Roger Hallam (Extinction Rebellion) ke zprave:
Roger Hallam
The Crisis: Four States of Denial
… As the IPCC gives it latest report
The first state of denial is the one everyone is familiar with: that climate change does not exist or, if it does, it is not caused by humans. The vast majority of people are now over this denial (apart from some Republican voters in the US). There is such a thing as facts and, well, facts are facts.
The second state of denial is that we do not have to engage in an immediate and massive transformation of our economies and societies. There is the pretence for instance that 1.5C is still possible, and that we can stay under 2C by ambling down to “net zero” by 2050. We cannot. As Sir David King the former chief scientific advisor to the UK government has put it “what we do in the next 3-4 years will determine the future of humanity”. This is because the world is already over 500 ppm of CO2 equivalent (the combined effect of all greenhouse gases) and the amount of heat being trapped by the planet has doubled in the last 15 years: “There is no carbon budget left”. Or as Norman Loeb the lead researcher on the heat imbalance research project made clear, we are heading into ecological destruction of unimaginable proportions. The “climate industry” is in denial about this: the diplomats, the political parties, the NGOs, Fridays for a Future, establishment scientists, and the liberal elements in XR. However many individuals in these social networks privately understand the situation perfectly well, but generally only those that are retired speak about it publicly.
The third state of denial is that we can create this transformation without mass and high level civil resistance. There is massive denial about this even in the supposedly radical elements of the environmental movement. Hence the false compassion that says “you don’t have to get arrested”. The whole of the Left is in denial about this – where is Black Lives Matters, where is the feminist movement, where is the labour movement? They all have the quaint humanist delusion, rooted in their “Enlightenment” philosophy, that nature something separate from society. That’s why Guardian articles only talk about sea level rise, temperature rises, and methane release but hardly ever talk about the secondary social effects of mass slaughter and rape, or genocide and fascism. Covid did not manage to break the denial but climate collapse surely will. The only thing that puts us in the ballpark of effective change given we have no time is economic disruption (closing of ports, motorways, pipelines etc) and/or the mass occupation of the centre of state capitals. Dressing up in costumes, going to ghostly international conferences, and moaning on social media, with all due respect, is just another displacement activity at this stage in the game.
The fourth state of denial is that the present political system will respond in time to this civil resistance. It will not. Only a political revolution will result in the World War Two transformation we now need. This is not a political statement but a sociological one – conventional political regimes have limits on how fast they can change. And political revolutions will inevitably happen once populations, probably later this decade, come face to face with the truly horrific depth of the fiscal crises and systemic breakdowns we face – given that civilisational collapse is now locked in for large parts of the world. They will demand the removal and prosecution of the political class “who knew all along but did nothing” and institute new political regimes: in other words, there will be revolutions. With a bit of luck they will be nonviolent and involve the institutionalisation of citizens assemblies in northern Europe, Canada and Australia. The US and southern Europe are more likely to descend into civil war, fascistic authoritarianism, and/or social collapse as a secondary effect of hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing from the depopulating sub tropics in an attempt to escape mass starvation and the deadly threat of wet bulb temperatures – Central America, the Middle East, India, and Africa, South West Asia.
This is where we are in 2021. The “crucial decade” was 2010-20, as we were told at the time, not the 2020’s. The 2020’s will be the decade of consequences. Like the people who understood the real nature of the Nazi project in the 1930’s and took in the Jews during World War Two, those that overcome these states of denial, and act in response to the real nature of the world today, are not predominately part of either the Left or Right, or of a particular religious or cultural group. What they have in common is what Tim Snyder, author of “Black Earth, Holocaust as History and Warning” calls “self knowledge”: the personality structure that is able to overcome the pressure to conform to the herd, and the ethical inability to stand by as society descends into evil.
In the next two to three years the prevention of humanity’s greatest hell of rape, slaughter, and starvation will depend on whether this small group of people around the world go into active and unlimited nonviolent resistance against the carbon regimes. These people already know who they are.
Email ring2021@protonmail.com to engage in civil resistance.