In other words, there’s nothing to indicate that we, human civilization, will ever get our shyt together, let alone in time to stop the worst of climate change.
There are three very simple reasons for this:
- Capitalism would need to radically transformed in such a way that it would functionally be something different, and very few governments will be willing to do this.
- Most of the people who are making the explicit decision to not do shyt about this now will be dead by the time conditions are apocalyptic.
- The people who are making that decision now who won’t be dead are going to be just fine by the time conditions are apocalyptic.
Barring an economic catastrophe, deeply unpopular war, a natural disaster of epic proportions, or a combination of some or all three which causes a socialist left which puts this problem front and center to grow exponentially, it’s hard to see how the first situation changes. In the United States, the second-largest emitter of CO2, there currently exists no major party which is even willing to offer a fundamental critique of capitalism. We are truly starting from scratch.
The latter two reasons go hand in hand with the ethos of “fukk you, I got mine.” As Quartz
found earlier this year, the median member of Congress is worth $1.1 million, 12 times as much as the median household. Our president is a billionaire. Because the poor don’t have access to power and decision-making, and these a$$holes do, nothing is going to be done about this. Climate change is
already disproportionately displacing and
killing the global poor on a catastrophic level.