein and the Wolfman, made special due to the bananas performance by Eva Green as a powerful medium.

This spinoff relocates the action to late-Thirties L.A., as a pair of cops — a determined Mexican American rookie (Daniel Zovatto) and a weary Jewish veteran (Nathan Lane) — investigate murders that involve Mexican superstitions, institutionalized racism, cults, the Nazi bund (led

by Dreadful alum Rory Kinnear), and a shape-changing demon (Natalie Dormer). City of Angels gorgeously re-creates the period, but there’s no one like Green to elevate the hard-boiled clichés. As a singer-turned-spiritual-guru, Kerry Bishé has moments that come close, but City feels more pretty than essential.

GREAT ESCAPE Run

HBO

NETWORK AIR DATE

April 12th, 10:30 p.m.

4

When Merritt Wever won a supporting-actress Emmy for Nurse Jackie in 2013, she gave an eight-word acceptance speech before practically

sprinting off the stage — “Thank you so much! I . . . gotta go. Bye!” Perhaps it was a moment of foreshadowing to this series, produced by Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge and created by Vicky Jones, in which Wever’s character, Ruby, receives a oneword text that gives the show its title. The missive prompts Ruby to blow up her life and go on a cross-country adventure with college boyfriend Billy (Domhnall Gleeson), where they

Wever travel by train to see if they still have that old chemistry. Boy, do they! The heat is palpable enough to carry this oddball mix of sexual farce and Alfred Hitchcock thriller, as their escapade is continually interrupted by a woman (Archie Panjabi) from Billy’s past. As funny as Gleeson is as a would-be master of the universe who’s secretly a pushover, the main attraction is Wever, unleashed in her long-overdue first star vehicle.

The irresistibly loose, self-deprecating energy she’s used to steal scenes in countless other shows and movies loses none of its potency when she’s the focus.

(She even somehow manages to sprint sheepishly.) Ruby is a woman who skips out on her family and understands just how bad that is. Yet her reckless behavior is understandable, even sympathetic, because of Wever’s boundless appeal.

KID VICIOUS

Home Before Dark NETWORK AIR DATE

#

Apple TV+ April 3rd

“I’m a journalist!” Hilde Lisko tells her father, Matt. “You’re a fourth-grader!” he replies. Both are right. In this drama inspired by the work of underage reporter Hilde Lysiak, Hilde (Brooklynn Prince from The Florida Project) has trouble making friends at elementary school, but she’s also seen All the President’s Men 36 times and runs her own local newspaper. When a suspicious death points to a crime that traumatized Matt (Jim Sturgess) as a boy, Hilde investigates. Like Stranger Things (but without superpowers and demons), Home Before Dark is unabashed in its love of Eighties Spielberg: Episodes are filled with kids on bikes going where they’re not Prince

supposed to and stirring up trouble through inquisitiveness, while their parents mostly shrug off the danger. (It’s also scarier and more casually profane than its cute-kid heroine would suggest.) The 10-episode season is repetitive in spots, but Prince is endearing, as is the sense of optimism even amid the tragedy Hilde seeks to unlock. A.S.

See our curated collection of toys, pleasure objects & bedroom adventure gear.

30% off with code: RS30

liberator.com

Promising Young Woman STARRING

Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Laverne Cox, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Adam Brody

REVENGE, SERVED RED-HOT

DIRECTED BY

Emerald Fennell

In this slashing, blackly comic satire, Carey Mulligan gives male predators a taste of their own toxic medicine

PETER TRAVERS

I

N A PRICKLY early scene of Promising Young Woman, a diabolically funny, dead-serious takedown of toxic masculinity, an alleged nice guy tells a trashed young woman he’s brought back to his apartment that they’ve made a real connection. She practically laughs in his face; he’s been too busy trying to get her into bed to learn a thing about her. So let’s fill him, and you, in: She’s Cassandra Thomas,

90 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

a med-school dropout who’s about to turn 30. Her hobby is going to clubs, pretending to be blackout drunk, and waiting for someone to take her home. That’s when she issues a scary wake-up call no would-be date rapist could possibly forget. If you need a primer on the meaning of consent, Cassie is more than happy to oblige. As played by Carey Mulligan, brilliant in movies from An Education to Wildlife, this avenging angel means business. She is definitely not someone you want to fuck with.

Welcome to one lit-fuse bundle of revenge-movie dynamite, courtesy of its thrillingly talented creator, Emerald Fennell.

Remember the name. This

$ vengeful women (WallerBridge played one of them).

Not coincidentally, Cassie happens to be reading a book with that very same title — a nice callback that doubles as a warning of things to come.

Astonishingly, Promising Young Woman marks Fennell’s feature debut as a writer and a director. She sets her tantalizing provocation in the here and now of American suburbia and wraps it in a candy-colored package (Benjamin Kračun’s cinematography is pure sugar) that suggests she’ll go easy on us.

