In an exclusive story for the Guardian, Matthew Taylor, the Guardian Environment correspondent reports (Tue 21 Jul 2020), under the subheading:
Activist says €750bn fund shows leaders not treating global heating as emergency
Greta Thunberg has accused EU politicians of failing to acknowledge the scale of the climate crisis and said its €750bn Covid-19 recovery plan does not do enough to tackle the issue.
The climate campaigner said the package of measures agreed by EU leaders proved that politicians were still not treating climate change as an emergency.
“They are still denying the fact and ignoring the fact that we are facing a climate emergency, and the climate crisis has still not once been treated as a crisis,”Thunberg told the Guardian. “As long as the climate crisis is not being treated as a crisis, the changes that are necessary will not happen.”
EU leaders reached agreement on the recovery fund in the early hours of Tuesday and pledged that 30% of the package would go towards climate policies, but few details were given.
Thunberg, 17, and other leaders of the school strikes movement across Europe said the package was inadequate.
Luisa Neubauer, 24, a central figure in Germany’s school strikes movement, said young people were becoming increasingly frustrated with politicians.
“We are asking our leaders to take care of the most fundamental thing: the safety of us, the safety of people around the world, the safety of our futures,”Neubauer said. “It is worrying on a democratic level when you ask for such substantial things, which seem so obvious, and yet you see how leaders are widely ignoring it, or not considering it to be as important as other things.”
Another prominent school striker, Adélaïde Charlier, 19, from Belgium, said politicians who adopted the language of climate action without following up with urgent policy measures were worse than climate deniers.
“When leaders minimise the climate crisis, I feel it is more dangerous than leaders that outright deny it … because then we actually feel we can rely on them and we are actually on the right path and that is dangerous and wrong.” The group has written an open letter to EU leaders demanding they act immediately to avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis.
The letter, signed by 80,000 people including some of the world’s leading scientists, argues that the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that most leaders are able to act swiftly and decisively when they deem it necessary, but that the same urgency has been missing in the response to climate change.
“It is now clearer than ever that the climate crisis has never once been treated as a crisis, neither from the politicians, media, business nor finance. And the longer we keep pretending that we are on a reliable path to lower emissions and that the actions required to avoid a climate disaster are available within today’s system … the more precious time we will lose,” it says.
The letter argues that the climate and ecological emergency can only be addressed by tackling the underlying “social and racial injustices and oppression that have laid the foundations of our modern world”.
Earlier this year the EU unveiled its green new deal proposals, which it said aimed to transform the bloc from a high- to a low-carbon economy without reducing prosperity and while improving people’s quality of life. The climate strikers dismissed the EU’s target of net zero emissions by 2050 as dangerously unambitious.
Thunberg, who this week was awarded Portugal’s Gulbenkian prize for humanity and pledged the €1m ($1.15m) award to groups working to protect the environment and halt climate change, said it was up to ordinary people to stand up and demand that politicians rise to the challenge.
“I see the hope in democracy and in people,” she said. “If people become aware of what is happening then we can accomplish anything, we can put pressure on people in power … if we just decide we have had enough then that will change everything.”
Boris Johnson’s ‘return to normality’ will only mean more consumerism at the expense of the planet – we must resist it
So George Monbiot writes for the Guardian Journal (Tue 21 Jul 2020):
Out there somewhere, marked on no map but tantalisingly near, is a promised land called Normal, to which one day we can return. This is the magical geography we are taught by politicians, such as Boris Johnson with his “significant return to normality”. It is the story we tell ourselves, even if we contradict it with the very next thought.
There are practical reasons to believe that Normal is a fairyland to which we can never return. The virus has not gone away, and is likely to keep recurring in waves. But let’s focus on another question: if such a land existed, would we want to live there?
The polls consistently suggest we would not. A survey by BritainThinks a fortnight ago found that only 12% of people want life to be “exactly as it was before”. A poll at the end of June, commissioned by the nursery provider Bright Horizons, suggested that just 13% of people want to return to working as they did before the lockdown. A YouGov study in the same week revealed that only 6% of us want the same type of economy as we had before the pandemic. Another survey by the same pollsters in April showed only 9% of respondents wanted a return to “normal”. It’s rare to see such strong and consistent results on any major issue.
Of course, we would all like to leave the pandemic behind, with its devastating impacts on physical and mental health, its exacerbation of loneliness, the lack of schooling and the collapse in employment. But this doesn’t mean that we want to return to the bizarre and frightening world the government defines as normal. Ours was no land of lost content, but a place in which lethal crises were gathering long before the pandemic struck. Alongside our many political and economic dysfunctions, normality meant accelerating the strangest and deepest predicament humankind has ever confronted: the collapse of our life-support systems.
