Only A Supervillain Could Stop Climate Change

We need to destroy this civilization to ‘save’ the climate

indi.ca
9 min readSep 13, 2023
Thanos having a literal strawman argument when he became a farmer

When I watch Hollywood movies, I root for the villains. They’re the only ones trying to change anything. They’re certainly the only ones thinking big enough to change something on the scale of ‘the climate’. We don’t need superheroes to ‘stop’ climate change. We’d need supervillains.

You Don’t Want This

Speaking as someone who has lost fossil fuels for months at a time (in Sri Lanka’s most recent collapse), you don’t actually want the climate cocaine to stop. Like any addict, we might need to quit, but we actually don’t want to. Without fossil fuels, I’ve struggled to go anywhere, to cook food, and daily power supply depended on the weather. During our months long collapse, Sri Lanka’s (already meagre) pollution dropped dramatically and people suffered unimaginably. That’s the scale of sacrifice required to even make a dent in the general collapse, but you don’t have to imagine, do you? You’ve been there too.

All of us suffered through COVID-19. COVID-19 was the gods showing us exactly how much we had to sacrifice to fight the greater threat of everything-collapse. We had to stop flying, stop buying, stop growing, and just cower in fear in our homes. That is the scale of sacrifice…

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indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.