No Time for Happy Talk
Spurring a grassroots takedown of the corporate and political resistance to genuine climate action requires articulating a vision of a better world that awaits us beyond the fossil-fuel era, but more than that is needed. It must become far clearer that our growing global emergency is deeply linked to an ongoing business-as-usual attitude and that a staggering amount of work and sacrifice is actually required. In contrast, happy talk like the current mischaracterization of the COP28 agreement as an "unprecedented" climate "breakthrough" will prompt people to strike ecological catastrophe off their list of urgent concerns.
To be complacent about climate is not just to be shockingly oblivious but to endorse future human suffering on an almost inconceivable scale. At COP28, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, spoke in stark terms about the moral imperatives of stopping the horror in Gaza now and preventing almost unimaginable future horrors triggered by ecological breakdown. In doing so, he offered a vision of a climate-change-devastated future that should stun us all:
"Are these events disconnected, is my question, or are we seeing here a mirror of what is going to happen in the future? The genocides and the barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis" Most victims of climate change, [who] will be counted in their billions, will be in those countries that do not emit CO2 or emit very little. Without the transfer of wealth from the north to the south, the climate victims will increasingly have less drinking water in their homes and they will have to migrate north" The exodus will be of billions" There will be pushback against the exodus, with violence, with barbaric acts committed. This is what is happening in Gaza. This is a rehearsal for the future."
President Petro was describing just a few of the likely catastrophic interactions and feedbacks that, amid other crises, climate change will bring to this planet in what's coming to be known as the "global polycrisis." If governments continue to focus on "solving" only the most immediate, seemingly most tractable emergencies (often making matters worse in the process), we're in trouble deep. The time has passed for societies to grapple only with the individual crises in the 24-hour news cycle. It's time to shift into polycrisis mode. All of us will then have to deal with the sprawling web of connections among this planet's emergencies, immediate and long-term, especially the future devastating overheating of our world, as one big problem that must be solved -- or else.
Copyright 2024 Stan Cox
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