It’s Too Late To Fight Climate Change
As Renaee Churches writes on Medium, it’s too late to ‘fight’ climate change (itself an oxymoron). Climate change is just one of many exponential problems caused by exponential growth, and you simply don’t have much time before exponential processes get out of control. And that time has simply gone.
We have had warnings for hundreds of years, for decades, and what we’re seeing now are not warnings, they are the cascading effects already begun. Humanity and our greed incarnate, corporations, never stopped hitting the gas, we never reduced artificial growth, and never stopped polluting. As Malcolm X said, “You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.” It’s even worse than what Brother Malik said, because all we’ve done is stick the knife in another nine inches, put a bamboo handle on it, and call it renewable.
As I’ve said before, ‘we’ are not even the operant species, during the colonial era some dickheads programmed corporations with the imperative to keep growing — taking slaves and land wherever it went — and now this legally recognized AI has gotten predictably out of control and devoured the world. We’re at the tail end of this process that devoured countries like mine centuries ago, and the people that pollute the most are trying to bargain now that it’s come for them too. It’s too little too late. We had ethics homework due 400 years ago and failed that, then physics homework due 50 years ago and failed that, and there’s no extensions no more. People say this is ‘defeatism’ but it’s not defeatism if you actually lose.
As Renaee Churches says:
We have already lost the climate battle and it is stories or opinions like [Rebecca Solnit’s], 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…
