Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

A short thread on some of the challenges we face.

1. Climate and ecological breakdown are now imminent and probable. Crucial Earth systems are approaching tipping points from which there is no return.

2. Nuclear war looks once more like a realistic prospect. As Vladimir Putin becomes bogged down in Ukraine, and if he starts to lose public support in Russia, he could be tempted to take the obvious short cut.

3. In combination with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, contagious export restrictions and systemic fragility, the impacts of 1. could push world food prices so high this year that the number of undernourished people might rise by hundreds of millions.

4. Inequality, and the perverse politics of austerity that reinforce it, have become so extreme in some countries that, even as billionaires greatly increase their wealth, many people face destitution.

5. Oligarchic power – the disproportionate political influence of billionaires and multi-millionaires – is now so embedded in many nations that it threatens to destroy democracy.

6. This power is used to confuse, distract and mislead us about challenges 1, 3, 4 and 5, ensuring that we neither see them clearly nor act on them. This leads to challenge 7, the greatest challenge of all.

7. Even as we face this astonishing series of existential crises, vast numbers of people appear to be blithely unaware of them, or at least to act as if they are. We focus on anything except the issues we should attend to. We live in a dream.

We cannot hope to survive challenges 1-6 unless we can resolve challenge 7.
So what you do here, and in all the other conversations you have, counts for something. It might even count for everything.