Thread by @leashless

Hard to explain it to people: since 2002 I've been working flat out, as hard as a human can, to pre-position food, shelter, housing, and water for the hundreds of millions of people that climate change inevitably displaces later this century.

Even @mattereum serves this cause.

Even now people are in super deep denial about how hard climate change is going to hit the world. They're still thinking "songbirds migrate away" not "a holocaust of global famine that hits subsistence farmers hardest of all."

CO2 is still through the roof. Hard landing approach

myhopeforthe.world lays out the plan: housing, then water purification, cooking. Right now, in the background, I'm working on refugee clothing and beds. Cooking I figured out mostly years back. Housing, the hexayurt, thrives. Resiliencemaps.org is totally transformative

Where does @Mattereum fit in? That's the aid tracking solution: Asset Passport the aid supply chain, and *prove* that people will get what they need to survive out of the aid system: no gaps, and no slack! Lives are at stake.

Let me tell you something that you aren't gonna like.

This long project has no friends.

Nobody, and I mean *nobody* gives a fuck about long term planning for massive numbers of refugees. Not aid agencies, not the UN, not (really) the military. You say "in 20 years..." and people stop listening.

And there's some active sabotage too

This climate genocide thing is no joke: almost everybody that dies from climate change will be brown or black people from hot, poor countries.

They caused very climate change, mostly too poor to afford much fossil fuel use: innocent victims, killed by a plenty they never reached

There is no hope for policy change to avert this disaster: the voters in democracies will not vote for the necessary changes, and the autocracies are all running in fear from their citizen's potential for revolution in the face of climate change and the cost of poverty.

We are going to slam into this fucking thing basically full force with our foot still on the carbon pedal. Global net zero will arrive so much too late, it's going to look like a Seinfeld sketch. It's going to look like US Covid statistics.

It's going to be a *car crash* people.

We'll get the solar panels and clean meat and all the rest of it, this huge technological push towards zero carbon better living circumstance, *after* we've locked in a genuinely horrific scenario for most poor people, forced to survive on land that stopped working last drought.

Here's the key number to watch: CO2 per dollar of GDP. Look at this carefully: data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.A…

The line needs to hit zero *now* and, ideally, go negative. That's what "regenerative economy" means: economic activity which soaks up CO2 changes the climate back.

0 by 2050?

The current transformation of data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.A… is *so slow* that there is basically zero chance we are going to avoid catastrophic warming. How catastrophic?

It'll hit the poorest hardest. Everything after that is a question for the scientists. But *bad*. Really bad.

So, understand: cheaper solar means we will *inevitably* decarbonize the economy (see Ramez Naam). Batteries too. But it's 99% likely too late to prevent a genocide-level blow for the poor people of color, living on farms, growing most of their own food.

ourworldindata.org/battery-price-…

If you are a subsistence farmer, you are 100% dependent on the rain and the seasons coming on time: you have to plant in spring, and cold after spring starts kills your crops. Rain, rain must fall when it usually does or the crops die in the fields.

They didn't cause the warming

And they are going to get hit *so* hard in most scenarios. They're just going to get hammered.

Of course it won't just be them: winter grid failures due to superstorms could be quite unpleasant in America, never mind fires. But it's the famine caused by shifting rainfall I fear.

You say "but what can we do?" and I'll tell you this: prepare for a gigantic humanitarian evacuation of entire countries where the rain no longer falls: hundreds of millions of people on the move

Migration on a scale never before seen or imagined, a Biblical event. Already begun

But we do get the technology to decarbonize the global economy pretty quickly. No doubt that coal, oil etc. are obsolete and being made uneconomic very fast by the ultra cheap solar panels. But we still need to manage other resource use to get to true efficiency.

Mixed scenario.

The biggest single win left on the table is clean meat: get the animals OUT of agriculture, and turn over most of the land which currently goes to livestock back to forest.

Plant things to soak carbon everywhere cows were, broadly speaking. Also a lot of food.

Clean meat RULES.

This is not a counsel of "no hope" - the faster we stop burning coal, oil and gas, the fewer people die.

The better we are at rehousing, and emergency food logistics, the fewer people die.

There's no doubt that solar etc. win in the end: the grid will be green.

But tough times

Our behavior now controls how bad the climate genocide event is. It doesn't have to kill a single person.

But from where we are now, every single step forwards sustainability is saving someone's life.

it's about handling the terrible climate overshoot, and that starts with us.