Don’t be fooled. The result is a bonbon spiked with wit and malice. “Hey, what are you doing?” Cassie snaps when numerous dudes (played by Adam Brody, Chris Lowell, Director and a priceless ChrisFennell (left) topher Mintz-Plasse) with Cox

British triple threat is 34, and her résumé includes writing clever YA books (Monsters, Shiverton Hall), acting (she’s the young Camilla Parker Bowles on The Crown), and taking over for Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge as showrunner/head writer on the second season of Killing Eve (which earned her two Emmy nominations). She shook up Sundance in 2018 with Careful How You Go, a wicked short film about

+++++ Classic | ++++ Excellent | +++ Good | ++ Fair | + Poor

FROM TOP: FOCUS FEATURES; MERIE WEISMILLER WALLACE/FOCUS FEATURES

FAIR WARNING Mulligan reads Careful How You Go.

respectively realize she’s not really out of it when they snake a hand up her skirt or try to take advantage of her “inebriated” state.

What exactly is Cassie doing? There’s no way this review is going to give away Fennell’s endgame, except to say that the driving incident happened to a med-school friend that Cassie treated like a sister. And it’s not just men who feel Cassie’s wrath.

There’s Dean Walker (Connie Britton), who caved to the he-said-she-said excuses once upon a time. And there’s Madison (Alison Brie), a fellow college student who stayed mum in the face of irrefutable evidence.

Though Mulligan is Fennell’s perversely comic partner in payback, to which an instrumental of Britney Spears’ “Toxic” adds just the right bottom note, there’s no question that Cassie is flushing her own life down the tubes. She lives with her parents ( Jennifer Coolidge and Clancy Brown) and works at a coffeehouse, run by a simpatico boss (Laverne Cox), so she can cosplay as a damsel in distress — her lipstick-smeared face suggests Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker with a different spin on retaliation.

A bright spot enters Cassie’s life in the person of Ryan (Bo Burnham, killer good), a former classmate who’s now a pediatric surgeon. Their reunion involves her spitting in his coffee, a fab singalong to Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind,” and the fact that his height (about six feet six) will make it look like he’s dating a child. Burnham, famous as a YouTube comic-musician and for his exceptional directing of Eighth Grade, pairs irresistibly with Mulligan.

Is there hope for this couple? Have you met this antiheroine?! As the film moves to a shocking climax, it takes a big swing at the wolves who tread through the #MeToo era in nice-guy sheep’s clothing.

But, like Cassie, Fennell hits hardest at the conspiracy of silence around the predators.

Fennell wants us to laugh at Promising Young Woman. She also ensures those laughs stick in our throats.

LOVE ON THE RUN

Patel plays a Dickens hero.

C O M E DY I S A

science — and Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani could teach a course STARRING Issa Rae, in chemistry. The two Kumail Nanjiani actors generate big DIRECTED BY laughs and a sense of Michael genuine connection as Showalter a New Orleans couple # on the skids who find out what they really mean to each other when a bunch of psychos try to kill them. Why? Scripters Aaron Abrams and Brendan Gall strain hard to bring clarity to a tale based on mistaken identity. Luckily, director Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) keeps the action percolating even when the holes in the plot could swallow a tank.

Rae, an Emmy nominee for HBO’s Insecure and star of sleeper hit The Photograph, plays Leilani. Nanjiani, of HBO’s Silicon Valley and an Oscar nominee for co-writing The Big Sick, is fellow lovebird Jibran, who Leilani resents for spending more time on making documentaries then making out with her. It takes a series of near-death experiences with crooked cops, drug dealers, and orgiasts out of Eyes Wide Shut to bring them back in sync.

Nonsense? Maybe. But the hilarious teamwork of Rae and Nanjiani is a recipe for inspired lunacy that nothing can spoil. P.T. The Lovebirds

DICKENS UNPLUGGED

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DEAN ROGERS/SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES; FRÉDÉRIC BATIER/ PANTALÉON FILMS; SKIP BOLEN/PARAMOUNT PICTURES; KOBAL/SHUTTERSTOCK (2)

T H E T R I C K TO

crafting a film out The Personal of Charles Dickens’ History of David Copperfield 1850 novel is to get a live wire to direct.

STARRING Dev Patel, Enter Armando IanHugh Laurie, nucci, the political Tilda Swinton satirist behind Veep DIRECTED BY and The Death of Armando Iannucci Stalin, who cuts the 4 classic to pieces — but spares nothing to create a singular, sensational adaptation.

Dev Patel, born in London to Indian Hindu immigrants, plays the title role of a British orphan who overcomes hardships to become the hero of his own life as a writer. Patel is wonderful, proving Iannucci’s insistence that the Victorian-era author had a fun side, with a twist of Monty Python-level irreverence.

Never mind the purists and revel in the action as actors run with the laughs. There’s Tilda Swinton as David’s daffy aunt, Hugh Laurie as the nut-job Mr. Dick, Ben Whishaw as obsequious villain Uriah Heep, and Peter Capaldi as Mr. Micawber, the poorhouse friend immortalized by W.C. Fields in the 1935 film version. Iannucci’s David Copperfield sometimes bursts at the seams, but always with an exuberant energy that honors Dickens without sticking to the page. P.T.

