Why the imperative to change can’t be ignored any longer.
Climate emergency is not an event. It is an era.
I took my eye off the ball, I admit it. By the time I paid attention, midway through the first year of the second decade of the 21st Century, it had become abundantly clear to many that the human race had set a course of growth for itself that had pushed planetary boundaries beyond the point of sustainability and was about to crash.
Over the last four decades, the term sustainability, although fraught with warnings of collapse and danger, has been normalized. Many millions of us, sitting in airconditioned comfort, bombarded with stories of sustainable fishing, agriculture, energy production, economic development being touted as successes, have become inured to cries of alarm it ought to raise.
The environmental movement from Dr. Hansen’s congressional testimony of 1988 to the IPCC report of 2015 tried to formulate policy solutions within the existing economic framework being forged by globalization, soon to become rampant predatory capitalism.
We have failed. The decision makers that sought to downplay, minimize, and lie about that alarm for the sake of hanging on to and expanding their power, have prevailed. They have equated humanity with money, success with glamor, freedom with crass over-consumption, and built a system that relies on infinite growth on a finite planet.
Now, they are counting on technologies not yet developed, artificial intelligence in its infancy, and materials not yet discovered to save themselves. While sacrificing us. In the meantime, they lie to stave off protests, give tax-cuts to themselves to accelerate the plunder, and purchase politicians to weaken what regulations we may have been able to enforce. Unfortunately for them, planet Earth gets to bat last. It is bound to be unfortunate for us too.
Lies cannot cover up the fact that CO2 causes the planet to warm. Lies cannot cover up the fact that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has just passed 417ppm. (1) Lies can not cover thatthe last 5 years were the hottest on record. Lies cannot make hydrocarbons be made up of less carbon, cool down the oceans, or stop the melting of Antarctic glaciers.
Lies cannot cover the fact that in the United States alone, out of a population of over 325 million souls only 116 million are allowed to bring in the cash flow through full-time employment that every business owner knows is essential to the survival of an enterprise. (3). If we look at OUR balance sheet compared to THEM, things are grim for OUR human enterprise. Just in the US alone, if we remove the top 1% of the population, we would still have 325 million souls in our collective American enterprise..give or take..and still only 116 million bringing in the cash flow. BUT, the 1% will have 90% of the wealth and 90% of the income generated. If I were a financial analyst, I would advise my customer to SELL, SELL, the human enterprise of America because it is failing.
My love of the human race will not allow me to tell my hypothetical client to buy into THEIR enterprise either, no matter how good their balance sheet looks…to them. They are also bankrupt. They just don’t know it yet. They have created an illusion of balance sheets and income statements, central banks, and courtiers to tell themselves how rich they are within the game they created. They are winning in monopoly. Alas, just as we need insects to stave off extinction they need us to survive as well. (4)
For you see, in nature’s eyes there is no us and them. It is an illusion we collectively have created. The planet though, is smarter. She knows we are just an organism on its surface. If we irritate her too much, she will simply scratch us off. And she is pissed. Not only does she have an itch, but she has a raging allergic reaction. And just as the human immune system responds with inflammation, fever, and anti-histamines, the Earth responds too. We will be lucky if instead of beating us down to a point where we can be a benign organism on its surface, she goes for a total cure — by eradication.
This change is happening whether we like it or not. As Gallileo anecdotally remarked under his breath that “ but it is indeed moving!”, all the while being forced to recant that the Earth was “revolving” when the Church forced him, the climate, the Earth’s inflammatory response, is going to keep getting worse no matter how much they recant.
We, humans, are amazing creatures. To survive on a planet, encased in a fairly fragile body, our great brains trick us into underestimating risks, a normalcy bias that has propelled us to the top of the food chain. Yet this bias, the -it has never happened before, (meaning to me) so it won’t ever happen - is a powerful risk denial tool. While helpful when you are galloping across the African savannah, ignoring the chances of a saber-toohed tiger leaping out of the bush, it is a crappy handicap when faced with a growing calamity on a geological time-scale that encompasses not only your life but of your progeny’s as well. It worked great throughout the seventies when the same scientist who gave us the moon-landing and GPS were telling us that we were on an unsustainable trajectory. We ignored them too and kept galloping while tearing up the earth for resources so we can all watch porn on our iPhones. (5)
Now we are faced with a chasm of unimaginable proportions ahead if unchecked, and certainly an uncomfortable, dangerous and conflict-ridden decade if we can arrest it’s progress. One of our biggest assumptions is that the climate emergency is an issue. It’s not, it’s an era. Climate change will become destructive to us personally long before it becomes cataclysmic to our civilization, but it will become cataclysmic. Sooner than you think!
