The climate crisis won’t be solved with lifestyle choices but through political pressure and bold collective action.

By: Leah C. Stokes

August 31, 2026 (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)

The first time my newborn’s eyes saw the sky, it was a dull gray. The first time her lungs breathed outdoor air, it was filled with smoke. On the morning she came home from the hospital, a wildfire burned just miles up the coast from Santa Barbara.

It was October 14, 2021, the day before her due date and 75 long nights after her birth. She’d spent that time inside a NICU incubator. But that evening, my baby slept in her bassinet for the first time, reunited with her twin sister who’d come home a few weeks earlier. The next morning, our family woke up under one roof. I’d anticipated this day for the past nine months. To mark the occasion, we were going to sing, eat chocolate cake, and celebrate.

The twins were not all that I’d been growing over that long year. I was having a strange, high-risk pregnancy, gestating policy ideas and babies. During this time, I was working with a team of fellow climate advocates on an ambitious plan to rapidly expand clean electricity and slash fossil fuel use. The idea began as a line in Jay Inslee’s 2020 presidential campaign platform pledging 100-percent carbon-free electricity by 2035. It grew into a policy paper, spawned a network of advocates, and eventually became a bill introduced in Congress. Along the way, we’d even managed to get President Joe Biden to commit to our plan. Now it was part of a major climate package, the biggest in history, slowly winding its way through Congress.

But both the policy and pregnancy proved precarious. There were weeks when my future children looked like they might die, while the policy seemed destined to pass. And other weeks, I was sure the babies would live, while the policy would crumble. I desperately wanted everything to work out, but often that felt impossible.

That jarring feeling hit me again on October 15, 2021, my due date. Just as we were about to sit down for our first dinner under the same roof, I checked my email. When I saw a message from Coral Davenport, my heart sank. As one of the longest-serving climate journalists at The New York Times, Coral was often the first to get the scoop. She wanted to talk as soon as possible. I immediately knew why.

Ten days earlier, as my baby was growing healthy enough to finally come home, I began to hear that the clean energy policy I’d poured so much into was dying. Rumors of its demise grew daily. On one of our last nights at the hospital, my friend Sonia Aggarwal, who worked at the White House, called. It was dinner time, and I needed to drive to the hospital before visiting hours ended, but I also knew I had to pick up the phone.

As one of my closest friends and allies in this work, Sonia said she wanted to be the one to tell me that the policy’s prognosis was not good. She would keep pushing, and so should I, but the case increasingly seemed terminal. Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia had hardened against the idea. He held the pivotal 50th vote in the Senate and could veto anything he opposed. A man who’d made a fortune in coal could not support a rapid transition away from dirty fossil fuels. That night, surrounded by the incessant beeping and alarms of the NICU, I held my tiny daughter and wept.

One week later, with both of my children now home, I picked up the phone and Coral’s voice came over the line: “I’ve got the story. I know the policy is dead.” She wanted a quote, to explain why this mattered in simple terms, but I couldn’t find the words. “Can I call you back in five minutes?” was all I could manage.

The larger climate package was still on the table, but the clean electricity plan was on the chopping block. Without it, I feared we wouldn’t be able to cut pollution fast enough to hit Biden’s 80 percent clean energy target. Its loss would blow a giant hole through the bill. My first instinct was despair — but despair is contagious. Plus, there were many other policies left in the package, policies worth saving.

With just a small window of time, I reached out to three colleagues I’d worked with over the past nine months. Each one held a different view, leaving me feeling like I was running through the stages of grief in rapid succession. One person was stuck in denial: “It’s not dead yet. Do not confirm it. Keep pushing.” Another wanted to bargain: “Maybe we can still fix this. There must be something else we can do.” The third counseled acceptance: “It’s gone. We need to move on and focus on everything we can still save.”

With these conflicting voices in my head, I tried to compose a brief comment. Coral had the story right; she’d heard it from multiple sources. There was no point in denying or trying to change the facts. I also knew the loss was too big to accept quietly. Instead, I would try to communicate the gravity of the situation while leaving space for hope. I wrote down, word for word, what I intended to say and practiced it aloud to my husband, who was sitting on our bed watching.

