A crazy(making) time to be alive

I grew up in the shadow of the bomb – when I was eight or nine I was worried about the neutron bomb. The shooting down of KAL007 had a profound effect on me (and we now know that that period – late 1983 through to mid 1984 – was when we came pretty close to a nuclear war). And with the receding of that threat, in the second half of the 1980s, we then got the longer, slower, but surer threat of “the Greenhouse Effect”. I remember reading a letter in a magazine (either Greenpeace or ‘Green Left Weekly’) in mid-1991 that said “yeah, look, really, who believes we as a species are smart enough, able to collaborate across boundaries and generations to address this? Anyone? If not, then you think we’re doomed.”

I’ve thought we’re doomed ever since. I remember saying it in 1991 in Santa Cruz. I remember saying it in 1995 in Benguela. And yet, I remember being startled by other people saying it in 1996/7. That’s how it goes, I guess? You can believe it intellectually, but then discount the emotions because you’re worried you biography has set you up for being drenched in fear.

I collected clippings of climate change from newspapers. I still have the folder somewhere. From about 2000 to 2005. My favourite ones were when scientists said “the changes aren’t just happening faster than we thought we would; they’re happening faster than we thought that they could happen.” Turns out, the models are small-c conservative. They have to be.

I got involved in “Camp for Climate Action,” for a year. I set up Manchester Climate Forum, then Manchester Climate Fortnightly (later Monthly). I saw the activism rise and fall, twice. I saw very few people learning any lessons at all. I saw many people burn themselves and each other out, for no effect.

I did a PhD that ended up being about how incumbent interests in Australia combined to resist carbon pricing between 1989 and 2012. I continued to write, to blog, to try to help individuals and groups see just how hard it is to create and maintain a functioning group (on any subject I suspect, but most especially on climate change). I failed in this, for many reasons, only some (half?) of them my fault.

I, I, I, I. There’s an occasional column in Private Eye that this blog could be entered for…

This, then. This is a very very weird moment. Five years after the Extinction Rebellion thing, and with Just Stop Oil having done what it could, and 2023 acting in the same way that 2018 did, in terms of extreme weather events, we’re in this weird weird place.

You won’t really find any scientists who will say “yeah, it will be fine. A bit of technology, a bit of behaviour change, the situation will stabilise.” You used to hear these people. That doesn’t mean all of the scientists have gone full doomer, at least not in public.

You get billionaires coming out in disgust at Rishi Sunak, writing in the Times that

“The environmental apocalypse is coming and it’s coming very, very rapidly. I am very worried about the future … [although] it won’t affect me because I’ll be long dead and buried.””

(I’ll come back to his timeline later).

It’s a bit like the Leonard Cohen song

“Everybody knows the boat is sinking…”

And yet, because there is still water coming out of the taps, and food on the supermarket shelves, it feels unreal. The future has both arrived and smacked us in the face, while at the same time, seeming completely unreal, just an artefact in your Twitter scrolling. Schrodinger’s future?

It’s that intellectual/emotional knowledge split, isn’t it? In the absence of functioning social movement organisations, which provide emotional and cognitive scaffolding/”stickiness” it seems impossible (for me at least) to really stick with it. (That’s not to say I don’t believe, or I don’t try to help others orientate themselves – see all our yesterdays, if you don’t already know it).

So we ‘know’. Most people ‘know’. Will we deny again? If the next two years aren’t as batshit crazy as the last two (but, you know, El Nino), will we see a retreat from this? Even if we do, it won’t be for long. Something’s clearly changing very quickly (at last!) in the system.
The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold, and it’s overturned the order of the soul, I guess.

The system is flickering. That will be how the light gets in, I guess.

Back to that guy’s timeline. He’s 70. Presumably he’s in good health and has access to the very best in medicine. He could reasonably expect to live another fifteen years.

I for one think he will see as much of the apocalypse as he could possibly want.