Thread by @sjmmcd

I’m seeing lots of enthusiasm for addressing climate change today. This is a delight. I'm also seeing lots of smart voices go right up to the edge of the big question: what do we Do?

But few or none are quite going over the edge and confronting the answers to that big all-important question…

That’s not to say people aren’t saying “Here’s what we do!” There are lots of prescriptions flying around. I’ve contributed to that deluge ineffectually. There’s no shortage of things we must Do..

We have to cut emissions in half in ten years, or five years, or by 60% by 2040, or something. We have to stop flying. We have to transition to renewable energy & hydrogen & biofuels & nuclear & Miracle Gas etc.

We have to stop eating meat. Degrow. We have to jail oil execs. We have to destroy capitalism and replace it with ecosocialism. We have to vacuum carbon dioxide molecules out of the sky with big hoover machines…

We have to impose a global carbon tax. We have to organize, mobilize, FIGHT. We have to replant forests and stop cutting them down. We have to keep it in the ground. Vote Democrat. We have to have fewer humans. We have to rebuild democracy. We must Act Now!

We have to do all that stuff. (Of course, as @DoctorVive points out, “we” is not a real thing; it’s not really helpful using the royal “we” here considering some people in that “we” have to do wildly different things from other people)

https://twitter.com/DoctorVive/status/1049318048342179840

These are all things that Society needs to do. Things that, from the panopticon of history, Humanity needs to do. But what does Humanity doing these things entail at the human scale? If the whole of our species does these things, what does that mean for us personally?

Here are a few implications of what these big actions entail, all these huge, unprecedented, vast movements that the whole species has to endeavor. What we have to Do is

We have to love far more fiercely. I don’t mean that in a stupid trite underpants advertisement kind of way. I mean it

More parents will have to love their children more intensely and selflessly than they do now. But more importantly than that, we have to love other peoples’ children more than we do now. We’ll have to take strangers into our homes, be willing to give our tax dollars to refugees

Have to be willing to go to meetings and show respect and deference and patience with others working on this issue, or demand those things more strongly, swallow our pride or expand it as the case may be, to love more selflessly and courageously

Have to be willing to waste a lot of our personal money and the public’s money on failed experiments, on technology that will never work, before we get one viable carbon sequestration project. We’ll have to blow our life savings on running for office or going back to school

We have to be willing to practice the heroic generosity of quitting our jobs to work on this fulltime or endure the discomfort of standing up on a stage and giving a speech. Some of us will have to go to jail, in an act of love and protection of those more vulnerable

We have to love the non-human world far more fiercely than we currently do. Everyday. Each of us. Love that ugly ass squirrel with half a tail eating your precious birdfeed or the pesky trash pandas pilfering your whatever

We also have to hate more fiercely. There are men who are rapists and murderers, who want us and our children to die painful deaths, who want all life to die, solely so they can jerk off into a jacuzzi in space

We have to hate these men commensurate with their evil. We have to take everything they have away from them--you and me--and we have to do so with state action or other means. Being motivated to do that means pouring our rage into the world, and suffering the pain of doing so

We have to personally shore up our own power and influence if we’re going to see these huge institutions and trillion-dollar budgets nudged toward decarbonization

We, personally, in our lives, are going to have to be ambitious, reshaping our personal behavior to be more charismatic, or Machiavellian, or ruthless, or charming, or whatever, to get this agenda represented in halls of power

We have to learn a lot of new ideas, give up notions we thought we understood, pour our time into mastering some new knowledge or skill, stretch our own personal, individual talents and abilities to their limits

As @GeorgeMonbiot has pointed out, we have to be embarrassed and embarrassing. We must continually talk about this issue, have to share our innermost feelings about it, build intimacy with other people, build camaraderie with strangers around it

This was never going to be easy. People with good intentions have told us it only requires some simple tweaks here and there. It’s won’t. Our generations alive now will, whether by mitigating or not, suffer major upheavals in our lives, challenges we have to live up to

I’ve only done some of this stuff because it’s fucking hard. Many others have done more, given more. Many haven’t given nearly enough. But hey, we’ve got each other to make it a little easier…

…Easier to let the climate crisis change our lives in fundamental ways, by our own agency, lest it change them in far uglier, more horrendous ways, by some tyrant’s agency.