Lovebirds Rae and Nanjiani confront a hater.

Eisenberg as Marceau

NO MIME TO LOSE D I D YO U K N OW

that the iconic Resistance French mime STARRING Marcel Marceau Jesse Eisenberg, Ed Harris was once an DIRECTED BY unsung hero of the Jonathan French Resistance, Jakubowicz smuggling Jewish 3 children across the border into Switzerland with the Nazis in pursuit? This World War II story is the core of Resistance, starring Jesse Eisenberg in a role he delivers with physical finesse and emotional grit. It’s the young Marcel, himself a Jew in German-occupied France, who teaches kids real-world benefits in the “art of silence” — and keeps your attention riveted to the screen.

It’s no lie that Resistance takes dramatic license, drifting into Nazi stereotypes and Hollywood action clichés. And it’s only after the liberation of Paris in 1944, when Gen. George Patton (Ed Harris) introduces Marceau to the troops in his trademark performance makeup, that Eisenberg gets to play the Marceau of legend. No matter. Writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz (Secuestro Express) achieves maximum impact by keeping our eyes on the man in the invisible box, one who’s stuck in a danger zone where children learn that the power of art can literally be a saving grace. P.T.

Dave 1993

RECONSIDERED

AVAILABLE ON

Hail to the Commander in Chief: ‘Dave’

Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver

YouTube, Prime Video, Google Play, iTunes, and Vudu

T W E N T Y-S E V E N Y E A RS AG O, the idea of a guy becoming president without the faintest clue of how to do the job seemed like a ludicrous Hollywood fantasy. But unlike some commanders in chief, who’ll remain nameless, Dave Kovic — Kevin Kline’s everyman at the center of Ivan Reitman’s Frank Capra-esque 1993 film — is a gentle, benevolent adult who found himself in the Oval Office because he happened to look like the real (and accidentally comatose) POTUS. Kovic’s common sense helps him win the heart of the first lady (Sigourney Weaver) and launch a federal jobs program. It’s a reminder of a time when we still believed that handing power to a complete political amateur with no previous experience could save the country — or at least not send us all down the road to ruin. ANDY GREENE April 2020

|

Rolling Stone

| 91

ADVERTISEMENT Sean “Diddy” Combs surprised the crowd with a performance.

On Saturday, February 1st, Rolling Stone headed back to the Big Game for a night out with the biggest stars in music and sports. Taking place at SLS South Beach and Hyde Beach, the party featured special performances by Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Ciara and DJ Khaled, who brought out surprise guests Diddy, French Montana, Yo Gotti, Fat Joe, Noreaga, Fabolous and DaniLeigh, followed by DJ Paris Hilton and Vice. As a fixture every Super Bowl weekend for a decade, the party intersected the worlds of sports, music, and entertainment while honoring Miami’s rich history and culture.

Grammy-winning artist DJ Khaled and Rolling Stone President Gus Wenner kicked off the event.

Rolling Stone Live: Miami took place at SLS South Beach.

Grammy-winning singer Ciara throws it back with her hit “One, Two Step.”

Fabolous joined DJ Khaled onstage for a set.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: 1 - DYLAN RIVES; 2 - SACHA LECCA FOR ROLLING STONE; 3-5 - IAN WITLEN FOR ROLLING STONE; 6 - SACHA LECCA FOR ROLLING STONE

Fat Joe was one of many special performers.

ADVERTISEMENT Lil Jon hangs at the MCM duck, dressed in full MCM.

Rolling Stone Live: Miami presented by Can-Am featured the full lineup of vehicles, including the brand new 2020 Spyder RT.

Ciroc served custom watermelon cocktails and more.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: 1 - IAN WITLEN FOR ROLLING STONE; 2 - DIA DIPASUPIL/GETTY IMAGES FOR MCM; 3-6 - IAN WITLEN FOR ROLLING STONE; 7 - EUGENE GOLOGURSKY/GETTY IMAGES FOR MCM

Paris Hilton closed out the party with a DJ set.

French Montana walked the carpet before taking the stage.

S P O N S O R E D BY

Guests hung out in the Vivid Seats Backstage Lounge for a VIP viewing experience.

Guests got an exclusive first taste of our new Elysian & Rolling Stone Lager.

G R E TA T H U N B E R G [Cont. from 42] has an acute noise sensitivity, which has meant at times the rest of the family eating in a guest room with plastic plates to keep noise to a minimum. When Beata went to dance class, Malena wasn’t allowed to move during the two-hour session lest Beata have a tearful meltdown.

Greta battled her own life-threatening demons.

When she was 11, she stopped eating and rarely spoke to anyone outside of her family for months. Sometimes she would come home after being bullied at school — recess was spent hiding out in the bathroom — and either spend hours petting her dogs or crying at her own pain. She lost 20 pounds as her parents chronicled her food intake. (“Five pieces of gnocchi in two hours.”)

