Humanity Heading for "Collective Suicide"

 

The warnings just get ever more dire even as our leaders show an incredible capacity to ignore them.

UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, says humanity is on the fast lane to "collective suicide."

Guterres told ministers from 40 countries meeting to discuss the climate crisis on Monday: “Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.”

He added: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”

Justin, are you listening? Just kidding.

Traditionally weather-tepid Britain is expecting to get heat-hammered this week and the head of the UK's Met Office says this is the face of climate change in Britain.

Exceptionally high temperatures expected across the UK on Monday and Tuesday are “entirely consistent” with climate change, the chief meteorologist at the Met Office has said, warning that such heat could become a regular feature by the end of the century.

The UK’s first red heat warning has come into effect, with temperatures expected to reach 41C (105.8F) on Monday or Tuesday, breaking the country’s heat records.

Does that sound familiar? Remember years ago, er, last year, when Canada set three all-time heat records over three consecutive days before the town at Ground Zero, Lytton, was erased by wildfires? 

"Carry water," isn't that precious?

The recipient of this year's George Orwell prize for journalism, Guardian enviro-scribe, George Monbiot, says small changes will not save us.

Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust. Even the Times editors still publishing columns denying climate science know it. Even the candidates for the Tory leadership, ignoring or downplaying the issue, know it. Never has a silence been so loud or so resonant.We have seen nothing yet. The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already becoming normal in southern Europe, and would be counted among the cooler days during hot periods in parts of the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, where heat is becoming a regular threat to life. It cannot now be long, unless immediate and comprehensive measures are taken, before these days of rage become the norm even in our once-temperate climatic zone.

The same formula applies to every harm humans do to each other: what cannot be discussed cannot be addressed. Our failure to prevent catastrophic global heating arises above all from the conspiracy of silence that dominates public life, the same conspiracy of silence that has, at one time or another, surrounded every variety of abuse and exploitation.

...They do so on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger than any of those interests: the power of incumbency. Those who hold power today do so by stamping out challenges, regardless of the form they take. The demand to decarbonise our economies is not just a threat to carbon-intensive industry; it is a threat to the world order that permits powerful men to dominate us.

Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. None of these are bigger asks than those the billionaire press has made and largely achieved: the neoliberal revolution that has swept away effective governance, effective taxation of the rich, effective restraints on the power of business and oligarchs and, increasingly, effective democracy.

So let’s break our own silence. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and others by pretending that small measures deliver major change. Let’s abandon the timidity and tokenism. Let’s stop bringing buckets of water when only fire engines will do. Let’s build our campaign for systemic change towards the critical 25% threshold of public acceptance, beyond which, a range of scientific studies suggests, social tipping happens.

I feel clearer about what effective political action looks like than I have ever done. But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?