Climate change songs rock

Music born from a relentlessly warming planet

by Mark Kaufman(opens in a new tab)

Climate change songs rock

Music born from a relentlessly warming planet

by Mark Kaufman(opens in a new tab)

Eight years ago, NASA oceanographer Josh Willis strolled through the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. There, he spotted Elvis. At an exhibit displaying the destined King of Rock and Roll at age 21, Willis noticed a particular photograph snapped in 1956, entitled “Starburst.”(opens in a new tab) It showed Elvis’ vantage point from the stage as he swaggered in front of an ocean of spellbound faces.

“There was a sea of people in front of him,” said Willis, “and he’s standing there looking so cool.”

For Willis, it provided a spark. Climate scientists should connect with people, especially younger people, in more poignant, human ways, he decided. In jivin’ rockabilly style, Elvis sang about social rebellion, crushes, and being hip. Willis, who started dressing up like Elvis and performing as “Climate Elvis” a few years ago, sings about the changing climate, including the recently recorded tune, “Climate Rock.”

“I’m a doughy middle-aged white guy with dark hair and sideburns — so it’s in my wheelhouse,” said Willis, who spends significant chunks of his other life in research aircraft swooping over Greenland’s rapidly melting ice sheets(opens in a new tab).

Of course, most climate songs today aren’t performed by gregarious scientists, like Willis. But, worry not. As Earth’s mercury rises — 18 of the 19 warmest years on record(opens in a new tab) have occurred since 2000 — the topic's salience has been increasingly sustained by the likes of Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish, and Neil Young.

And like Elvis, the songs wrestling with the globally disrupted climate often, fittingly, rock.

Neil Young: “Shut It Down”

Neil Young, now 74, is pissed. On his new album Colorado, recorded under a full moon at an 8,750-foot elevation studio largely powered by solar panels, Young slams on the distortion and rails against the globe’s antiquated economic, energy, and industrial systems — systems that have spewed heat-trapping carbon emissions into the atmosphere for well over a century.

(Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, now the highest they’ve been in at least 800,000 years, are now increasing at both historically and geologically unprecedented rates(opens in a new tab).)

Young regrouped his gritty band, Crazy Horse, for the record. On the song “Shut It Down,” the band chants “Have to shut the whole system down” while Young shouts over blaring guitars:

People tryin' to save this Earth

From an ugly death

People tryin' to live

Working in a world of meat factories

All around the planet

There's a blindness that just can't see

They're all wearing climate change

As cool as they can be

Billie Eilish: “all the good girls go to hell”

Billie Eilish’s Southern California homeland has changed, dramatically, by a surge in climate-enhanced wildfires(opens in a new tab). And as her brother and producer Finneas O’Connell said unequivocally in an interview with Vulture(opens in a new tab), “all the good girls go to hell” is about climate change. In Southern California, that means profoundly parched vegetation that’s prone to more easily catch fire and rapidly spread. (This, on top of the reality that humans are, often unintentionally, sparking these fires to begin with.)

“In the last two years, there have been these horrendous wildfires,” O’Connell said in April.

Eilish softly, cryptically sings:

Hills burn in California

My turn to ignore ya

Don’t say I didn’t warn ya


Paul McCartney: “Despite Repeated Warnings”

In a seven-minute prog-rock track, Sir Paul laments how powerful governments and industries have largely ignored repeated, decades-long warnings from climate scientists about the environmental damages wrought by a disrupted climate. The tracks starts with a “Hey Jude”-like ballad before jumping into sharp time changes rife with arena-rock guitars.

Despite repeated warnings

Our danger's up ahead

The captain won't be listening

To what's really said

It feels that there’s a good chance

That we’ve been misled

And so the captain’s planning

To steam ahead.

The 1975: “The 1975”

In a collaboration with leading climate activist Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swede leading climate strikes around the globe, the English band The 1975 recorded a self-titled climate change track.

Above dreamy, atmospheric pianos and synthesizers, Thunberg lays down an eloquent lyrical stream. She highlights a critical conclusion from United Nations' scientists: Curbing Earth’s average warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures will avoid the ever-worsening consequences of a hotter planet(opens in a new tab).

Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that Homo sapiens have ever faced.

The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it: We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases, and either we do that, or we don't. You say that nothing in life is black or white, but that is a lie, a very dangerous lie.

