The Climate Crisis Will Be The Next Thing The Right Says We 'Just Have To Live With': The Guardian

[appalachiablue]

'After Covid, the climate crisis will be the next thing the right says we ‘just have to live with.’ Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian, July 22, 2021. Covid & Climate Deniers. - Ed.

- The politics of this new, extreme individualism will make collective responses to social crises impossible. -

Soon, a few of the more shameless newspaper commentators will urge the rest of us to “learn to live” with climate breakdown. Soon, a couple of especially sharp-elbowed cabinet ministers will sigh to the Spectator that, yes, carbon emissions should ideally be slashed – but we must make a trade-off between “lives and livelihoods”. Soon, a little platoon of Tory backbenchers will respond to TV pictures of another devastating flash flood or deadly heatwave by complaining about “fearmongering”. “Why is the BBC so doomy?” they’ll ask, as the death toll rises.

Soon, shockingly soon, the cheap shots, the brazen stat-bending and the coprophagic cynicism that have warped British discourse since March 2020 will migrate from Covid to an even bigger and more lethal crisis: the climate emergency. And just as they have helped shape the self-inflicted catastrophe that England has embarked upon this week, so they will work their terrible influence on that one. Scientists and politicians the world over have noted the strong similarities between coronavirus and climate breakdown. In papers and speeches, they have drawn lessons about some of the best ways to handle both: go early, go big, and don’t pretend you can strike some special deal with a lethal force.

The UK’s week-long delay in locking down in March 2020 led to about 20,000 deaths. Every year wasted in reducing carbon emissions pushes us further into extreme weather, environmental destruction and the loss of human and animal lives. These lessons appeared to have been fully imbibed by Boris Johnson and his chancellor, Rishi Sunak, when they vowed last March to do “whatever it takes” to tackle the pandemic. Goodbye to all that. Starting this week, our prime minister is no longer even pretending to keep down infections in England; instead, he is allowing more people to catch the disease, hospitals to drown amid case numbers, and thousands more Britons to die. That scenario isn’t drawn from the government’s critics: it is the one publicly accepted by Whitehall. It is less a policy than a white flag.

Even as global health experts unite in condemning the UK as a “threat to the world”, Johnson merely shrugs and asks: “If not now, when?” It is an artless, shortsighted phrase that will come back to haunt him.. As ever with anything involving this prime minister, the fatal farce of “freedom day” will be refracted through a thousand talk-radio discussions about Johnson’s fitness to govern. But the Tory leader is surfing a wave far bigger than himself. Riding forces larger than himself is what Johnson has done throughout his career, and it is what makes him such an effective political campaigner... What he has correctly identified is a growing extremist individualism. It is an ideology that claims to be about freedom when really it means selfishness; and it sees any curtailment of its liberties, no matter how justified or temporary, as Stalin sending in the tanks...

More,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/22/covid-climate-crisis-politics-individualism

[IcyPeas]

1. Fox news Jesse's Waters just said that...

Jesse Watters: "If you want to stop climate change you don't fight climate change, if it's getting warmer you adapt to it"

Link to tweet

?s=19

[appalachiablue]

2. Already on top of the messaging ..Maggie &

Ayn must be happy wherever they are. 'Just adapt to it,' paging Scott Atlas..

[-misanthroptimist]

4. I suppose dying is a form of adaptation in some larger, evolutionary sense

[Igel]

6. They've been saying it for years.

At least 5 years, perhaps more than 10.

But "In echoing assertions going back a decade or more, _________ said _______" does not make people gasp in horror. and outrage. Now, were the claim were to be suddenly more widespread, that might be news. On the other hand, The Guardian's basically just implied that it's unaware of the claim's past existence, much less its distribution or extent. I doubt the implication is true, to be honest, but I do suspect it's unaware of the claim's distribution or extent.

One difficulty is that if we go net zero as of 12:01 UCT 7/23/2021, the overall effect would continue to grow worse for awhile before flatlining and then easing a bit. There's no way to go net negative in the next decade--the tech's not there.

So then the options are "adapt to it" or "don't adapt to it", at least for the next 50 years. One is painful and lethal; the other is even more painful and far more lethal. Saying "adapt to it" is pure evil says that we prefer as the more moral choice "more painful and far more lethal", which is obviously false. So there's no shortage of strong advocates for going net zero carbon asap and then net negative carbon also asap *also* saying we need to adapt, at least for the intermediate term.

[uriel1972]

3. It might pay for them to read Edgar Allan Poe's

The Masque of the Red Death, where the nobility lock themselves away with supplies for a luxurious quarantine from a plague. However, Death has already talen residence and stalks them down one by one as they dance and party.

You can't escape this, there is no Plsn B.

[appalachiablue]

5. Thanks, I need to read it.

[marie999]

7. I do not think that anything meaningful will be done not only to stop climate change

but to even slow it down. Humans will not do anything until it is too late if it isn't too late already. Humans will survive no matter how bad it gets.

[LymphocyteLover]

8. you mean *some* humans will survive.... most of us won't

[LymphocyteLover]

9. they no doubt will say that and already have

but the climate crisis is more of an existential threat than COVID19 is, by far.