From an opinion by Rebecca Solnit:
"A significant percentage of the general public speaks of climate change with a strange combination of confidence and defeatism: confidence in positions often based on inaccurate or outdated or maybe no information; defeatism about what we can do to make a livable future. ... They’re surrendering in advance and inspiring others to do the same. If you announce that the outcome has already been decided and we’ve already lost, you strip away the motivation to participate – and of course if we do nothing we settle for the worst outcome. It often seems that people are searching harder for evidence we’re defeated than that we can win."
Also:
"I don’t know why so many people seem to think it’s their job to spread discouragement, but it seems to be a muddle about the relationship between facts and feelings. I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis. You can feel absolutely devastated about the situation and not assume this predicts outcome; you can have your feelings and can still chase down facts from reliable sources, and the facts tell us that the general public is not the problem; the fossil fuel industry and other vested interests are; that we have the solutions, that we know what to do, and that the obstacles are political; that when we fight we sometimes win; and that we are deciding the future now."
— Rebecca Solnit. "We can’t afford to be climate doomers" The Guardian, July 26, 2023
From an opinion by Peter Kalmus:
"...it’s all still just getting started. So long as we burn fossil fuels, far, far worse is on the way; and I take zero satisfaction in knowing that this will be proven right, too, with a certainty as non-negotiable and merciless as the physics behind fossil-fueled global heating. Instead, I only feel fury at those in power, and bottomless grief for all that I love. We are losing Earth on our watch. The Amazon rainforest may already be past its tipping point. Coral reefs as we know them will be gone from our planet by mid-century, and possibly much earlier given this surge in sea-surface temperatures. These are cosmic losses."
"No amount of tree planting, recycling, carbon offsetting, or wishful carbon-capture thinking will ever change this." End fossil fuels, Kalmus says. "Every speck of fossil fuel sold and burnt combusts into carbon dioxide, forcing the planet to heat."
"Biden’s refusal to declare a climate emergency and his eagerness to push new pipelines and new drilling – at an even faster pace than Trump – goes against science, goes against common sense, goes against life on Earth. In the world of politics-as-usual, with its short-term goals and calculus of “safer to follow than to lead”, I suppose there are reasons and rationalizations for this planet-destroying choice. But speaking as a scientist, it seems ignorant and short-sighted. It’s certainly a form of climate denial."
"Biden had the last opportunity of any president to keep the world under 1.5C of heating." We didn't do it.
— Peter Kalmus. Joe Biden must declare a climate emergency. And he must do so now. The Guardian. July 27, 2023.
Related
"We know who's responsible for orange sky". It's a 2-minute read on Medium.
“Changing the discourse did not prevent” a lot of stuff from going wrong, Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger.
“‘We did change the discourse...,’ a friend remarked to me the other day, and then the thought trailed off. We did. But we appear to have done it at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming on those screens. A torrent that assiduously amplifies the most operatic forms of virtue performance and the most cynical forms of pipiking [that is, trivializing through nonsense-making].”
Klein again:
"...it would seem that Greta [Thunberg] no longer believes in that theory of change. She has come to the place at which so many of us have arrived: the realization that no one is coming to save us but us, and whatever action we can leverage through our cooperation, organization, and solidarities.
There is a power in naming this, rather than just filling up airtime. Because if you find yourself saying, as some activists more diplomatic than Greta did, that a climate summit is a 'good start' and that the summit is officially called Conference of the Parties 26 — because it had literally happened every year since 1995 at that point (save Covid-wracked 2020) — then it might be time to admit that words are no longer doing what we expect them to do."
— Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Also, Klein says, there has been a common narrative that "people of good conscience, across all the lines meant to divide us, can band together, build power, and transform our societies into something fairer and greener, just in the nick of time. But that story is getting harder to believe with each day that goes by."
See also
Goal Of Capping Global Warming At 1.5 Degrees Celsius Is 'On Life Support,' UN Chief Warns: “There is no kind way to put it,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said. Lydia O'Connor, HuffPost, Mar 21, 2022
Oh, it happened
"Global warming surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius over the past 12 months for the first time on record, new data shows, breaching a critical threshold that, if it continues, will push the limits of life on Earth to adapt."
— The world just marked a year above a critical climate limit scientists have warned about, Angela Dewan, CNN, February 8, 2024
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