All I felt was the overwhelming feeling that I had failed the world, and perhaps most acutely, failed my children.

When I called Coral back, I did my best to stick to my lines. But I found myself saying more than I meant to. Emotion came spilling out of me. My voice trailed off, “It’s pretty sad… it’s so sad.”

My husband, noticing I’d gone off script, signaled that I needed to stop talking. When I hung up, I reassured him, “Oh, the part about me being sad? Don’t worry, she won’t use that.”

That night, we still sat down for dinner. We still sang. We still ate cake. I did my best to hold the grief and the joy simultaneously. I’d found myself in the middle of my life, in the middle of a policy fight, in the middle of the climate crisis. In my brief 35 years, polluters had pumped out more than half of all carbon emissions in human history. Even on that happy day, the crisis was still there, casting a shadow. It had already made the air too smoke-filled to take my newborns outside.

The next morning, I walked to the corner store to pick up a copy of The New York Times and found the article on the front page above the fold: “Crucial element of climate plan likely to be cut: Manchin blocks effort.” It opened with a sober reading of the facts. “The most powerful part of President Biden’s climate agenda — a program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy — will likely be dropped from the massive budget bill pending in Congress, according to congressional staffers and lobbyists familiar with the matter.”

Manchin’s staff all but confirmed it. The White House wouldn’t comment. And then, halfway down the page, were my words: “This is absolutely the most important climate policy in the package. We fundamentally need it to meet our climate goals. That’s just the reality. And now we can’t. So this is pretty sad.”

They say you should choose your words carefully. That you shouldn’t say something you wouldn’t want to read on the cover of the newspaper. Because words can have consequences you can’t predict. In the coming days, young people would begin a hunger strike outside the White House, staffers would find new ways to cut pollution, and pressure would grow on Congress to act. But that was all in the future. That Saturday, all I felt was the overwhelming feeling that I had failed — failed the world, and perhaps most acutely, failed my children.

Ifirst heard about climate change two decades earlier, in 2001. At the time, I was in high school, where my geography teacher — a brilliant British man with thick white hair — would draw fluffy clouds on the chalkboard to show how mountains create rain shadows and deserts. He was lighthearted and kind, and encouraged students to speak up. Plus, he had a funny ritual of closing each lecture by saying: “From the bottom of my heart, and the depths of my conviction: get lost.” I took every class he taught.

But one morning, he brought up global warming, saying it was an unproven theory. Just because temperatures were rising alongside carbon dioxide, he posited, did not mean humans were to blame. Correlation was not causation, after all. Despite my admiration for him, this lesson struck me as misguided. I don’t know why at the time, but I knew he was wrong.

During my four years at the University of Toronto, I became immersed in climate change through coursework and extracurriculars. One evening in the winter of 2007, a few months before graduation, I walked towards the University’s Convocation Hall.

Until we get rid of fossil-fuel infrastructure in every corner of our society, individual behavioral changes are mere nibbles at the edges of the problem.

It was here, surrounded by fellow climate activists, that I watched Al Gore give his famous slideshow. In Toronto, he was like a rockstar — when ticket sales for the event went live, the website crashed. After the talk ended, my friends and I were invited to attend a reception. I even got to shake Al Gore’s hand.

Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” had been released nine months earlier, creating widespread public awareness of climate change for the first time. In it, he presents the same slideshow I saw live. Just four days after this talk, it would win best documentary at the Oscars.

When I think back on that film two decades later, strangely, the thing I remember most vividly is the credits. After all the charts and facts came a black screen and a series of messages appeared. “The climate crisis can be solved. You can reduce your carbon emissions. In fact, you can even reduce your carbon emissions to zero.”

These words appeared before me, like a sacred text. And then the answer came: “Buy efficient appliances and light bulbs…Recycle.”

The idea that individuals could solve climate change on their own was ubiquitous at the time. It was 2007, and “carbon footprints” were all the rage. The claim was that we were each responsible for producing a certain amount of emissions, and we each needed to work relentlessly to reduce them. It felt like everyone I knew was calculating how much pollution their “lifestyle” created.

