Nature will have the last word on the climate crisis
Hope for systemic change ignited by activism snuffed out by policymakers and lobbyists
The climate crisis, according to Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, “is our third World War. It needs a bold response.” And, after decades of political gesturing and public apathy, 2019 may be remembered as the year the world began to fitfully awaken to the deadly threat of ecological collapse.
The ripples of awareness are spreading quickly. The Collins dictionary chose “climate strike” as its word of the year, while the Oxford English dictionary plumped for “climate emergency”. Meanwhile, teenage activist Greta Thunberg has become Time magazine’s youngest ever person of the year.
After a decade and more campaigning on this issue, I should be feeling elated that the message is finally breaking through. Instead, I remain haunted by HG Wells’s description of history as being a race between education and catastrophe. And, on the eve of 2020, it hardly feels like we’re winning.
The flicker of hope for real change ignited by the school-strike movement and Extinction Rebellion has been snuffed out by politicians, policymakers and corporate lobbyists
First, the politics. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) COP25 meeting opened with the direst of warnings from United Nations secretary general António Guterres: “Humanity is knowingly destroying the planetary support system.” Despite this, it ended with a whimper in Madrid earlier this month. “Make no mistake, this was a failure of epic proportions,” said Irish climatologist Prof John Sweeney.
Endless growth
The IPCC was first convened in the early 1990s to tackle the threat of dangerous climate change, yet in the quarter century since its inception, global CO2 emissions have actually doubled. Soaring rhetoric has consistently crumbled in the face of a reality in which politics is beholden to powerful interests and bewitched by the imperative of endless economic growth.
“Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons,” ecologist Garret Hardin presciently wrote in 1968. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
The flicker of hope for real system change ignited this year by the international school-strike movement and the street activism of Extinction Rebellion, among others, has been snuffed out by the politicians, policymakers and corporate lobbyists in Madrid.
Nature, however, will have the last word. The Arctic region is now warming so rapidly that it is releasing more than a billion tons of CO2 annually from melting permafrost – this is equivalent to the total emissions for Japan and Russia combined...
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/natu ... -1.4123780