Somehow, it was Greta turning her weakness into strength that made her a global icon. According to Malena, Greta fell silent after seeing a film in school depicting floating armies of plastic infesting our oceans. Other students were horrified, but quickly returned to their iPhones and talk of upcoming ski trips. Not Greta. She fell silent and obsessed over the climate’s demise.

“I felt very alone that I was the only one who seemed to be worried about this,” Greta tells me in Stockholm. “I was the only one left in this sort of bubble. Everyone else could just continue with their lives as usual, and I couldn’t do that.”

Greta read all she could and sometimes went online and battled with climate deniers, oft exclaiming triumphantly, “He blocked me,” to her parents. She eventually wrote an essay on the climate crisis for a Swedish newspaper. Eco-activists contacted her, and Greta mentioned the inspiration she took from the school strikes after the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting, and suggested a climate version. The activists showed little interest. Greta didn’t care and slowly broke out of her cocoon.

“I thought what the Parkland students did was so brave,” says Thunberg. “Of course, it was not the only thing that got me out of that feeling. I did it because I was tired of sitting and waiting. I tried to get others to join me, but no one was interested and no one wanted to do that. So I said, ‘I’m going to do this alone if no one else wants to do it.’ ” So in August 2018, Greta and her father bicycled down to the Swedish Parliament, across the cobblestone street from where Greta and I now stand.

She propped up the first Skolstrejk för klimatet sign, which she’d made from scrap wood. Greta also wrote up an information sheet with climate data and a hint of the defiant humor that eventually led her to make her Twitter profile read, “A teenager working on her anger management problem,” after Trump told her to chill out. Her bio was simple: “Because you grown-ups don’t give a damn about my future, neither do I. My name is Greta, I am in ninth grade, and I am going on strike from school for the climate.”

Her dad left, and she sat alone. She posted a couple of images to Instagram. It was passed on by a few of her followers. Then a reporter noticed. And then local activists from Greenpeace. Within two months, there were hundreds of fellow travelers, and the news spread through Scandinavia to Europe and on to America. Within a year, climate student strikes attracted tens of thousands, from London to New York.

Greta’s rise was the activist version of a perfect storm. Her ascension from bullied Swedish student

94 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

to global climate icon has been driven by both a loss and a regaining of hope. It is not a coincidence that her ascent happened immediately in the aftermath of the election of Trump. It’s impossible to see a Gretalike phenomena emerging during the Obama-driven run up to the Paris climate talks, when it actually looked like nations of the world were getting their shit together to deal with global warming. It became obvious after Trump and the Paris implosion that 30 years of rhetoric and meetings had created very little except more talk.

And then you had the natural disasters. California could not stop burning. Floods ravaged Europe. We now watch glaciers melt and collapse in real time.

The dawn of 2020 brought the Australian calamity, with images of scorched earth, koalas and kangaroos burned alive, and the death of a way of life.

The irony of the Greta Age is that we now have options, but refuse to take them. Clean-energy technology has evolved to a point where old arguments that fossil fuels remain the cheapest way to create ener-

“I was tired of waiting. I tried to get others to join me, but no one was interested. So I said, ‘I’m going to do this alone.’ ” gy are now obviously nonsense. The cost of clean energy is no longer a barrier to change. Over the past decade, it became an obvious truth: Burning fossil fuels no longer made economic sense anywhere, anytime. What remains is the power and influence of the energy conglomerate superpowers to maintain the status quo. No politician has the courage to face them down. By 2018, it became even clearer that politicians could not be trusted. Talk was wasted. Companies would continue to put profits before nature.

We were on our own.

And that’s when Greta came along.

Thunberg’s perceived psychological weakness became her superpower. Her flat, affectless, blunt voice was the perfect counterpoint to the bureaucratic bullshit of the climate negotiators. It cut through all the gobbledygook about offsets and the economic necessity of coal and cost curves of solar power. She put it in simple human language: We are losing our planet. Unlike many activists before her, she is not political. She is not interested in reforming the process. Her voice is unabashedly and explicitly moral — “How dare you.”

“I think she is extraordinary in her determination,” says Eva Jones, an American high school senior who recently spent a week protesting for climate justice in Davos. “When you hear her speak, she doesn’t do vanity interviews. It’s never like, ‘So what do your friends think about this?’ She’s like, ‘No, I don’t want to talk about my friends, I want to talk about the crisis.’ She’s absolutely insane about getting reporters

and getting politicians and getting whoever’s talking to her back to the subject.”

All of this from a teenager who sometimes still wears her hair in pigtails.

Thunberg and her fellow protesters head toward Medborgarplatsen (Citizen Square), in central Stockholm. They pass over a bridge by the harbor, where massive renovations are being done so the city can host even more waste-multiplying mega cruise ships.

The kids chant in Swedish, “What do we want? Climate justice! When? Now! When? Now, now, now!”

At the square, the squirrelly tweens play tag and are entertained by a rapper in a ski mask (some things don’t translate).

Eventually, Greta takes the stage. She speaks in her native Swedish, and her tone is faster and more emotional than in English. She mentions that temperatures in Sweden have been 5 to 10 degrees Celsius above normal this winter, and how globally 19 of the past 20 years have been the warmest on record.

