Tag: Global Warming

Bookmarked Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us | Richard Flanagan (the Guardian)
Scott Morrison is trying to scare people about economic policy but seems blithely unaware people are already scared – about climate change
It feels like one of the dominant narratives about global warming is that the caps will rise and the sea levels will rise. However, what posts like this highlight is that it is all far more complicated.

Marginalia

What has become clear over these last four weeks across this vast, beautiful land of Australia is that a way of life is on the edge of vanishing. Australian summers, once a time of innocent pleasure, now are to be feared, to be anticipated not with joy but with dread, a time of discomfort, distress and, for some, fear that lasts not a day or a night but weeks and months. Power grids collapse, dying rivers vomit huge fish kills, while in the north, in Townsville, there are unprecedented floods, and in the south heat so extreme it pushes at the very edge of liveability has become everyday.

…

Climate change isn’t just happening. It’s happening far quicker than has been predicted. Each careful scientific prediction is rapidly overtaken by the horror of profound natural changes that seem to be accelerating, with old predictions routinely outdone by the worsening reality – hotter, colder, wetter, drier, windier, wilder, and ever more destructive.

Bookmarked Human rights for the 21st century: by Margaret Atwood, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Dave Eggers and more by Margaret Atwood, Josh Cohen, Dave Eggers, James Bridle, Anne Enright, Olivia Laing, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Bill McKibbon (the Guardian)
As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70, leading authors reimagine it for today
  • The right to be a person, not a thing (Margaret Atwood)
  • The right to an inhabitable planet (Bill McKibben)
  • The right to live free from blame (Anne Enright)
  • The right to understand (James Bridle)
  • The right to live free from discrimination (Reni Eddo-Lodge)
  • The right not to work (Josh Cohen)
  • The right to define yourself (Olivia Laing)
  • The right to a life offline (Dave Eggers)
Bookmarked To Slow Down Climate Change, We Need To Take On Capitalism by Kim Stanley Robinson (BuzzFeed News)
As we head for the edge of a climate change cliff, neoliberal market capitalism is chewing up the biosphere and the lives of everyone in it. But it’s not too late to act.
Kim Stanley Robinson argues that change is still possible to alivate the crisis of global warming. However, this is not individual change, but rather political change.

Any such resistance will have to emerge in forms borrowed from the system we have now, in a stepwise process using the political tools already at hand. This is a depressing thought, but as methods go, it’s the lesser of many evils. The other options include things like world revolution (messy, murderous, prone to failure or blowback); or a fall into a new Dark Age, followed by a renaissance some centuries later; or — well, what else is there? Alien or divine intervention I leave to others to imagine. In our timeline, it seems to me the only real option is politics. Or to be more specific, political economy.

This ‘political economy’ would be post-capitalism. In many respects this touches on Douglas Rushkoff’s push for more human intervention and involvement.

A political economy like this would be a “post-capitalism” one in which everyone could live at adequacy, including wild and domestic mammals, birds, fish, insects, plants, bacteria, and all the other parts of Earth’s living symbiosis. What we’re doing now makes it harder to get to that good future, but the goal is still physically possible to attain. This is the project that human civilization has to take on to survive, and one that will provide not just employment, but purpose. We all crave meaning in our lives, and by a strange twist of fate, a very meaningful project has been given to us: Prevent a mass extinction event, and build a better world for the generations to come.