Last month, confined to our homes, we watched columns of smoke rising from the Arctic, where temperatures reached a highly abnormal 38C. Such apocalyptic imagery is becoming the backdrop to our lives. We scroll past images of fire consuming Australia, California, Brazil, Indonesia, inadvertently normalising them. In a brilliant essay at the beginning of this year, the author Mark O’Connell described this process as “the slow atrophying of our moral imaginations”. We are acclimatising ourselves to our existential crisis.
When business as usual resumes, so does the air pollution that kills more people every year than Covid-19 has yet done, and exacerbates the impacts of the virus. Climate breakdown and air pollution are two aspects of a wider dysbiosis. Dysbiosis means the unravelling of ecosystems. The term is used by doctors to describe the collapse of our gut biomes, but it is equally applicable to all living systems: rainforests, coral reefs, rivers, soil. They are unspooling at shocking speed due to the cumulative effect of “normality”, which entails a perpetual expansion of consumption.
This month we learned that $10bn-worth of precious metals, such as gold and platinum, are dumped in landfill every year, embedded in tens of millions of tonnes of lesser materials, in the form of electronic waste. The world’s production of e-waste is rising by 4% a year. It is driven by another outlandish norm: planned obsolescence. Our appliances are designed to break down, they are deliberately engineered not to be repaired. This is one of the reasons why the average smartphone, containing precious materials extracted at great environmental cost, lasts for between two and three years, while the average desktop printer prints for a total of five hours and four minutes before it is discarded.
The living world, and the people it supports, cannot sustain this level of consumption, but normal life depends on it. The compound, cascading effects of dysbiosis push us towards what some scientists warn could be global systemic collapse.
The polls on this issue are also clear: we do not want to return to this madness. A YouGov survey suggests that eight out of 10 people want the government to prioritise health and wellbeing above economic growth during the pandemic, and six out of 10 would like it to stay that way when (or if) the virus abates. A survey by Ipsos produced a similar result: 58% of British people want a green economic recovery, while 31% disagree. As in all such polls, Britain sits close to the bottom of the range. By and large, the poorer the nation, the greater the weight its people give to environmental issues. In China, in the same survey, the proportions are 80% and 16%, and in India, 81% and 13%.
The more we consume, the more our moral imagination atrophies.
But the Westminster government is determined to shove us back into hypernormality regardless of our wishes. This week the environment secretary, George Eustice, signalled that he intends to rip up our system of environmental assessments. The government’s proposed free ports, in which tax and regulations are suspended, will not only exacerbate fraud and money laundering but also expose the surrounding wetlands and mudflats, and the rich wildlife they harbour, to destruction and pollution. The trade deal it intends to strike with the US could override parliamentary sovereignty and destroy our environmental standards – without public consent.
Just as there has never been a normal person, there has never been a normal time. Normality is a concept used to limit our moral imaginations. There is no normal to which we can return, or should wish to return. We live in abnormal times. They demand an abnormal response.
The normal that the politicians are required to re-impose upon societies worldwide is global capitalism! A system where money is free to harvest and be harvested, and people's will constrained!
Q. What would an abnormal response be?
A. Re:LODE Radio suggests: "Fuck capitalism"?
Mark O'Connell's essay for the Guardian (Mon 13 Jan 2020) and referenced in George Monbiot's Opinion piece is headlined:
This essay coincidentallyevokes echoes of places along the LODE Line and LODE Line Zone, be it the Ireland where Mark O'Connell lives, or his friend fighting fires in Gippsland,Victoria, Australia. The essay ends with an empathetic consideration of the plight of refugees arrival, and removal, from the northern shores of Western Australia and the Northern Territories. Mark O'Connell writes:
Not so long ago, one of the reigning cliches around the subject of climate crisis was that it was a “looming catastrophe”. The situation was urgent, yes, and catastrophe was more or less imminent, but when people talked about it they mostly stuck to the future tense. It’s hard to identify the precise moment when the crisis moved from the horizon of popular imagination to the immediate foreground, but the spectacle in recent weeks of a continent in flames feels like a clear indication that the time of looming has ended and the catastrophe proper has commenced.
The other day I messaged an Australian friend, a volunteer firefighter in Melbourne who had spent the week between Christmas and new year in East Gippsland, where thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes. After informing me she was home and safe, and requesting that I arrange for some Irish rain to be redirected down there, she sent me a photo she had taken on the job: an image of a narrow dusty road leading toward low hills dotted with trees, behind which the sky itself was a vast inferno of dark smoke and glowing flame. I stared at her photo for a long time, and kept returning to it all that day.
