“The world is perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius increase in temperature. Everybody, even the schoolchildren, knows this is a catastrophe for all of us.”
International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook report
My argument as a climate activist and in my last forty or so op-eds is that scientifically we are so obviously in extreme climate change danger that we should be in emergency mode; but our awareness of climate dangers and all our mitigation planning remain completely within - ideologically trapped within - business as usual (BAU): the present socio-economy in which we are all so fortunate to live.
Several years ago I postulated what I called society-wide denial : because we have been so slow to react and begin effective mitigation - because the economy and especially economic stability in our service sector dominated economies has been the prime focus of business and government - effective mitigation must now happen at a scale and pace that is not possible within, is not compatible with our present socio-economy. "We're stuck between temperatures we can't possibly accommodate and carbon reduction pathways we can't possibly achieve. A rock and a hard place." The default mode is BAU and so we are in denial and don't think or talk about real mitigation.
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