"We've Run Out Of Elections To Waste" - Bill McKibben On 2020 As The Very Last Electoral Chance

[hatrack]

I’m no expert on Australian politics – I don’t know all the cross-currents that will determine this week’s balloting. But I do know a fair amount about the climate crisis, having written the first book on the subject back in 1989. So I can say with confidence that if Australians want to play a serious role in fixing the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced, this may be about the last election where people retain enough leverage to make a real difference.

Global warming, after all, is a math problem: how quickly can we reverse the flow of carbon into the atmosphere? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its report last year, said that unless a fundamental transformation was fully underway by 2030, we stood no chance of meeting the targets the world set in the Paris climate accords. No matter what country you’re in, “fundamental transformations” don’t come overnight; if you want to dramatically trim carbon emissions in 2030, it means you better start in 2020.

EDIT

Reading that Tony Abbott bet $100 that the climate will not change over the next decade is the latest reminder of the pervasive intellectual dishonesty necessary to prop up the status quo. Australians literally watched hot water kill off huge swaths of the Great Barrier Reef in two years. Hell, you’ve watched wildfires wipe out suburbs in two hours.

A decade is an eternity in climate time now. We’ve wasted three decades since scientists first raised the warning – that’s guaranteed that we’ll have massive increases in temperature.It means we’ve run out of decades to waste, and hence of elections to waste. Every election matters – it registers who we are at a certain moment in history, and it sets the course of the next few years. But this election will matter forever.

EDIT/END

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/14/weve-run-out-of-elections-to-waste-this-is-the-last-chance-to-make-a-difference-on-climate-change

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

1. +1000!! There's no time left for a moderate response to climate change!! #GND

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!