“I have been on the road and visited numerous places and met people from all over the globe,” says Greta. “I can say that it looks nearly the same everywhere I have been: The climate crisis is ignored by people in charge, despite the science being crystal clear. We don’t want to hear one more politician say that this is important but afterward do nothing to change it. We don’t want more empty words from people pretending to take our future seriously.”

She pauses, and her face goes grim. “It shouldn’t be up to us children and teenagers to make people wake up around the world. The ones in charge should be ashamed.”

The crowd chants, “Greta, Greta, Greta. . . .”

She must hate that.

G

RETA KEEPS MOVING. In January, it was Davos. This week it is Stockholm. Next Friday is Hamburg, Germany, and then Bristol the next week. It’s a debilitating schedule since she doesn’t fly. Greta says it won’t go on forever. She is nearing the end of her gap year, between high school and university. “I really hope that we can solve this thing now because I want to get back to studying,” says Thunberg, shivering a bit in the Stockholm wind.

I can’t tell if she is joking or is having a rare moment of optimism.

Still, she is so small, and the world is so big. I wonder how she continues forward as the world pays lip service and not much else.

For the first time, Thunberg softens.

“I’m very weak in a sense,” says Thunberg quietly. “I’m very tiny and I am very emotional, and that is not something people usually associate with strength. I think weakness, in a way, can be also needed because we don’t have to be the loudest, we don’t have to take up the most amount of space, and we don’t have to earn the most money.”

A friend comes over and whispers in her ear. It’s time to go, maybe home for a silent walk with her two dogs, Moses and Roxy. But she isn’t quite finished.

“We don’t need to have the biggest car, and we don’t need to get the most attention. We just need to . . .”

Mighty Greta’s voice trails off as if she is lost in thought or searching for the right word in English.

Then, she looks up, locks eyes, and smiles for the first time.

“We need to care about each other more.”

Additional reporting by staff writer RYAN BORT

On Newsstands Now Wherever Magazines Are Sold

CHILDREN OF THE CRISIS [Cont. from 48] campment, a lot of them fell deep into a hole of either drugs and alcohol or depression.

We lost a lot of young people when we came back.” It wasn’t just that the movement had failed, threatening the ecology of the area and the future of its youth — it was that, for a time, kids had seen a glimpse of hope for the natural world. “They killed themselves because they missed camp,” Charger says. “The younger people who weren’t there, they felt like they missed out on something. It took a toll on us mentally.”

F

OR EVERY YOUNG person like Charger, who has seen a hint of what a world of climate cooperation might look like, there are now far more kids who’ve witnessed the other extreme. From an Australia on fire to the sinking Maldives, a growing number of children and young adults no longer experience pre-traumatic stress disorder when it comes to climate change; they know what climate trauma is firsthand. And they know that they are likely to be traumatized again.

Madigan Traversi evacuated her Sonoma County, California, home late one October night in 2017 wearing her pajamas, with the smell of smoke in the air.

She didn’t take the time to change, to pack more clothes, or to even grab her toothbrush. “We just grabbed my dog and got in the car,” the 14-year-old explains. “I took my school backpack, and that was it.” Two days later, she and her parents were in a hotel in the San Francisco area when they got a call from a neighbor and learned that their house had burned to the ground 20 minutes after they had evacuated. As Madigan huddled in the hotel room, crying with her family, she was in utter disbelief. “It didn’t seem real — I still don’t feel like it’s real two and a half years later.”

Weeks afterward, when she finally returned to her neighborhood, the outlines of where her home had been were all you could see. She looked for her favorite tree, the one with the swing she had played on almost every day, but it was gone — along with everything she had owned or made as a child. “The hardest possessions to lose were things like diaries and artwork from when I was little,” she says. “Of course, I remember my childhood, but I don’t have any first artworks. I know my mom was heartbroken about that.” Now, all throughout fire season, Madigan keeps two laundry baskets packed with everything that she wouldn’t want to lose a second time.

During the Camp Fire of 2018, schools in her area shut down. In the Kincade Fire of 2019, she had to evacuate yet again.

“Just in the past two and a half years, our school has been closed due to four different climate-related disasters,” says Park Guthrie, a sixth-grade teacher in Sonoma County, father of three and co-founder of Schools for Climate Action, who speaks of the “psychological or spiritual destabilization” he sees in many of his students, some of whom have lost their homes and all of whom live with the uncertainty that fire season brings. For these kids who have experienced climate change acutely, Guthrie thinks climate inaction is particularly damaging — and undermines his role as an educator. “They’re right at that age where they have one foot in childhood and one foot in a broader world,” he tells me. “It’s a moment of revelation in many ways, and as it relates to the climate crisis, it’s a terrible revelation. Like, ‘If this is the case, then what about everything else you’ve

96 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

been telling us about who we are as a country — that we value mainstream science, we value solving big problems, working together, speaking up for justice?’

