The Climate Crisis and the Case for Hope

[babylonsister]

September 16, 2019 8:00AM ET
The Climate Crisis and the Case for Hope
Protesters and politicians are stepping up and fighting for the future we want. Will 2019 be remembered as a turning point?
By Jeff Goodell

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.


Here’s a reckless prediction: a decade or so from now, when the climate revolution is fully underway and Miami Beach real estate prices are in free-fall due to constant flooding, and internal combustion engines are as dead as CDs, people will look back on the fall of 2019 as the turning point in the climate crisis. At the very least it will be remembered as the moment that it became clear that people were not going to give up their future on a habitable planet without a damn good fight.

It’s not easy to feel hopeful at this dark hour. The Amazon rainforest is burning, heat waves this summer have killed thousands of people around the world, the Midwest is still reeling from massive flooding, and the human suffering from Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas is just beginning to be revealed. Meanwhile, President Trump doodles on hurricane maps and big oil is still investing millions in fossil-fuel infrastructure that will only further load the atmosphere with carbon and accelerate the devastating climate impacts. Climate scientists tell us that nations of the world need to cut carbon pollution in half by 2030 to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis. Yet in 2018, carbon emissions grew faster than any year since 2011.

On the other hand, consider this: Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, has become a media star for calling CEOs and politicians liars and thiefs who have stolen her future – and the future of millions of other voiceless people. Inspired in no small part by Thunberg, tens of thousands of people will participate in a global climate strike on September 20th to demand action. CNN just devoted seven hours of coverage to climate change. In the U.S., a majority of registered voters now say climate change is an “emergency.” The climate crisis is at the top of the agenda for every Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential campaign. And, of course, there’s the Green New Deal, which has emerged in the past year to become one of the hottest political topics of the moment.

To me, these are all signs that the climate fight is gaining momentum and becoming the driving political movement of our time. Of course, I thought the same thing back in 2015, after the gavel came down in Paris on the climate deal. Boy, Paris is turning out to be an empty gesture. According to Climate Action Tracker, only two countries in the world, Morocco and the Gambia, have policies in place that are compatible with the 1.5 C target set in Paris.

This time, the moment feels different. And the difference can be summed up by the emergence of two qualities that have been in the background of the climate fight until now – moral courage and financial panic.

more...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/climate-crisis-the-case-for-hope-884063/

[Moostache]

1. I'm calling BS...

ANY article, message or thought that includes the tripe "THIS TIME IT FEELS DIFFERENT..." is a dead give away that NOTHING is about to change, AT ALL...

1) Gun Violence...how many times has it "felt different this time"? Sandy Hook? Orlando? Las Vegas? El Paso? How many laws have changed? How many additional lives have been lost? BS....its no goddamn different. Assault weapons, massive magazine capacities, loopholes, no federal background checks...yeah, real differences (once more)...

2) Me Too movement...yet, we still have Kavanaugh on the SCOTUS and despite the "new allegations"...How many new women CEOs have been hired because of the "different feeling"? Has fair pay been enacted and enforced? The Women's World Cup is fading into memory...has their position materially changed? Nope...

3) Climate Change...we are STILL pumping record amounts of pollution ANNUALLY, on top of what is already in the air and sure to cause a MINIMUM of 2-3 degrees C warming and immeasurable damage around the world. A one day strike? Cute. The situation needs much, much more immediate and drastic action and it is NOT going to happen.

The world is the equivalent of a herd of Hindu cows...mindlessly munching away, oblivious to all.

Hope? I'm sorry, I just don't feel different this time...there is almost no time left to have hope, the worst is going to happen to the poorest already...look no further than Haitians in the Bahamas and count the dead from there.

[Newest Reality]

2. Good Points!

The issue is also momentum. Those points have a certain momentum behind them.

While I think that hope can be helpful as a form of optimism in some situations, we really could delegate it to the sphere of wishes and dreams. On the surface, those are fine and dandy and can be a realm of their own, but hope is rather impractical without any action and so, its thought's and prayers in a sense. I am not taking a position on those here, though.

With hope, we can also include belief. Belief is so common that we don't tend to be able to discern the differences between reality and the actual, the conceptual and the actual, etc. It comes down to the nature of abstract concepts and even people who are not of a religious or spiritual bent have many, many beliefs and are subject to biases of their own. The nature of biases is that they tend to not be transparent, but act more like a filter on actuality and humans have to deal with that rather than labeling it as good or bad.

So, better or more appropriate beliefs can be useful and change views or reflect values, but they still are beliefs and tend to be more hypothetical and should be treated as such.

Ultimately, beliefs and hope are relitively useless in relation to many of the perfect storms that are brewing now on so many levels. Even though that may seem to be a rather dry and seemingly heartless view, it does point to something deeper and more insightful than mere reactionary sentiments. Whatever gets us to the heart of the matter is what may be most essential and that may include acknowledging what is going on, dealing with climate grief, processing the cognitive dissonance of modern life, etc.

That's my view on the pragmatism that your post suggests. Give up hope all ye who enter here. We don't have the luxury of playing many of the contextual games that supported a Status Quo anymore. It seems that survival is on the table in a massive way. This has been dubbed the Anthropocene Era, and our species is taking itself out and may take all other species with it.

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. Nope, we're fucked

we're fucked because of the Trumps and Bolsonaros and their climate-science denying followers; we're fucked because the USA's idea of "transitioning to cleaner energy" is switching from coal to natural gas and fracking the shit out of West Texas and the Dakotas and releasing tremendous amounts of methane in the process; we're fucked because far too many people feel entitled to wasteful lifestyles where they can eat as much beef as they want, fly thousands of miles on vacation regularly, drive fifteen to twenty thousand miles a year, and live consumerist lifestyles buying largely plastic crap with built-in planned obsolescence like the latest iPhone. Real and effective change that affects the rate of warming from greenhouse gases would require drastic mass lifestyle changes and for hundreds of millions of people to accept that not only will their children have a lower standard of living than they do, but that they themselves will have to have a lower or at least very different standard of living to the one Americans have viewed as their god-given right since the end of WWII. This is never going to happpen; the political will to make the necessary changes on the policy side that would actually be effective isn't there and won't be because any politician who ennacted what needs to be done would not get re-elected.

[Bayard]

4. Climate change:

We are stealing our childrens' future.

That's a great line for the Dem's to be using.