A perfect analogy for how climate change will affect us: by wearing us down, not through some singular event.
We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.
A flourishing economy mostly depends on an unsatisfied population and a declining environment.
With the arrival of high speed trains and low-cost airlines, rich and poor are simply swapping long-distance transport modes.
This is exactly the case. I doubt the return of traditional cheaper trains would change much. They did let you carry your bike onto them which is not the case for most high-speed lines today though. As long as airlines are basically subsidised and we all take for granted that we can go anywhere in the world whenever we want to, the situation has little chance of changing.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant.
They've pulled off the best trick ever: making it all about personal responsibility while they happily destroy the planet in the background. We need to attack the issue from all sides: personal change but, more importantly, system change.
As the amazon burns, don't count on our leaders to prevent our self-destruction. They're locked in to the system and the transnational corporations that govern it. They will not be the source of the radical changes needed.
Jeremy Lent argues the window for new ideas is opening now. We can still go both ways.
I recently watched a BBC interview with Extinction Rebellion's co-founder Roger Hallam where he mentions six billion people could die from starvation and war before the end of the century.
My future outlook as far as the coming climate emergency is downright bleak and even I was a bit surprised at the numbers he was throwing out. Well, it turns out there are scientists out there who believe exactly that.
