Doomed or Not?
Rebecca Solnit writing in the Guardian: We can’t afford to be climate doomers:
“Some days I think that if we lose the climate battle, it’ll be due in no small part to this defeatism among the comfortable in the global north, while people in frontline communities continue to fight like hell for survival. Which is why fighting defeatism is also climate work.”
We have already lost the climate battle and it is stories or opinions like the one above, that are preventing others from grasping this, and stopping us from taking the kinds of collective adaptive responses appropriate on a local and global scale.
The not-too-late framing is a dangerous one. It means people are prepared to wait for global elites to roll out the energy transition, to deploy such ‘solutions’ as carbon capture technologies, or other flawed techno fixes, aimed at making those elites wealthy, while not stopping the baked in warming that is already here and accelerating. It is only when we finally break through the not-too-late taboo that we will begin the work in earnest of adaptation to reduce suffering as much as we can.
This question and discussion is on my mind most days. I don’t think there’s a correct answer. My response is just simply that we are now in a climate emergency that will have no end in our lifetimes. That we have gone too far and must respond and keep responding. Our everyday lives should be a response and in short order, whether we like it or not, our lives will involuntarily be a constant response, a forced adaption to ever changing, worsening conditions.