The climate goals are dead. The only way this planet stays below +2°C (or simply +2K) warming is if we can somehow artificially cool it with aerosol injection, and if we suddenly stop putting aerosols into our atmosphere, global warming will simply resume, so unless we can somehow remove a hilarious mass of carbon from our atmosphere, it will get hot no matter what.
However, that doesn't mean that we can just let reactionary politicians (including Merz and much of the current German government) decide that we can just keep going on as before, since we're not going to keep below the +2K line anyway. Every tonne of unburnt carbon matters, every tonne of carbon sequestered in the soil as biochar matters. But what also matters is that we stop looking at the #polycrisis as just a bunch of separate problems, we need to be aware of the whole shape and size of the monster instead of just looking at a single limb. If some alleged technological solution to climate change puts too much additional stress on already badly damaged natural systems (like ecosystems or biogeochemical cycles), it is not a viable solution because the climate isn't the only natural system we have been destabilising over the past few centuries since the steam engines changed everything. Every proposal for a solution to any component of the polycrisis must consider the whole picture, must take into account how it will affect the other component crises. We can't treat the economic woes caused by running into the global growth limits at full speed, the ongoing #BiodiversityCrisis aka the #SixthExtinction, the growing weather weirdness due to #GlobalWarming, the ecological troubles with #microplastics and with agricultural and industrial synthetic toxins killing all kinds of lifeforms, as separate problems that need separate solutions, but as symptoms of the sickness which is killing our entire civilisation.
We need to be prepared for things to fall apart faster than we can repair them. We need to understand that our high-tech civilisation has quite likely peaked already, and whether it slowly declines (leaving room for the birth of future civilisations that are radically sustainable right from the beginning) or whether it rapidly collapses, leaving the survivors (if any) on a planet utterly incapable of supporting complex civilisations for tens of thousands of years, maybe even a million years or more, depends on how fast we can stop this madness.
And the first thing we must stop is the global economy. It cannot grow anymore, it can only shrink, and now it needs to shrink as fast as possible until it gets small enough to be sustainable. I'm talking about the real economy, of course, not the one measured in money but the one measured in how much energy and raw materials it needs to process, and how much entropy it dumps onto the living world to swallow. It just can't stay at its current size; shrinking to a bit under half its current size won't be enough to make it sustainable, but unless it does, it simply cannot ever become sustainable. Growth is over, and the longer the economy even stays at its current size, the worse every part of the polycrisis gets. Market-based economies can't work properly unless they are growing, which means that we need a different type of economy, one that distributes resources according to the needs of the people instead of according to the numbers on their bank accounts.
Seriously, people, we need to get ready to switch to survival mode, but not like all those right-wing preppers who think that we need to fight one another for the last remaining resources, that kind of thinking leads straight into a #MadMax scenario. No, we need to switch into survival mode by helping one another so that as many as possible of us make it. If by the end of this century there are 4 billion humans left alive, it will be horrible, but it would be enough of us to build a halfway decent new world out of the rubble of the old one. If less than a billion are alive by then, there won't be enough gardeners to help all those damaged ecosystems heal. We won't need any fancy machines to fix this planet, we just need a lot of capable gardeners with rakes and shovels, we need capable foresters who can keep the forests alive by slowly replacing tree species that can't thrive under the new climate with others that can. We will most likely lose at least 50% of all the species that live today, but as highly intelligent omnivores, our chances of survival as a biological species is pretty high, even if many of us won't make it. If we let the biodiversity loss escalate any further, we will eventually hit a point where this planet loses 80% or more of its species, and in that case we'll go extinct because we're too big and heavy to survive something like that. Mammals will most likely still survive, but I don't think primates will. We need to dismantle Capitalism before it kills us all.
#πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #climatecrisis
