Can Our Broken Politics Solve a Problem Like Climate Change? - Eudaimonia and Co
Can Our Broken Politics Solve a Problem Like Climate Change? | by umair haque | Jul, 2023 | Eudaimonia and Co
Can Our Broken Politics Solve a Problem Like Climate Change?
What We’ve Learned So Far From the First Extinction Summer
Climate Change Service
Canada. Europe. Argentina. Siberia. Turkey. A planet on fire.
What have we learned so far, from what is perhaps humanity’s first proper Extinction Summer?
One thing that strikes me, over and over again, is how…far…behind the curve our politics really are. As we discussed recently, the doom-shamers say: “We have the tech to solve climate change! All we have to do is apply it!” Of course, this is scarcely true — we don’t have replacements for industrial agriculture, food, cement, steel, glass, plastics, chemicals, not remotely at civilizational scales. But even if we did: how could we “just apply it”? As things stand today? We wouldn’t have a chance.
There’s a thought that rubs away at me like sandpaper. One that I feel is telling of where we stand — really stand. It wasn’t even a decade ago that much of the world rejected the idea of Green New Deals. The US. Britain. Europe. Asia, of course, which doesn’t have the money to implement one to begin with.
The politics of climate change? They’re nonexistent. The doom-shamers who say that “all we have to do is apply the tech!” — and by this, they mean renewable energy that rich parts of the world are beginning to implement, here and there — seem not to want to be acquainted with this difficult fact.
You know the term “climate denial,” I’m sure. But stop to really reflect on it. As a civilization? Our politics are in climate denial.
What’s been happening over the last decade or so? Forget even a window that big — let’s take the example of just the last year or so. Two of the nations hardest hit by this Extinction Summer…elected…far right governments. Italy and Greece. So while Italy burned, its ministers denied climate change existed. This isn’t some kind of anomaly, though — it’s a theme. Australia had a Black Summer, as they call it — black meaning “incineration” — not so long ago, and while it did, its PM, too, was a climate denier.
Join me in deranged laughter.
Now let’s zoom out. What are the politics of our civilization? In a recent essay, I pointed out that they ranged on a…
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.