PLEASE PANIC AND DON’T CARRY ON
Most rational political leaders in the world are now in agreement that climate change is real and that we should start taking careful and methodical steps towards drawing down our Global carbon emissions. No need to panic, the adults in the room have got it figured out, right? Except they don’t, as the latest UN Emissions Gap Report (detailing where current emissions stand vs. where we need to be) makes painfully clear.
Greta Thunberg wants you to panic. And she is absolutely right. We can’t wait to panic until the year 2030 when we once again see that we have failed to do anything close to what is necessary towards eliminating the endless plumes of CO2 and other GHGs (greenhouse gases) that are the vanguard of our relentless warming. 2020 is guaranteed to be the second hottest year on record and could well be the new hottest, a pattern that has been more or less repeating every year since 2014. That is not a coincidence. Waiting to panic about the climate catastrophe is like getting a lung cancer diagnosis from your doctor that needs immediate attention and you just sort of wearily shake your head and mutter something like, “Guess maybe next year I’ll try to cut down to a pack or so a day Doc….bummer.”
We’ve been having international gatherings on global warming and the climate crisis for thirty years. We’ve been talking about the need for change and drafting the architecture for reducing emissions year after year, for decades. Emissions have only gone one way all this time — UP. We’ve created more carbon emissions and more warming since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 than in all the years leading up to it since at least 1900. That is to say, we’ve smoked more cigarettes since we got our cancer diagnosis than we smoked to get cancer in the first place.
So how are we still here now, with some still questioning the very science whose projections are playing out in a real-time smorgasbord of biblical floods and rain “bombs”, record number and strength of hurricanes, unprecedented fires, crippling droughts, record shattering temperatures, rising sea levels and coastal erosion, dying coral and marine life, decimated rainforests and all of the correlated exponential increases in climate migration, species extinction and zoonotic disease transmission.
Why didn’t you say something back then Doc? What do you mean now I need a double lung transplant and a straitjacket to keep from lighting up cigarettes? This must be what it feels like to be Professor James Hansen (who testified before congress in 1988, to a then concerned bi-partisan group of senators and representatives, about the certainty of global warming and projected results) or Bill McKibben (a 350.org founder and long-time climate advocate who wrote one of the first widely published books detailing the climate crisis to come in 1989, entitled “The End of Nature.”)
We knew we had cancer when it was first diagnosed. But the smokestacks of industry, the endless quest to find consumer nirvana through the latest advertised goods, the super-sizing of energy footprints in residential areas, the industrial-scale and unsustainable agriculture that filled our fast-food restaurants and supermarkets, the Instagram-worthy, jet-setting vacations and the catastrophic embrace of limitless growth on a finite planet— all aided and abetted by the smokescreen of “uncertainty around the science” propagated by the oil and gas industry — this was what the prosperous minority in the Global North aspired to more determinedly with each advancing year, while the poorer denizens of its cities and the majority of citizens in the Global South got sick from the second-hand smoke.
If you are reading this article in the comfort of your own home, have access to high-speed internet, have more than adequate clothing and labor-saving consumer devices, access to food whenever you are hungry and with savings in the bank, then you are part of the fortunate minority on this planet. You are also likely generating GHG emissions up to 10x more than citizens of many Global South countries. This is not because you as an individual are terrible, but because of how we have constructed the Global economy and the pre-ordained winners and losers, with pathological disregard for the true ecological cost of our lifestyles. But now you know, so you can no longer plead ignorance. If we don’t acknowledge our diagnosis and immediately pivot towards radical, sustained change during this Pandemic — the biggest upheaval the world has known since our last World War — we are condemning ourselves to a terminal fate.
This is not the time for overly cheery “We can do this!” aphorisms that fade as quickly as most New Year’s resolutions. This is not the time to slowly start to change our ingrained, energy consuming behavior — that time was 30 years ago. This is showing up at an AA meeting after your second DUI. This is the anti-masker diagnosed with COVID and looking for an empty ICU bed. This is the morning after Pearl Harbor. This is understanding that you have a terminal illness and all the fear, anger, soul-searching, “questioning how you’ve lived your life” and “realizing what’s truly important” that comes with that.
We no longer have the luxury of approaching the climate catastrophe as a long-term problem to be chipped away at over time. The trend going forward is that every year will bring worse devastation than the year before. It will affect north and south, wealthy and poor, culprits and victims. We don’t have another planet and we won’t all fit on Elon Musk’s spaceship to Mars or Peter Thiel’s apocalypse-prepped compound in New Zealand. We can’t wait for things to get worse before we start to panic. The time to panic is NOW.
P.S. If you are getting sufficiently panicked and looking for some actionable suggestions (though by no means do they encapsulate the full scope of the actions needed), check out a recent piece I wrote via the link below:
https://barrett-h-stuart.medium.com/drawing-down-with-the-joneses-448fd7dfeee3