There was something both bizarre and instructive about the image, the way in which the gentle bucolic scene in the foreground was juxtaposed surreally against the literally hellish sky behind it. It made me think of René Magritte’s Empire of Light series of paintings, in which scenes of a residential street at night are presided over by a bright, daylit sky.
It also made me think of what life is basically like now: a calm foreground with an inferno on the horizon. And it struck me that this would be a thing that would happen at the end of the world. People would point their phones at the fire in the sky, and they would send photos to their friends in other places. “This is what the apocalypse looks like here,” they would say. “How is it where you are?” There would be a great storm of content and engagement, and then there would be nothing at all.
One thing that is often remarked about climate crisis is that the subject is characterised by a strange form of cognitive dissonance. You read about the melting ice caps, the rising temperatures, the mass extinctions, and you understand intellectually that something truly terrible is happening. It doesn’t feel like that on the nerve endings, though. On the nerve endings, it feels like an unseasonably warm day in January. But what is happening in Australia, and the images that are emerging from the fires, feels like a closing of the gap between the scientific evidence and the field of immediate perception.
A little boy in a facemask in a small boat at sea, his hand on the outboard tiller, the sky behind him an incandescent haze. Two horses in silhouette against a burning forest. Crowds of masked people taking refuge on a beach. That same beach littered with the corpses of tropical birds. A kangaroo burned alive, trapped by a barbed wire fence. All these scenes suffused with a malignant red glow, as though put through an Instagram filter named “Inferno”. It looks like a film. It looks like a video game. It looks like what we have always imagined the end of the world would look like.
In East Gippsland, where my friend had been dispatched to fight the fires after Christmas, the situation was so severe that the government issued an emergency warning telling the remaining residents that it was too late to evacuate. “You are in danger,” read the warning, “and need to act immediately to survive.”
Here on the other side of the world, thousands of miles from the immediate peril of the fires, it’s impossible not to read this as a warning about the broader climate emergency. It’s the message we’ve been hearing from scientists and activists for decades.
And it is undoubtedly the message of those apocalyptic images from Australia, bathed in the crimson radiance of catastrophe. If God himself were to materialise and deliver this message, it could not be any clearer, any more urgent. You may recall, in fact, that it was by means of a burning bush that God announced it was time to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.
Yet the most disturbing thing about the images of the fires is not that they might signal the end of the world, but that they might signal how the world will continue. That we might just get used to large parts of the planet being on fire, and even larger parts of it being underwater. And more disturbing still, that we might harden our hearts against the people who live and die in the floods and the fires.
Because when I look at the images of those Australians crowded on the beaches, fleeing the smoke and the flames, there is a kind of double exposure effect, whereby I see the ghostly image of those other refugees who have come by boat to Australia from places where they were no longer safe, only to be held indefinitely and in appalling conditions on offshore detention facilities in the South Pacific. In the rest of the world, their suffering has been mostly ignored. These people know better than anyone what an apocalypse looks like.
It’s not the melting of the ice-caps or the burning of the forests that seem to me to be the real apocalyptic scenario, but rather the slow atrophying of our moral imaginations; not the inferno itself, but the indifference of those of us who are not yet on fire. In this sense above all we are in danger, and we need to act immediately to survive.
Mark O’Connell is a writer based in Dublin. His book Notes from an Apocalypse was published in April.
by Lauren Olyer for the Guardian Books of the day - Society books section (Wed 15 Apr 2020).
Re:LODE Radio considers that the framing of the present in terms of an Apocalypse, an"end of days", is not helpful in a crisis, andthe temptation to surrender to fateful circumstances is not practical. And surrender to an end is not a way to live from day to day, either with a full awareness of what is going on in the present, or taking "the ostrich position" of denying the reality. A reading of, and interpretation of the meaning of the word Apocalypse as an "uncovering", can be used in an active way to disclose something very important that was and is being hidden, and so in this case Greta Thunberg's demands for action and accountability includes an"uncovering".
“They
are still denying the fact and ignoring the fact that we are facing a
climate emergency, and the climate crisis has still not once been
treated as a crisis,”
“As long as the climate crisis is not being treated as a crisis, the changes that are necessary will not happen.”
George Monbiot's Opinion piece includes an image of a helicopter battling a wildfire in Khanty-Mansi, Siberia, July 2020.This too is an "uncovering", an invitation to "come and see", although in a virtual way, is an "uncovering" in no uncertain terms.
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