A healthy classroom culture is embedding these lessons, and when you pull back the veil on not just climate crisis, but our national climate neglect, it’s totally destabilizing. It’s painful cognitive dissonance.”

That cognitive dissonance is what gets to Guthrie, that as his students are donning masks to go to school, members of Congress are denying the existence of climate change and the National School Boards Association is refusing to use the term for fear of alienating some of its members. He calls climate inaction a “form of neglect/abuse” arguing that “it’s not just metaphorical: We have collectively abandoned our children’s generation and future generations.”

Considering this neglect, he’s also frustrated by the patronizing way adults congratulate kids for being the ones who will assuredly solve climate change.

“They hate hearing that ‘You’re going to be the ones that fix this problem that we elders couldn’t fix.’

That’s a terrifying thing to tell a seventh-grader,” says Guthrie. “It’s not healthy for kids to grow up with this nagging sense that ‘the adults aren’t in charge.’ ” In fact, this sentiment was echoed by all the young people I interviewed. They didn’t want the burden of saving the planet when some of them couldn’t even vote, when they had a Spanish test looming, and when they had come to understand that climate change is not simply a matter of science but of classism, racism, capitalism, and the way the global north indiscriminately dumps on the global south.

The psychological enormity of what they’re up against has actually helped fuel the Republican argument that climate change should not be taught in schools, that reiterating the subject could augment student distress; and it’s true that among some young people, there’s a level of alarmism that reflects the most dire of all possible outcomes. But it’s also true that those outcomes could come to pass, and that eco-anxiety is not necessarily pathological.

“It’s a logical, emotionally healthy response to the reality of what’s going on,” argues Hickman, who recently had an 11-year-old point out to her that in “the world in which I am growing up, it is normal not to have polar bears. And that’s different to the world in which you grew up.”

In fact, mental-health professionals warn that the internal inconsistencies created by climate disavowal — knowing a truth but not acting on it — can be more psychologically disruptive than confronting that hard truth repeatedly. “We know that what we try to push away usually comes back or turns into a symptom in some other form,” says psychotherapist and Climate Psychology Alliance North America co-president Elizabeth Allured, who argues that rather than constraining climate education, we need to train educators on how to deal with the psychological implications of what they’re teaching.

Instead, we’re leaving that to kids as well. Just before the September climate march, Zero Hour’s Margolin was approached by a group of girls who knew of her activism and wanted her help. “They were like, ‘I was crying myself to sleep the other night about this. I’m so scared. Jamie, do you genuinely think that we’re going to be OK?’ I was trying not to discourage them, but what could I say? ‘I don’t know,’ I told them. ‘It depends on the action that we take.’ ” For her part, Margolin has found activism to be the only way to push back on overwhelming eco-anxiety, the only way to navigate the precarious line between existential dread and improbable — but necessary —

hope. “I think the psychological is what we need to impact,” says Allured. “We need more people to be thinking psychologically about this and to be feeling what’s going on. In terms of social tipping points, we never know what is going to push a system out of its equilibrium into a new level of awareness.”

In other words, we need the Jamies of the world, the Gretas, the iconoclasts, the idealists, the people whose brains are still wired for exploration. And we need them not to solve the climate crisis for us but rather to invite us into their way of seeing the issue. If young people are scared, anxious, and grieving, then so should we all be. We need the psychology of children to be our guide.

S

OMETIMES, THOUGH, THAT scares me almost as much as the climate crisis itself. This past September, on the Facebook page for my son’s first-grade class, someone posted the question, “Is anyone taking their kids out of school tomorrow for the climate march?” Some parents wrote that they were, but I opted against it. At the time, my son was only five. I didn’t know if he was aware of climate change yet. I didn’t want to expose him to something so scary at such a young age. I wanted to preserve his blissful ignorance as long as I possibly could.

So it was a surprise when, a few months later, he came home with a petition he’d created to save the koalas (or “kwola’s,” as he spelled it). He’d gotten his teachers and classmates to sign it. He wanted me to send it to President Trump, and to the zoo. He doesn’t watch the news, nor had my husband and I talked about the fires in Australia in front of him.

But, somehow, some way, the message had gotten through. And what I realized, standing on the sidewalk beside his bus stop, holding that piece of paper, is that I was naive to think that I could shield him from the truth that the world he lives in is changing.

And in my naiveté, I had allowed his introduction to that concept to come from someone other than me.

When I tell Hickman this story, she’s silent for a moment. “Often, we have to interpret what children say to us,” she eventually says. “It would be too traumatic and frightening for your six-year-old to say, ‘Mommy, save me.’ But he is asking you to save him.

When children ask us to save koala bears, they’re asking us to save them. He’s saying, ‘Save me.’ ” By this time, of course, I’m in tears. Right now, I don’t know how to save him. I know to recycle, to try to offset my carbon footprint when I fly, to buy locally and organically when I can, to compost. I know how to make decisions that can help us all feel a little more in control. But I also know that these things are salves, that while they are important — psychologically and otherwise — the problem of climate change cannot be solved by these steps alone. And I know that when my son asks me about this, I will have to tell him the truth.