Either we prevent a 1.5 degree of warming, or we don't; either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, or we don't; either we choose to go on as a civilization, or we don't.

Josh Willis: “Climate Rock”

Donning a sparkling 1970s Elvis outfit, NASA’s Willis lightheartedly breaks down misconceptions about weather and climate (climate is the expected, or average, of weather conditions).

“I think it’s important for people to understand their relationship with the climate,” said Willis.

Critically, Willis devotes a healthy chunk of the tune to emphasize how Earth's climate has been altered by human activities — just as climate scientists confidently concluded forty years ago(opens in a new tab). In the last century, human-created carbon dioxide emissions have skyrocketed(opens in a new tab) to their highest levels in at least 800,000 years, though likely millions of years(opens in a new tab).

Well the climate has been changing

Because of the greenhouse gases we spew

They trap the heat and warm the Earth

And melt the glaciers too

The globe it has been warming

But the weather it still blows through

So just because it’s cold sometimes

Doesn’t mean it isn’t true

Global warming, oh that’s global warming

Willis, who researches how the changing oceans impact massive ice sheets in Greenland, has another salient message that he didn’t include in “Climate Rock.” Over 90 percent of the heat trapped on Earth by human activities gets absorbed by the sprawling, absorbent oceans. The oceans, then, are the true keeper of climate change(opens in a new tab), and they’re now relentlessly heating

“Global warming is really ocean warming,” Willis said.

Bad Religion: “Kyoto Now”

Punk rock legends Bad Religion — fronted by prolific lyricist and evolutionary biologist Greg Graffin — released “Kyoto Now” in 2002. It’s a fierce song about the Kyoto Protocol(opens in a new tab), a precursor to the historic Paris climate agreement, which the Trump administration will officially leave next year, to the dismay of climate scientists(opens in a new tab). In Kyoto 22 years ago, global nations started to formally commit to lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

Bad Religion urged the world’s powers to sign on. “We can't do nothing and think someone else will make it right,” Graffin bellows.

The media parading

Disjointed politics

Founded on petrochemical plunder

And we're its hostages…

You might not think it matters now

But what if you were wrong?

You might not think there's any wisdom

In a fucked up punk rock song

Patti Smith: “People Have the Power”

Patti Smith, punk rock’s poet laureate, took the stage at Italy’s annual Concerto di Natale in the Vatican in 2017 and belted out her anthem “People Have the Power," backed by a massive band and orchestra. Over the past few years, Smith has performed the fist-pumping chant with renewed intention. She has played a slew of Pathway to Paris(opens in a new tab) shows, intended to stoke awareness about climate action as global nations up the ante on their commitments to slash heat-trapping carbon emissions.

Curbing Earth's warming is a herculean task, as civilization is still largely powered by fossils fuels. Presently, meeting the ambitious Paris climate targets this century is unlikely, if not bordering on impossible, according to experts who research the effort(opens in a new tab). Smith punches home the message of dismissing despair when faced with the need for unprecedented societal change:

That the people have the power

To redeem the work of fools

Upon the meek the graces shower

It's decreed: The people rule


John Mollusk: “Greta Thunberg sings Swedish Death Metal”

In an ingenious, deservedly viral video, death metal drummer John Mollusk, from the band Suaka, turned Greta Thunberg’s acclaimed speech at September’s U.N. Climate Action Summit into a vicious thrash metal song.

Greta’s speech was, unwittingly, made for pummeling death metal.

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm 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 talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.

How dare you.

Radiohead: “Idioteque”

On Radiohead’s once radical and now iconic album Kid A, frontman Thom Yorke sardonically sings about wide-scale environmental collapse and perhaps even the futility of climate denier talking points, over an electronic dance beat.

Ice age coming

Ice age coming

Let me hear both sides

Let me hear both sides

Let me hear both

Ice age coming

Ice age coming

Throw it in the fire

Throw it in the fire

Throw it on the

We're not scaremongering

This is really happening

Happening

We're not scaremongering

This is really happening

Happening

Read more about Climate Change

U.N. confirms the ocean is screwed

Churchill's famed polar population is plunging. What now?

Worst reasons for Trump to quit the Paris climate pact, unranked

California’s climate dystopia comes true

  • Author

    Mark Kaufman

  • Editors

    Nandita Raghuram

  • Top Art

    Bob Al-Greene

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