This isn’t Year 2022 of the Common Era, or shouldn’t be. ![]() Has your brain, reading all this, started its self-protective shutoff protocol yet? Do you need a nap?Īccording to Günther Anders, underground hero of existential philosophers and A-plus catastrophic thinker, we are so lost we don’t even know the year. I’m talking about a society that’s simply not built for the weather that’s coming. I’m talking about Earth’s ecology losing equilibrium and falling down the stairs. I’m not talking about your fear that you’ll lose control, your frets that life will get messy. secretary-general António Guterres recently said. “If we are not able to reverse the present trend that is leading to catastrophe in the world, we will be doomed,” U.N. But we missed 1.5 degrees and probably also missed two, and two degrees (by which people really mean 2.3 or maybe 2.5) will lead to unspeakable suffering. ![]() We’re not going to warm by five degrees Celsius, which is a relief. We’ve got some bright spots: the climate bill, cheap (and growing radically cheaper) clean energy, promises and pledges to move faster toward our climate goals (“promises,” “pledges,” “goals,” yikes) Bolsonaro lost, Lula won Indigenous-led resistance finally proved to many old-school Birkenstocks environmentalists that tribes who have spent millennia battling extraction-happy settlers are the best ones to lead this fight. Is it possible that this message has actually persuaded the privileged to think they need do nothing about climate change because they will be insulated from the worst impacts of global warming by their affluence, and indeed by their bodily advantages?” As Amitav Ghosh notes in his excellent book The Nutmeg’s Curse, “It now needs to be considered whether these appeals to the conscience may not have had exactly the opposite of the intended effect. Even the climate-justice movement’s heroic efforts in recent years to call out the climate gap, the unequal impacts the crisis wreaks on the rich and the poor - this is not enough. A sampler, in ascending order: bike, vote, buy a heat pump, organize, stop flying, go full ’70s hippie and live in a yurt go back to school, earn a law degree, work to put ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and/or Chevron CEO Michael Wirth in a dock at the Hague (which may be underwater by the time you succeed) set yourself on fire on Earth Day on the Supreme Court steps.īut we know none of it is enough, really: not the science, not the news, not the paths for individual action nor the tens of thousands of people assembling right now in Egypt for COP27 (officially the U.N.’s Conference of Parties, intended to broker global climate action unofficially an international sleight-of-hand performance full of shiny non-binding agreements). You know the basic menu of options for individual action. In their default setting, they’re unable to hold what’s going on. But how? Our brains: They’re good, but they’re not great. We need to address the concept of loss and damage. ![]() convenes in September for Climate Week ( week, ha), your brain keeps tripping on that awful, poetic phrase: loss and damage. The term of art for that money is loss and damage. There’s a lot of resentment, too … And they’re asking for reparations - money.” “It’s interesting when you talk to people. “What is so pronounced here, John … is you don’t see any aid workers,” she says to her anchor back in his air-conditioned tower in New York. There she is, in her pink tunic, blonde hair pulled back, getting bumped by oxen interviewing dazed, desperate families streaming down the road to get to higher ground visibly baffled by her own journalistic relationship to non-interference. You watch CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward reporting from the floods that cover one-third of Pakistan. You sweat out the record-high temperatures this summer in Shanghai or London or Anaheim or Salt Lake City or Sacramento. But even so, how could a person possibly stay sane and oriented? How could a person think straight and well in a moment such as this? You’ve got that huge lucky fact going for you. Your life is still stable enough that you’re reading magazine articles. Plus the big granddaddy catastrophe of them all, the planetary crisis. ![]() Six months ago, a teenager killed 19 kids and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, while hundreds of law-enforcement officers stood around. Just days ago, Elon Musk bought Twitter and the fascists openly rejoiced. Our warm embrace of surveillance capitalism. I mean, obviously we’re in a catastrophe. Hello, excuse me, are you lost? Not in physical space or in your personal life - just kind of cosmically unmoored? It seems like we’re in a catastrophe.
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