Any task, if its benefit to changing the status quo is only incremental, is a waste of time.
“The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.”
The only reasonable actions remaining to us are decisive, effective, and broad changes to business as usual. Symbolic victories or actions are idle wankery. They won’t mean a thing when the world is going through severe destabilization. There is a tipping point beyond which everything we’re working on now will get erased; we don’t know exactly where this tipping point is but we’re pretty sure it’s really, really close.
There is no time left to “nudge” the industry (whatever industry we mean), or policy, or popular opinion. No time left to wheedle people or attempt to win hearts and minds. There is no time left for individual change, or education, or any of that to make an impact. They were reasonable actions twenty, thirty, forty years ago; now they mean nothing.
The only realistic options remaining to us are those that scale widely, are huge in scope, and can be implemented now.
If an action is not absolutely, completely radical in nature and conception there is no hope for it. The trajectory of civilization is insane: we’re sucking down a Big Gulp of cyanide and just sucking harder and harder. We need radical, terrifying, horrible, blinding, outrageous action now.
Anything else is suicide.
What are you doing?
Shit.
What am I doing?
Why am I just sitting here? Why am I staring at this stupid screen typing away when I could be out there doi