As a psychology major, I was susceptible to this argument. In college, I ran campaigns to get students to change their behavior and save energy. For my first job after graduation, I conducted carbon audits for a nonprofit. Once I figured out exactly how big the problem was, the proposed solution was to buy carbon offsets, which funded things like reforestation and carbon capture projects. What else could we do? No one seemed to know. It was counting for counting’s sake.

During the same period, I joined 50 million people across the globe and sat in the dark for “Earth Hour,” a global campaign aimed at demonstrating the world’s commitment to climate action. In Toronto, the iconic CN Tower switched off its lights, alongside hundreds of other buildings, instantly dropping energy use by 9 percent. But as that dark hour passed, I began to wonder: How would turning off the lights solve the climate crisis?

When I think back now on the closing credits of “An Inconvenient Truth,” I can see they simply weren’t true. Until we get rid of fossil-fuel infrastructure in every corner of our society, individual behavioral changes are mere nibbles at the edges of the problem.

Of course, this was not Al Gore’s fault — as usual, fossil fuel executives were to blame. In 2004, the fossil fuel company BP put a carbon footprint calculator on its website, encouraging people to estimate how much their behaviors, such as food choices and commutes, affected the planet. For the next three years, they spent upwards of $100 million a year promoting the idea. The phrase “carbon footprint” was unfamiliar at first, but by the time “An Inconvenient Truth” hit theaters in 2006, it was everywhere. No wonder it became the film’s framework for action.

It took me a decade to understand why my brilliant high school teacher had spread climate denial. Beginning in 1998, the American Petroleum Institute funded online curricula that promoted fossil fuels and cast doubt on climate science. These dirty industries were doing everything they could to delay policy action and protect their profits. The longer I worked on climate change, the more I realized there were villains in this story.

Whether or not a baby is born, our world will keep churning out pollution.

The carbon footprint paradigm didn’t just shame people for driving to work or not recycling — it also discouraged having children. Academic articles suggested that the number one way to reduce your impact was to forgo having a child. According to this perspective, the average American is responsible for 16 tons of carbon pollution every year — including every baby. If you don’t have that kid, theoretically the world makes less pollution.

My whole life, I struggled with whether to have children. Typically, when people ask if it’s moral to have a child with climate change accelerating, they are asking two things at once. They want to know if it’s okay to bring a child into a doomed world. And they want to know if the kid would only make the crisis worse. To me, both of these questions are fundamentally flawed: We are not doomed, and everyday people — let alone newborn babies — are not responsible for our dirty energy system.

We have too easily accepted the idea that we’re all to blame for the climate crisis. Whether or not a baby is born, our world will keep churning out pollution. Everyone alive today was born into a society that runs on fossil fuels. That’s even true for my grandparents, born almost a century ago. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve jumped from climate denial to climate despair without pausing to consider a third option: actually doing something about the problem. Our dirty energy system is not inevitable. This is the work, regardless of whether or not someone chooses to have a child.

When we start thinking this way, the question shifts from minimizing our impact on the planet to maximizing it.

For that reason, I suggest that we replace the carbon footprint with a new idea: the carbon wave. Rather than thinking of a single person leaving a footprint in the sand, think of waves in the ocean. These waves are made by strong, sustained winds blowing in the same direction. Over generations, these waves are built as thousands of people work together to create change, adding to the efforts of those before them. And just as waves wash away footprints on a beach, our carbon waves can erase our carbon footprints. Whatever negative impacts we have on the planet from living in a fossil-fuel society can be offset by our activism if we join with others to change it. Working together, we can make waves.

Of course, waves are less controllable than footprints. The waves we make alongside others will have less certain impacts. But their potential is orders of magnitude larger.

The waves we make now will determine our future. The American public wants climate action — they have for decades. We must keep pushing our governments, corporations, and communities to act. We can break the cycle and refuse to pass our dirty energy system to yet another generation.

Leah C. Stokes is Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara. As a leading climate advocate, she has championed climate policy in the United States at all levels of government and was selected for Time Magazine’s Time100 Next list and Business Insider’s top 30 global climate leaders. She is the author of “The Carbon Wave,” from which this article is adapted.

Posted on Aug 31

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