How’s THAT for a click-bait headline, (albeit circa 2014)?
You’re unlikely to read to the end of this, so I’ll spit out the tl;dr – It’s hubris, or pride, or arrogance, whatever you want to call it.
Of COURSE it is also the wildly successful disinformation and delay campaigns run by the oil companies and their meat puppets in the think tanks, the ‘news’rooms, the legislatures and the universities. Of course it is. Their entrenched political, economic,cultural and when-push-comes-to-shove physical (military) power is enormous. Everyone has a transition plan until they get punched in the face etc.
But those guys didn’t have the numbers, they didn’t have the facts, so they had to come up with alternative facts.
But what brought us to THIS point, in mid-2023? Because now it is serious; the climate disasters are not merely drowning and burning brown and black people who come from countries we couldn’t point to on a map and couldn’t care about even to save our own lives. The apocalypse isn’t smacking its lips in places and peoples who we only interact with when metals and textile and food from those places turns up in our gadgets, our wardrobes and our plates.
No, now the climate catastrophes are properly affecting important people, who have some moral weight. People like US, with the same skin, the same language, the same assumptions. Who could BE us. Oh, the horror.
What brought us here? What keeps us stuck here?
Lots of things. The above mentioned disinformation campaigns, which have – as long predicted – moved from outright denial (though there’s still some of that) to predatory delay, to pointing to the costs of the “transition” to net zero (while never, curiously, talking about the costs of not acting).
There’s the sense of helplessness. If you had a spare billion, or spare time, where would you ”invest” it? It’s all gotten out of hand now.
There’s inertia – it’s much easier to keep on (not) doing the same things you did before.
But most of all, this is about pride. If you’re asking people to see what is unfolding, you are asking them to admit that on the single most important issue ever in the history of our species, they were wrong, and that they have been consistently and persistently wrong for 30 years. They prevaricated, they self-censored, they fell in love with or peddled fantasy policies and fantasy technologies, while all the while the carbon accumulated. They stayed within the rules of their tribe (be it political, cultural, academic whatever) because the tribe – even wrong (perhaps especially when wrong) – must be respected and feared. The tribe is the final arbiter of your worth, your comfort, your future.
“Yeah, I wasted my time and other people’s attention with that carbon trading scheme”
“Yeah, I spent my life cheerleading for ethical consumerism”
“Yeah, I kept organising marches.”
And so on.
But we don’t REFLECT on this stuff. Learn from it. There’s a quote I just stumbled on that Imma try out on you. It’s by RH Tawney, who was an interesting chap.
Men may genuinely sympathise with the demand for a radical change. They may be conscious of social evils and sincerely anxious to remove them. They may set up a new department, and appoint new officials, and invent a new name to express their resolution to effect something more drastic than reform, and less disturbing than revolution. but unless they will take the pains, not only to act, but to reflect, they end by effecting nothing.
And hardly anyone is – for understandable reasons – willing to get a little crazy and therefore, no, we’re never gonna survive.
But we were never going to and it’s all about the carpeting of the diems.
marchudson.net 
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