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Elon Musk is a toxic individual and is rapidly turning Twitter into a toxic ‘public square.’ However, unlike a real, physical public square that we can and should fight for, Twitter is a virtual public space that can be remade literally overnight elsewhere. And it is.
And at the rate we’re going, our time will be up soon! Think the climate emergency is a huge threat? It certainly is. Plastic pollution? Slowly poisoning us. Ocean acidification? Killing not only the fish we eat but the plankton that make the very oxygen we breathe. Putin’s wars? Russia’s and China’s espionage and cyber warfare and suborning of African countries?
Dear Climate Campaigners: You – we – need to get serious about saving the planet. Any day now would be great. I know we’ve been at it for 40-some years, and this would be a great year to finally get it right and break through.
In a previous and apparently somewhat controversial article I laid out what individuals are likely to do as despair and anger rise over climate inaction. (I have taken it down, as some actions were illegal and potentially dangerous, but people are doing them.) I was not recommending these actions, but some readers interpreted it that way and seemed very threatened by what desperate individuals will do.
There is an influential school of thought that says if someone knows the truth, they will accept it. The environmental and social justice movement largely subscribes to this, and thus the tremendous focus on events that raise awareness, from candlelight vigils to An Inconvenient Truth. How’s that working out?
Capitalist theory clearly breaks down when it comes to the climate crisis – or many other forms of pollution.
Most of the ‘climate realists’ I have spoken with, whether in an interview on our (now retired) radio show or in casual conversation, went through some sort of journey to get the point where they accept climate reality; it often wasn’t easy. My case is no different; I did not always accept reality, but now understand why Gandhi once said “Truth is God.”
On a fairly regular basis, I get people saying I’m a kook, an extremist, nuts, and recently an eco-fascist, all because of my writings on climate change. I prefer to think of myself as well-grounded in reality. Why the disconnect?
The Great Global Warming Inquisition: Where Scientists are Galileo and the Church is Market Fundamentalism. Four hundred years ago, the Catholic Church found Galileo Galilei “vehemently suspect of heresy” and sentenced him to house arrest for the remainder of his life.
Every person I know who has faced the reality of our climate crisis battles with feelings of despair, some or all of the time. When you pull the pieces together and take what the scientists are saying and combine it with our foreseeable political reality, it is hard not to believe we are doomed.
Most economies today are growth economies, meaning they require continuous growth or there is a recession, companies go bankrupt, jobs are lost, and so forth. This is unnecessary, unsustainable, and very unstable, as we are increasingly discovering.
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We must change our ways or join the dinosaurs, with the added shame of having known what we were doing – and doing it anyway. We are the meteor, and we are about to flame out.
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