It’s the Apocalypse, Stupid
Size matters—the scale of the problem, the size of your audience, the level of coordination necessary to overcome an obstacle. Tackling the climate crisis has always been an immense and impossible task necessitating a global effort unlike anything preceding it, and with every year, the scale of the problem balloons and as the rational animals approach the heat of their burning future they increasingly lose faith in the institutions that have both created this crisis and failed to adequately address it for a half century. Civilization does not always end the moment the volcano erupts. Sometimes civilizations end because they know the eruption’s coming. Civilization is collapsing in its panic at its coming collapse.
Mark Carney’s Davos speech begins with a simple true statement, “The power of the less starts with honesty.” Its opposite is also true: “The power of the more starts with deceit.” On both the wider global stage and the more localized political one, this is the calculus of our times, but what are they lying about and what truths must we reveal? The world as we know it is ending and it’s them who did it. The global south is being offered up to the flames because capitalism will always put profit first while every year is hotter and it’s inconceivable to us how it can get any hotter than it’s already got.
Power exists in different ways and different ecosystems. There are powerful individuals and powerful entities. There is the power of media and the power to destroy. We can talk about Elon Musk’s power to influence an election and China’s power to revert a global oil crisis.
By the same token, there are also different types of powerlessness. Individuals are powerless on their own—they require a community to accomplish anything beyond the simple fact of living a life. But certain communities are also powerless because they are not recognized by the nation as full citizens: Uyghur, Tibetan, Palestinian, US immigrants (both illegal and increasingly legal immigrants). And island states powerless as they vanish beneath the waves. And regulating bodies that are powerless to mandate their members to limit carbon emissions. We were always going to expect more than the world is able to give.
But is the world as we know it really ending?
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