Canada is burning down and American cities are choking on the smoke. The arctic ice-cap is now beyond the point of no return. There have been record heat-waves in Asia, getting us close to Ministry for the Future territory. Phoenix, Arizona has banned new construction because it is running out of water (bringing to mind another cli-fi novel, The Water Knife). And globally, we've almost burned through the carbon budget which would give us only a 50-50 chance of staying under 1.5 degrees of temperature rise:
The world is rapidly running out of “carbon budget”, the amount of carbon dioxide that can be poured into the atmosphere if we are to stay within the vital threshold of 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, according to a study published in the journal Earth System Science Data on Thursday.And meanwhile, what is our government doing? Gutting the ETS and sabotaging its own clean-car policy because it might actually be effective and change things (and meanwhile, our opposition is full of climate deniers and shows every sign of wanting to do even less, while their radical vandal farmer base are explicitly calling for the repeal of all climate policy, as if you don't need a stable climate to farm...)Only about 250bn tonnes of carbon dioxide can now be emitted, to avoid the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere that would raise temperatures by 1.5C. That is down from 500bn tonnes just a few years ago, and at current annual rates of greenhouse gas emissions, of about 54bn tonnes a year over the past decade, it would run out well before the end of this decade.
This isn't good enough. We have an actual crisis, and our political class is so beholden to the status quo that they are - at best - sleepwalking and foot-dragging us to disaster (and some of them are trying to push us headlong into it). Can we have a government which isn't actually trying to murder us all please?
