In September 2022, an international group of climate scientists published a study showing that the world was close to, or in some cases had even surpassed, key tipping points in the climate crisis that would trigger irreversible changes in the world’s ecosystems. These include the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, tropical coral reef die-off, the abrupt thawing of Northern permafrost, the loss of Barents Sea ice, the melting of mountain glaciers, the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, and changes to the West African monsoon that will impact the Sahel region of Africa.
These points launch the world into the unknown and unknowable, as they engage feedback loops the consequences of which we cannot accurately predict. And yet those predictions concern the mass suffering and death of tens of millions, and maybe more. We are at a tipping point. And President Biden has yet to declare the climate emergency he publicly pondered in July 2022. He likely (and legitimately) fears a political backlash; populism is seen now as a barrier to climate reforms.
What’s wrong? Threats to our species as a whole, and to our survival, are amorphous things. They are too large, and too slow, for us—for the slowly evolving human brain—to see properly. But threats framed as originating from other persons, from the people around us are not. Our species is quite accustomed to dealing with such threats—this is the history of war. And in the case of things like pandemics, where amorphous threats like contagions were framed as threats by the government to deprive us of liberty, they have triggered terrifying populist responses.
The climate crisis certainly is a form of oppression, exacted upon a vast majority of middle and low-income folks by a wealthy few in a fossil fuel industry that knew and hid the facts of what it was doing, and the relatively few politicians and world leaders that authorized and enabled their acts. And while we are accustomed to scientists and those same politicians framing news regarding the crisis, or very young persons like Greta Thunberg with their angry but relatively muted responses centered on the rights of future generations, we can imagine other framings.
What if the news that climate crisis-driven heat waves are killing people were not framed as a study or science at all, but the still true vision of a handful of wealthy elites and the few thousand political cronies that protect their profits by committing the indiscriminate killing of children, of grandmothers, and of pregnant women. Why not see it this way, in the terms our brains might react to? Why not frame it in terms of class, which triggers action on the right and left, often beyond the margins? Yes, climate change is an ethereal thing we cannot touch, like the bullets of Putin’s army, but that’s merely a choice of how we perceive it. Who pays the price of the crisis and who benefits from it, and the science that shows such a flow of responsibility, is a fact.
It could be that we do not frame it in this way because that framing does not present any particular solution, any better solution, than more amorphous frames. We still need to go to courts and other bodies to determine liability. We still need governments, and their processes to regulate emissions or build systems of sequestration. We still need massive regulatory networks to implement climate mitigation plans.
All of this is true, but it is also true that—like the trials at Nuremberg—the world has faced unprecedented threats and the situations that followed them with unprecedented systems of justice. Perhaps climate change is such an unprecedented threat, justifying solutions—like the demanding particularly culpable corporations follow the lead of companies like Patagonia—and begin to transform their structure accordingly to start to repair the damage they have caused.
That sort of demand, regardless of governments, would be particularly appropriate were the repairs treated as reparations and the beneficiaries future generations—the most likely class of persons to be harmed. Future generations could be best compensated through effective family planning incentives, entitlements, and reparations awarded to their parents through novel devices like private baby bonds that encourage sustainably sized families likely to maximize the resilience of their children. If we believe that government derives from the people, these solutions—ones that involve the creation of those people—precede and exceed the ability of governments, and the companies they protect, to refuse.
Moreover, how we frame the crisis can trigger the governmental processes described above by motivating officials to act, much the way the framing of the pandemic created massive political backlashes. There are many other examples of amorphous threats transformed into tangible ones. Certainly, the harms caused by the crisis, and the irreversible harms the tipping points promise, are cause for a populist backlash, if we just find a way to see it as the oppression of many by a few that it is.
Author Bio: Carter Dillard is the policy adviser for the Fair Start Movement. He served as an Honors Program attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and also served with a national security law agency before developing a comprehensive account of reforming family planning for the Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal.
Source: Independent Media Institute
Credit Line: This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Whilst the Malthusian Trap (based on mid 1700’s thinking and referencing only food production) has been able to be overcome with technology to grow more food, it remains to be seen if the same trap can be overcome in regards earths resources to provide for our children’s future.
