Figures and previews from the forthcoming IPCC AR6 (due out in July) are starting to come out. They’re not looking great. Limiting warming to 2 degrees C or less is now virtually impossible, as even the most optimistic net carbon zero projections put us at 2.1 degrees of warming by 2100. More realistic target is now in the 2.5-3.5 degrees of warming range, which is likely to be extremely bad for a lot of people.
The authors of the IPCC report suggest that only an “immediate and radical transformation” of the global economy and governance would allow us to avoid the worst of the oncoming climate catastrophe. This kind of language is a marked difference from earlier IPCC reports, and reflects a growing sense of urgency and impending doom within the climatology community broadly.
We’re going to miss the bus for this just like the pandemic and the bourgeoisie emphatically do not care
Watching how the world has responded to COVID has made me much more pessimistic about our chances of solving the climate crisis. Both scientists and activists have long assumed that most people would come around to the right beliefs as soon as their own communities started being impacted, and as soon as people they knew and loved started dying in climate-related catastrophes. I think one of the lessons of COVID is that this is a very dangerous and wrong assumption; there are a substantial number of people out there who are so ideologically committed to a certain perspective that they’ll be unwilling to change it (and may even double-down on it) even as their friends and family are dying. The fact that we couldn’t get it together as a society enough to respond to COVID with even a minimal level of competence and responsibility bodes very badly for the climate crisis. COVID is a much simpler case, with clear, direct, short-term impacts that are very easy to understand causally: there’s a virus, it comes out of your nose and mouth, you give it to someone else, and they get sick. The causal chain for climate change is far more complex and attenuated–it’s basically impossible to trace any single death or event to any particular “transmission event” like you can with COVID. This was a global crisis on Very Easy mode, and we failed miserably.
Don’t lose sight of the fact that a serious amount of money was spent to get this outcome. All those astroturfed anti-lockdown/anti-mask protests were paid for by dark money groups and then used by corporate media to manufacture consent for opening things back up, half assed measures, and the total abandonment of scientific rationale. If the left is to have any hope taking measures against what can be changed for humanity’s future and palliative measures for what can’t, it’s going to require us to take pro-active measures to undermine the inevitable eco-fascist messaging bound to come out of relationships between corporate media, the government, and the wealthy.
Watching how the world has responded to COVID has made me much more pessimistic about our chances of solving the climate crisis. Both scientists and activists have long assumed that most people would come around to the right beliefs as soon as their own communities started being impacted, and as soon as people they knew and loved started dying in climate-related catastrophes. I think one of the lessons of COVID is that this is a very dangerous and wrong assumption
Partly because no one truly agitates and tells them that the deaths of their friends were brought about by the government. The media and the ruling class managed to turn getting covid into an “irresponsible” act, with covid as a result of parties and not jobs that refused to enact safety measures. But a lot of the people that have died throughout this entire pandemic have been service, warehouse workers, grocers, first responders, and old people.
it shows that the economy is more important than any amount of human lives. i think things will stay relatively normal for a while (by plundering developing countries even harder than usual) until the ressource scarcity starts world war 3. (at least that’s if nothing crazy happens until then)
Which is actually extremely puzzling, really. There’s a huge amount of both modeling and empirical evidence showing that unchecked climate change is going to be far, far worse economically than aggressive decarbonization and mitigation. The gold standard metareview on this, the Stern Report from the London School of Economics, puts the difference as high as an order of magnitude: 2% global GDP expenditure to mitigate, and up to 20% global GDP loss annually in the worst case, long-tail scenarios. Even from a strictly economic standpoint, the damage that would be done by 10+% GDP loss annually is mind-blowing, especially given that those impacts will disproportionately hit the Global South.
Basically every economist on any side of the political spectrum agrees that it makes far more economic sense to act now and mitigate the damage. Economic arguments against climate mitigation are always smokescreens for other ideological commitments.
Some countries handled covid fairly decently: Taiwan, Iceland, New Zealand, Vietnam, China, Cuba. Now take smaller island polities off the list (they have an advantage in that they can much more easily control entry and are, geographically, much smaller in area) and you get two stand outs; China and Vietnam.
What do these two have in common? A belief in the common good and a country not run and organized around principles of profit but around principles of human need and well-being. You can get people to believe in the common good very easily, in my experience it’s actually the default amongst non-PMC or small business tyrants, it takes a lot of wrong-education and propaganda to get people to shake off their inherent drive towards solidarity and protection of their communities. You can’t get people to care and wear masks when their leaders, at first, tell them not to wear masks like Fauci did or like the Vox explainers did back in March and April. You can’t direct a society of well-being if it’s oriented around profit and the accumulation of capital. You can’t catch the people that want to flout principles of communal protection and care (by not wearing a mask or going out when their sick) when policing is centered on protection of property or the continued marginalization of racial minorities. It’s hard in countries where the healthcare system is under attack by austerity for multiple decades to manage a pandemic - I’m sure you don’t need to be told but nurses and doctors and healthcare staff were already out of PPE before December 2019, they were already re-using masks and using trash bags as PPE because of chronic underfunding.
These systems seem invulnerable. But it’s just a glamour. “All” it takes is a conscious working class that is organized and willing to be militant in its demands for control over the political-economy. It’s a tall order, but it’s the fate we’ve been handed by history. I think we can take this challenge and further I think we can win the struggle and reorganize our society around principles of health and communal care, so that if another pandemic comes around what were once called the countries of the West can handle it just as well as Vietnam and China have handled it today.