In the meantime, I practice what I might say to him when the time comes. “I am sorry that my generation and other generations haven’t fixed this for you already,” I tell Jasper and Kavi the afternoon we meet.

By now, we’ve carried our drinks to the benches outside, the January day mild enough for us to sit there in light jackets.

“Well, yeah,” Kavi agrees. “It’s a lot of pressure.”

Jasper nods. “It’s a lot of stress on us.”

“I just tell myself, ‘Well, we’re going to do something.’ ” Kavi says. “And hopefully that’s true.”

Jasper looks at his friend uncertainly. “I thought climate change was going to make its way across like a storm. But no,” he sighs. “It’s here to stay.”

NEW ECO -RADICALS [Cont. from 59] actions are planned to be fun and inviting, so people want to participate. “We try to think about how can we disrupt these roads in the most nonviolent, loving way possible,” says Baulch.

“Crowds of people planting trees, singing songs, and waving colorful flags look inviting, as opposed to a purely angry mob.” As Hallam writes, “The general atmosphere should be: ‘We’re going to take down the government and have fun doing it.’ ” Second, the actions are designed to be disruptive, but not too much. For instance, XR canceled plans to shut down Heathrow airport, and it tries to work with police in advance to make sure it isn’t blocking emergency routes or risking the public’s safety. The goal is to find the sweet spot at which XR is not endangering or alienating people yet still causing enough headaches that it can’t be ignored. “The process of political change involves people getting pissed off,” Hallam once said. “So the key issue is not whether they get pissed off, it’s whether them getting pissed off leads to attitude change.”

Finally, and perhaps most important, civil resistance doesn’t require a majority in order to be successful. According to XR, there’s a tipping point at which a movement’s momentum will carry it to success. “We should not make the mistake of thinking ‘the people have to rise’ in the sense of the majority of the population,” Hallam writes. “We need a few to rise up, and the rest will be willing to ‘give it a go.’ ” This strategy is based in large part on the work of Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, the co-author of a book called Why Civil Resistance Works. Chenoweth

studied more than 300 movements since the turn of the 20th century, and according to her research, the magic number for success is surprisingly small: only 3.5 percent. Which is to say, every nonviolent movement she looked at that had the active participation of just 3.5 percent of the population was a success.

In other words, if just a few hundred thousand people can mobilize in New York City, it might be enough to spark massive structural change. “There’s lots of people who disagree with what we do,” says Baulch. “But you don’t need the whole population to act. You just need a majority of the population to not be against you.

“If you look at the polling that was done after our big rebellion in April,” he adds, “you saw a huge increase in the number of people in the U.K. who thought climate change was one of the top issues we need to focus on right now. And you saw the media start to cover climate change as if it’s an emergency.

So even if people disagree with our tactics, they still might realize, ‘Oh, shit. I actually do want my kids to have a future.’ ”

E

XTINCTION REBELLION is growing worldwide, with nearly 800 branches in more than 57 countries. Here in the U.S., where there are dozens of chapters from Montana to Miami, XR members in New York shut down Times Square last October, and more than 60 people were arrested. A good start — though far from a revolution.

Stateside, the most successful new group is the Sunrise Movement — a self-described “army of young people” taking a more traditionally political route.

Sunrise, which was born in 2013 inside a borrowed office at the D.C. chapter of the Sierra Club, grew out

of the campus divestment movement, where students pushed their colleges and universities to stop investing in fossil fuel. It made its first big splash in November 2018, when 51 young people were arrested after taking over Nancy Pelosi’s office and calling on her to support the Green New Deal. A just-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stopped by to show her support, and the videos went viral.

Sunrise has boomed in part because it’s been savvy about communicating with Gen Z’ers and millennials: The group is fluent in Twitter-speak, handy with memes, and knows how to engineer a viral moment, like a subsequent sit-in at Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office where the 85-year-old California moderate lectured the kids on political realism but mostly succeeded in winning more converts to Sunrise’s cause.

So far, the movement has devoted most of its energy to organizing politically: pressuring lawmakers, advocating for legislation, and helping get out the vote. In January, Sunrise endorsed Bernie Sanders, and its top priority this year is mobilizing young voters in November. But according to the group’s fiveyear plan, while 2020 is about winning the election, 2021 will be dedicated to “engag[ing] in mass noncooperation to interrupt business as usual.”

Meanwhile, Extinction Rebellion is gearing up for another worldwide campaign starting May 23rd — one that it hopes will be even bigger. “We’re calling it a rolling rebellion,” says Clare Farrell. “The goal is sustaining it for six weeks. We’ve done quite well at ringing the alarm — that’s been heard. Now we’re focused on mobilizing as many people as possible. Our ambition is to get a million people activated this year.” She admits it’s a high bar. “But,” she adds, “it’s our job to be audacious.”

S UB SC RI B E TO DAY

ONE YEAR FOR $49.95 Iconic. Provocative. Influential.

ROLLINGSTONE.COM/INTROOFFER

Jane Goodall The primatologist on overcoming sexism and maintaining hope You’re still working in your eighties. What drives you now?

