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The end of 2025 must be the end of the inane rule of climate ‘optimism’ | The world missed its opportunity to prevent climate change. We need to focus our resources on adapting to it. (www.resilience.org)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net to c/climate@slrpnk.net

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We were supposed to have gone net zero by now: that was XR’s central demand, when we formed it, seven years ago. Can we all please at last acknowledge and take seriously the utter failure to do so? Only such acknowledgement will prevent us from continuing collectively to basically ignore the increasingly pressing need to actually focus resources on a strategy beginning with climate adaptation. We should admit that widely-mandated climate optimism has been actively harmful to the needful acknowledgement of reality – and to the active collective self-protection that we now desperately need to get serious about making happen.

[...]

Here at the end of 2025, we are already living with the consequences of delay. Flooding, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires are no longer rare events; they are becoming features of normal life. And in some cases – look at California, or Sri Lanka, or (closer to home) at the many floodplains that have been and will be built on – the consequences of their not being taken seriously enough as our new never-normal have been deeply disastrous, or indeed very deadly. The idea that we can still prevent at source very serious damage is an illusion. What we can do is reduce harm, protect the most vulnerable and adapt in ways that for starters do not worsen the problem.

This is the moment to prioritise resilience at every level — from reinforcing critical infrastructure to strengthening the social fabric of communities on the frontline of climate impacts, from learning from how global South frontline communities have already been practising transformative adaptation to shared inner work turning climate despair into climate courage.

I'm not sure how much I agree with this, but I certainly found it thought-provoking.

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[–] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What do you disagree with? Seems like it's just acknowledging the reality of where we are heading.

[–] stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net 11 points 1 day ago

I think it underestimates the value of climate mitigation. A focus on reducing emissions may not save us from a 3 degree world - and a 5 degree world after that, and a 10 degree world after that - but it could delay those milestones and give us more time to adapt. For example, I think a 40-foot rise in sea level is inevitable in the next few centuries - even a two degree rise guarantees both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melt - but delaying that 40-foot rise from 2080 to 2150 makes a huge difference in our ability to prepare for it and in the lives of people living in the flood zone now.

I also think climate change is a symptom of the underlying disease of capitalism/technofeudalism. Local and community resilience efforts treat the symptom but leave the disease free to run rampant in new and horrible ways.

(Imagine: a city puts in battery backup in case of grid failure, but the megacorp manufacturing the batteries forces them to use its proprietary software and pay service fees, and when the grid goes down the megacorp hits the city with millions in extra fees and threatens to turn off the power if they don't pay.)

[–] matsdis@piefed.social 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not the person you asked, but my critique would be: It moves the focus away from decarbonization towards solving very obvious local short-term problems. A move to gain credibility/popularity in the public eye, instead of pushing for long-time measures that have a globally distributed effect. Aka "there is no glory in prevention".

That said, I know it's easy to critique like I did without being directly involved. Perhaps the idea is to then use this new political capital to push for those measures again. It may be a smart move, and it will certainly be a good thing to push for adaptation measures locally anyway, before everyone can finally agree that they are needed. But it does feel like giving up on the cost-effective but unpopular decarbonization.

[–] stabby_cicada@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That's actually a part I don't disagree with. Local short-term problems still do need to be solved. They are the symptoms of the underlying disease that is the global capitalist economy, and we have to fight the disease instead of just fighting the symptoms - but if you don't treat the symptoms, you might end up dying before you can treat the disease.

And, also, the personal is political. People will see the impacts of climate change on their communities, and people will commit the time and effort to adapt to those impacts locally, and that will make people more willing to vote for the national and global collective action we need even more badly.

Credibility and popularity are necessary. Getting people involved and committed on the local level is the first step to getting people involved and committed on the global level.

If climate leaders lead people in that transition instead of stopping at the local level and saying "hey, we rented some solar panels from this fossil fuel megacorp that branched out into solar power, everything's good now, go back to consuming as usual".