Yesterday, NPR reported that humans produced more CO2 from industrial processes in 2020 than any other year in history despite the pandemic and all our ongoing strategies to reduce emissions. This shouldn’t be surprising because capitalism requires continued economic growth, renewable energy has been used to facilitate that growth rather than to reduce absolute CO2 emissions, and the groups and governments in control of the world would rather end humanity than experience the inconvenience of substantive change.
Related: Greenhouse emissions reached record levels in 2020, even with pandemic lockdowns by Scott Neuman, NPR
In another story, George Monbiot points out that the transformation of society in a matter of months (rather than years or decades) has been done before — which is to say, we now must transform our entire society in months because that’s all we have left. The opportunity to do it in years has passed, as has the opportunity to do it in decades. Making that kind of change in months would be really inconvenient. In essence, the cost of doing something substantive about climate change keeps increasing in terms of inconvenience, and for a society that would rather die than be inconvenienced, that doesn’t mean action. If inconvenience is unthinkable, and death is the only other option, then death is what’s going to happen.
The position of the left is and has always been that we can do the right thing right now. This is a true fact. Every day that we don’t do the right thing is a day that we chose to do the wrong thing. It isn’t hard to do the right thing — people just don’t want to. What’s a good word for a person who knows what the right thing is but just chooses not to do it because it isn’t convenient?
In the so-called Fertile Crescent, climate change is driving people away because there simply isn’t enough water anymore. These changes have happened within the lifetimes of many of the people currently living there. Today, that land that was once the birthplace of civilization is becoming uninhabitable, but over the next 50 to 100 years, everyone in the continental US will be facing the exact same thing — staring out into a wasteland, trying to figure out how to survive. The answer to that question will depend a lot on what we do now; if we don’t act now, there won’t be any survival.
When climate experts try to inform us, they typically talk about the worst-case scenarios as something that, “could happen if we don’t act.” That, to me, is a big mistake because it implies that we are going to do the right thing. We haven’t done that for 40 years, and we’re not going to do it today. The more accurate message would be that the end of humanity is definitely what is going to happen and only extreme change will save it at this point. Even with drastic change, our children and grandchildren are going to suffer. What we have left is to do the right thing so they can survive and so that someday our great-grandchildren can live in a better world.