All the ideas expounded in the above article are based on the premise that there are enough resources available for 8 billion people. To late for birth control already?
Worth a read;
https://open.lib.umn.edu/principleseconomics/chapter/33-2-population-growth-and-economic-development/#rittenmacro-ch19_s02_s02_f01
“The world’s high-income economies have completed the demographic transition. Less developed nations have begun to make progress, with birth rates falling by a slightly greater percentage than death rates. The results have been a sharp slowing in the rate of population growth among high-income nations and a more modest slowing among low-income nations.”
There is a direct correlation between income and birth rates. So to control the earth population we need to redistribute wealth. But is there enough “wealth” to take low income economies with high birth rates to become high income economies with low birth rates (and leaving the high income economies in place to maintain their low birth rate)?
How much of the earths resources will be required to achieve and maintain this?
Worthy read;
http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htmV
quote
81. In its broadest sense, the strategy for sustainable development aims to promote harmony among human brings and between humanity and nature. In the specific context of the development and environment crises of the 1980s, which current national and international political and economic institutions have not and perhaps cannot overcome, the pursuit of sustainable development requires:
a political system that secures effective citizen participation in decision making.
an economic system that is able to generate surpluses and technical knowledge on a self-reliant and sustained basis
a social system that provides for solutions for the tensions arising from disharmonious development.
a production system that respects the obligation to preserve the ecological base for development,
a technological system that can search continuously for new solutions,
an international system that fosters sustainable patterns of trade and finance, and
an administrative system that is flexible and has the capacity for self-correction.
82. These requirements are more in the nature of goals that should underlie national and international action on development. What matters is the sincerity with which these goals are pursued and the effectiveness with which departures from them are corrected.
end quote.
The current Ukraine war suggests that the lofty ideals of the UN are a pipe dream.
Ok you lot ….this is serious…here’s the plan…Someone ring Greta and get her to organise a talkfest at some very comfortable resort so hundreds if not thousands of people to fly there and discuss a plan…some people throw paint at art work in a gallery…some superglue your hands to something , it doesn’t matter what , just something….we need some people to stand on top of a coal wagon , give money away to anyone and tax the farmers more…much more….stop eating meat and build empty bike lanes everywhere….that will do it….come on New Zealand we can save the world…Let’s do this….
Brought to you by the same clowns telling us of impending ice age in 70s. As long as we’re unable to debate science due to censorship we’re screwed. I suppose being in the establishment brings comfort.
Sounds like a GreenWasher to me.
More, end of the world bs. Just need to depopulate the northern hemisphere, like the US,NATO is doing now to Ukraine that will help reduce consumption in the long term.
Consumption is the environments enemy.
85-90 percent of emissions originate from the Northern hemisphere. They drive consumption and the factories in China and Asia. That then drives the environmental damage caused by mining finite resources everywhere else in the world causing environmental damage and destruction as well as slavery, child slavery and exploitation of all kinds.
They need to lead by example instead of spinning more bs.
Yes less hysteria and more science.
There will be solutions.
and there are no unusal ‘one in x years’ adverse weather events over the ditch, and across europe and the US as well are there? white…that much is actually opservble in front of your eyes…
but hey your feel feels trumps the facts don’t they?
I see the usual, it was in the paper so it must be true,majority of scientists agree.
An amusing mob.
The biggest threat to climate catastrophe is the warring imperialist powers that chose to mash Ukraine to the last Ukrainian and before long the last Chinese living on Taiwan, and if not stopped, the last worker and peasant farmer in the world.
The power rests with the ruling classes on both sides. Their plan is to use workers to defeat their rivals so they can grab all the remaining booty (oil, gas, minerals etc) of Eurasia and burn the earth to a cinder- rip, shit, bust!
But that is the long term. To win they must prepare for nuclear war and once that is done, threaten to use it.
This is a lose-lose prospect when nuclear war is in itself the greatest immediate threat to human extinction.
Words on digital pages will disappear along with humans, and life elsewhere in the universe will welcome the end of a society that is prepared to burn the planet for the principle of making a buck over so many dead bodies.
Time for the prospective burnees to rise up while they can still stand and get rid of the perps – the polluters with the power to kill us like slow boiled frogs.
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