The existential matter of the climate crisis
When an aggressor seriously threatens the lives of loved ones we can enact a non-violent revolution, seeking resolution.
We can fight.
Doing nothing is not a viable option.
Yet here we are as humanity, where 100 companies are responsible for 70% of our global emissions, where the Trumps, Bolsonaro’s and Morrisons of the world are leveraging their own form of climate barbarism towards self-interest.
The threat is bigger than any one nation. It demands unification of response. In the positive it may be the trigger that forces nations to collaborate as one world, one Spaceship Earth.
As Bucky Fuller said in around 1930, if we consider the all-in-cost of a barrel of oil, the cost for Earth to make it, for humans to find, extract, refine and use it, and then the post-use cost, there is no one on the planet who could afford a single barrel of oil. We would eventually need to pay the after-tax of our failure to account for the full cost.
This after-tax is becoming due. Many, particularly those who have made the least contribution towards the climate breakdown, are paying now. Our children will continue to pay. No one will escape. The after-tax will be exponentially greater than the financial profit made by those who have gained unprecedented wealth and power from their exploitation of humanity’s future.
We have an existential threat that is greater than any humanity has faced to date.
Yet the old guard of human dinosaurs insists that we throw humanity, our beautiful home planet, into the chapters of history that speak to the absolute incompetence of their leadership.
We turn instead to the steady clear voice of those who will pay the biggest price.
The young, the displaced, those who are at the effects of 75 years of neoliberal economics and thousands of years of colonisation and exploitation.
There is a revolution in play that threatens the very existence of the old guard and the systems they designed to befit the few off the backs of the many.
It is little wonder the old guard is lashing out at those whom they didn’t see as having any power, any value, any authority – helpless in the face of the new game that speaks steady, true, and without artifice – unable to be silenced, for a world that benefits all, and not just the few.
Our modern-day dinosaurs are beginning to get that the game is up, and that they are the fossils in our global ecology.
It is our time to be active, to speak, to change habits, to insist on the kind of leadership that effects radical, seemingly impossible change against the biggest threat we have faced. No longer a question of affordability, technology or time.
The time is now, and today, if we act, the price will be less than if we wait for tomorrow.
October 5th 2019
Photo taken October 5th, 2019