By 2030, if unchecked:
The Earth will be 2 degrees warmer compared to the beginning of the industrial revolution. 3 degrees by 2040
Severe weather events such as storms and drought will increase unabated.
There will be severe food shortages.
There will be severe water shortages, putting nuclear-armed nations such as India and Pakistan and China on a collision course.
Coastal cities will first flood more regularly and will become increasingly unlivable as the decades wear on.
Property insurance will be impossible to obtain if you are living in a coastal zone.
The 25 % of the world’s 460 nuclear reactors situated in coastal areas will be abandoned and possibly cause devastating pollution that will take centuries to clear. (6)
There will be mass migration from poor countries with inadequate governance and resources to the perceived richer countries. 200 million people in Bangladesh alone will be on the move.
Southwestern United States, Northern Africa, the majority of Australia, and the Middle East will be uninhabitable.
Border clashes and closures will increase.
There will be close to 10 billion souls on the planet, if they haven’t been already decimated, to feed, clothe, keep healthy, and shelter.
The global political structure, as it is today, will be unable to deal with the consequences in any meaningful way.
All of which will lead to violent conflict, possibly between state actors as opposed to proxies.
The will be an economic collapse for a huge portion of the population while a small minority will shield itself from the ill effects initially. That will also lead to violent conflict and social unrest. The social compact is likely to break down as these uprisings are violently suppressed by the power elites directing militarized police, and eventually armed forces. From the Roman Empire to the Ottoman it has been the same story. We in the U.S. think we are immune. We are not.
Fortunately for the Romans and the Turks, there were many other lands to conquer, populations to subjugate, and resources aplenty to plunder. So the names changed, the elites remained the same, and the pillaging and burning, burning, burning carried on.
Except, this time the Earth bats last.
We are finally reaching the point of serious structural changes to the way we relate to the planet, imposed on us by our insatiable consumption and greed.
The eventual make-up of what human existence on this planet will look like will take decades -not centuries I’m afraid- to play out. (We do not even have a century, even by IPCC’s rosy and politically correct assessments.)
Those of us who can see beyond the next quarter’s earnings, beyond the immediate inconvenience of personal curtailment or beyond the fleeing emotional fulfillment of pointless consumption, need to buy time, need to prepare. We need to come up with a transitory model that works for us, for our families and our immediate communities. We need a stepping stone to what Dr. Jem Bendell calls “Deep Adaptation.” (7)
As he points out, we need to decide on what we are going to keep and we need to relinquish.
We need to relinquish the profit motive. We need to relinquish the idea that we can measure a person’s worth in monetary terms.
We need to redefine and keep those things that make us unique among the creaures of the planet and honor those things that make us a part of the Earth.
We need to hang on and develop the idea that we are ALL human, not different races. One species, bound together in our struggle for survival on the same planet, suspended in space.
We need to think about how we can keep our creativity and curiosity alive without the profit motive. What makes us… human? Is it that we can be moved to tears by a simple melody or is it the fact that we can create a web of ideas called a “central bank” to turn the planet over to? Is THIS us?
As the founding member of Extinction Rebellion Roger Hallam states: “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.”
We need to get serious about transitional adaptation if we are to reach deep adaptation and the survival of what makes us human.
Surely we can use the same imagination we used to create predatory capitalism to create a web of ideas that can take care of the planet, who in turn will stop trying to scratch us off its surface but allow us to lie on it and dream our dreams.
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- https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2636/Rise-of-carbon-dioxide-unabated
- https://www.noaa.gov/news/may-2020-tied-for-hottest-on-record-for-globe#:~:text=After%20registering%20unusually%20high%20temperatures,National%20Centers%20for%20Environmental%20Information.
- https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/05/where-have-all-the-insects-gone-feature/
- https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/193149858X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3USNRSLWXS5MT&dchild=1&keywords=limits+to+growth&qid=1592669538&sprefix=limits+to+growth%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1
- https://ensia.com/features/coastal-nuclear/#:~:text=According%20to%20maps%20prepared%20by,reactors%20are%20situated%20on%20coastlines.
- https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