In short, what drives me are my own grandchildren and youth all around the world.

There is an old saying that goes, “We don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”

But I don’t believe we’re “borrowing” the planet from

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Goodall’s study of chimps in the wild.

our children — we’re stealing it from them. And if we don’t stop our reckless behavior, then there won’t be a future for our children to inherit.

If you could share one fact about your research, what would it be?

That we humans have been terribly arrogant. We are part of and not separated from the rest of the animal kingdom — we are not the only sentient, sapient beings on the planet.

After more than six decades of research, what’s your best advice for sustaining a long career?

Even before I ever stepped foot in Africa, my mother would always tell me that if I truly wanted something, then I would have to work hard for it and never give up.

When I was eventually allowed to begin my study in Gombe [in Tanzania], she even came with me and encouraged me to keep going.

Whenever I came back to the base camp in the early months discouraged by not

98 |

Rolling Stone

|

April 2020

finding any chimps, she would remind me that I was learning much more than I realized: their eating habits, sleeping patterns, daily foraging paths. One’s work won’t always feel fulfilling or meaningful, so I believe that finding meaning in the little details or the small victories is key to a sustained career.

You had to deal with a lot of sexism, especially early in your career. How did you overcome it and press on?

I believed in my work and knew that if I could just get a seat at the table then I would be able to quiet any detractor with the data I had collected.

Yes, I had to work 10 times harder than the average man just to get the same level of recognition, but once I had made a name for myself, I let the data speak for me. I also realized early on, once I had started to gain some notoriety, that the future careers of many women rested on my shoulders, and that if I could show them the way and open those doors for them, then it would be that much easier for the next generation of women scientists to break into their chosen field in a substantial way.

What can your research on chimpanzees tell us about the climate crisis?

One of the most important lessons learned from studying the chimpanzees is how every single living creature is connected in the great tapestry of life. Even the removal of the smallest organism from an ecosystem can have disastrous effects. This is, in part, why I started our TACARE [Lake Tanganyika Catchment Reforestation

and Education] approach, or “Take Care.” It was started, in part, after I flew over Gombe forest in the early Nineties and witnessed the sheer destruction and removal of the majority of the forest that I had grown to love. It was then that I realized that we would never be able to save the chimpanzees’ habitat if we were not able to first help the local communities surrounding the forest.

Are you hopeful we can reverse the climate crisis?

Obviously, I am far more concerned with our current state of affairs than I was 60 years ago, but I am also hopeful that more and more nations are taking the threat of climate change more seriously than ever before. I am also hopeful that the younger generations realize the threat facing them. I find inspiration in the youth that I meet around the globe that feel the need to take issues into their own hands. In fact, it seems to me that the younger generations are the ones taking climate change the most seriously out of everyone.

We lost an estimated billion animals in the Australian brush fires. How do you stay optimistic about the animal kingdom?

You must stay optimistic for the future, because if we lose hope and let apathy guide us, then we are a lost cause already. Wherever I travel, I try to spread a sense of hope. We still have a very limited time to turn this all around, but we must convince the entire globe and, as Dylan Thomas said so eloquently, not allow ourselves to go gentle into that good night. SEAN WOODS ILLUSTRATION BY Mark Summers

THE

JUNE 5 - 7, 2020 K:G=:EE L BLE:G= I:KD G>P RHKD <BMR FOUNDERS ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS

TAME IMPALA · MISSY ELLIOTT · FLUME · VAMPIRE WEEKEND STEVIE NICKS · SOLANGE · MILEY CYRUS ELLIE GOULDING · RÜFÜS DU SOL · H.E.R. PORTUGAL. THE MAN · FOALS · SUMMER WALKER · JON BELLION KHRUANGBIN · CARLY RAE JEPSEN · MAREN MORRIS SWAE LEE · OF MONSTERS AND MEN · MILKY CHANCE BLEACHERS · BANKS · DANNY BROWN · GRYFFIN ALESSIA CARA · MADEON · EARTHGANG · YBN CORDAE GIRL TALK · OLIVER TREE · STEVE LACY · PINK SWEAT$ A R I Z O N A · DOMINIC FIKE · PINEGROVE · DAVE SNAIL MAIL · ALEC BENJAMIN · CUCO · TONES AND I · MUNA PUP · CHARLY BLISS · PRINCESS NOKIA · FONTAINES D.C. NANCY WHANG (LCD SOUNDSYSTEM) · SASHA SLOAN POOLSIDE · SLOWTHAI · BLACK MIDI · FRANKIE COSMOS JAY SOM · CHARLOTTE LAWRENCE · MAXO KREAM KOTA THE FRIEND · NASTY CHERRY · MAX · CHASE ATLANTIC 99 NEIGHBORS · LAUNDRY DAY · JAWNY · CHIIILD YEEK · RYLAND JAMES · POPPY JEAN CRAWFORD ALMOST MONDAY · HAND MADE HOUSE govball.com

TICKETS ON SALE NOW AT GOVBALL.COM