Myles Byrne https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1476515676168851461.htmlTo all who have panned Adam McKay's
#DontLookUp, i have another set of metaphors for you:
The wreck of the Estonia in Sept. 1994:
William Langewiesche: The Sinking of the Estonia - The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/'
Survival that night was a very tight race, & savagely simple. People who started early & moved fast had some chance of winning. People who started late or hesitated for any reason had no chance at all. Action paid. Contemplation did not. The mere act of getting dressed was enough to condemn people to death, & although many of those who escaped to the water succumbed to the cold, most of the ultimate winners endured the ordeal completely naked or in their underwear. The survivors all seem to have grasped the nature of this race, the first stage of which involved getting outside to the Deck 7 promenade without delay. There was no God to turn to for mercy. There was no government to provide order. Civilization was ancient history, Europe a faint and faraway place. Inside the ship, as the heel increased, even the most primitive social organization, the human chain, crumbled apart. Love only slowed people down. A pitiless clock was running. The ocean was completely in control. Oddly enough, the relative distance that people had to travel seems to have made little difference.'
To all who praised
#DontLookUp but called it 'the first great climate change film': Don't Look Up is great, but as many such as @neiltyson have said, it's a documentary, not a film. First Reformed, She Dies Tomorrow, and Silent Running are all great films.
To all who have criticised Adam McKay for posting 'wrong answers' to climate change: '
Remember after watching #DontLookUp that WE HAVE THE SCIENCE TO SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS. Renewables, carbon removal and capture. It just needs to be scaled up & developed. We are missing AWARENESS, WILL AND ACTION. Without those three things we are in SERIOUS trouble' .. it's hopeful that you see that the 'approved' answers are unworkable.
But there are two further realisations i see very few of you making:
1. Only a few researchers have consistently and rigorously pointed out that we have no workable solutions. The degrowth needed seems impossible without collapse. We'll have to sit in the fire for awhile longer and see how collapse changes the landscape before we can move en masse. The way through can only be emergent, and cannot be prestated. [More here:
https://neuroplastic.github.io/climate_social_contract_2020.html ]
2.
Adam McKay et al. get something powerfully right, that most climate researchers get wrong: climate change at this scale is not a civilisation-ending event, it is a world-ending event. We do not in fact face 'climate change', but the Gaian Bottleneck:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26789354/On the other side of the bottleneck, the Earth fails as a life-bearing planet. Unless .. How we respond is the key, not to our own survival, but to the survival of Earth as a life-bearing planet.
Now, if you want to argue that this is a scientifically unprovable claim, i refer you back to the metaphor of the wreck of the Estonia. My actual unprovable claim is that it was always meant to be this way:
humanity was evolved to both trigger and manage the transition of the planetary biome to self-managing homeostasis.
Like #DontLookUp, the sinking of the Estonia is a good metaphor for climate change, with this key difference: Your choices from now forward will not decide whether you survive or die, but simply whether it is possible for you *as a class* to survive.Here are two questions, your answers to which are closely related: Are you critical of
#DontLookUp?
Do 1 billion die and 7 billion survive, or do 7 billion die and 1 billion survive, as we traverse the Gaian Bottleneck?
If the answer is 1:7, then rule of law manifests sustainable developmental justice in the form of a world court prosecuting ecocide. This gives us a chance at surviving, naked or in our underwear. If our answer is 1:7, then maybe 1 billion will make it into the 23rd century.
If our answer is 7:1, then effectively none of us survive, and the Earth dies.Happy 2022!