Back in late 2021, just after the UN's COP 26 meeting, economic anthropologist Jason Hickel had a piece in Foreign Affairs that I somehow missed. I guess there was a lot going on back then.
It was called What would it look like if we treated climate change as an actual emergency?
Our summer of 2023 — wildfire, drought, bathwater oceans, floods, unbreathable air — has brought it back to the surface.
Hickel was writing before all of that, but after there had been a lot of other unimaginable climate effects. Just not quite so many conflagrations all at once. He asked:
All of this makes it worth asking: What would it look like if we treated the climate crisis like an actual emergency? What would it take to keep global heating to no more than 1.5 degrees? The single most important intervention is the one that so far no government has been willing to touch: cap fossil fuel use and scale it down, on a binding annual schedule, until the industry is mostly dismantled by the middle of the century. That’s it. This is the only fail-safe way to stop climate breakdown. If we want real action, this should be at the very top of our agenda.
The how it could happen, the answers he provides, are not techno fixes or public-private partnerships. They're truly radical.
I can't imagine anyone getting this article published in a mainstream publication in 2023. The tide has shifted among elites against acknowledging reality, just as it has since 2020 about acknowledging white supremacy. Backlash.
More awfulness has to happen before another opportunity arises, and time is literally awasting.
I just realized that time is no longer money, metaphorically: time is temperature.
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Among recent related things I've posted, I recommend this, partly about the work of Mark Jacobson. As well as:
- Matters of degrees, and percentages (predictions of just how many degrees of warming we're looking at, from Ramez Naam).
- And Seven charts from Assaad Razzouk.
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