The "real progress" vs. "blah blah blah" debate is pointless.
The structures we have to pursue climate policy and diplomacy are incapable of delivering rapid and bold action.
Most of those working within them to deliver change are not to blame for the structures themselves.
There is no movement that can be built that is going to pressure those within these systems to move fast enough, in part because these systems are designed to facilitate delay.
Mass movement --> government action/international agreements --> an orderly transition won't happen.
An orderly transition is no longer on the table.
The climate movement — as currently conceived — has failed.
A movement designed to win an OT can't get one, and isn't designed to deliver what we need instead.
This should be a time of reinvention, disruption and fierce clarity.
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We need to do a much better job at communicating that all good climate futures now involve an absolute fuck-ton of new buildings and major infrastructure investments.
A giant building boom is what successful climate action looks like on the ground.
I mean, I'm a lifetime fan of electrification and demand reduction, and the one billion machines frame is great.
But decarbonizing energy is only one part of the job we face; ruggedizing ourselves will be a bigger and just as pressing task as cutting CO2. saulgriffith.medium.com/one-billion-ma…
Then in the U.S., there's rebuilding all the degraded systems around us, paying off technical debt and deferred maintenance, building out of the current housing shortage, preparing to accommodate millions of new refugees and welcoming 10s of millions of internal climate migrants.
I'm sorry to be impolitic, but, if — in 2021, as the biosphere unravels before our eyes — your call to action is for more dialogue between those seeking to prevent planetary catastrophe and those profiting from it, then YOU are part of the problem that needs to be fixed.
There is no middle ground between predatory delay and action at the pace demanded by the crisis we face.
There's fast enough, and too slow. That's all.
The idea that we should seek out that middle ground is itself a tactic of predatory delay.
So, too, is literally every other aspect of the planetary crisis.
Speed is everything.
Also, it's not just that actions become, of necessity, faster and more disruptive.
It's also that increasingly massive resources must be devoted to ruggedizing in the face of impacts, and ever-greater discontinuities shake society as people and institutions scramble to keep up.
Thinking tonight of the many 1000s of awesome, dedicated, tough (and often funny!) advocates for the human future on planet Earth I have met over 30 years of this work.
Bunch of fricking misfit geeks, wonks and rads —who may have actually staved off human extinction.
Respect.
Humanity owes a vast, unpayable debt to the good, kind people who transformed themselves thru love & commitment from unremarkable citizens, scientists, back-to-the-landers, artists, engineers, parents & professors into the thin edge of the wedge that may turned us from disaster.
Even today, we fail to understand what these folks did for us all, and our kids, and their kids, and generations stretching out into the vastness of time.
Noting that the structure of a human system inclines it with great probability to a certain set of outcomes is not prediction, but observation.
The systems we've created for climate politics, policy and diplomacy incline towards seriously insufficient near-term outcomes, and thus — because of the inevitability of action in response to ecological imperatives — to radically disruptive medium-term results.
Massive actions in response to the planetary crisis are not a matter of whether, but when.
When, however, changes dramatically what the nature of the actions taken ends up being.