Climate change is a global emergency. Stop waiting for politicians to sound the alarm | Naomi Klein | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Climate change is a global emergency. Stop waiting for politicians to sound the alarm | Naomi Klein | Comment is free | theguardian.com

Only when we urgently acknowledge that we are facing a genuine crisis will it become possible to enact the kinds of bold policies and mobilize the economic resources we need. Only then will the world have a chance to avert catastrophic warming.

It’s not simply that our leaders aren’t leading us – at an appropriate gallop – away from fossil fuels and towards the renewable energy revolution that is both technologically and economically feasible.

... Surrounded by such wild contradictions, most of us perform all sorts of mental tricks to try to reconcile the irreconcilable. Those scientists and environmentalists must be exaggerating, we tell ourselves. Or there must be more time before we
really need to change. Or maybe: the experts are just on the verge of figuring out a techno-fix. But does anyone really believe these fairy tales?

Sunday’s climate march will serve many purposes for its many participants: meet up, boost morale, exert political pressure. But sounding the alarm together will help us bring our actions in line with our emotions. So many of us are scared of what is happening to the world around us; for one day, we will come together and show it. Yes, we will be showing that sense of existential urgency to our politicians. But we will be showing one another.

The true leaders are not the ones who will show up at the United Nations next week in motorcades. The true leaders are the people next to us in the streets: the people who already achieved, and are fighting to defend, a moratorium against natural gas fracking in New York state. The Indigenous communities using their hard-won land rights to try to stop the suicidal expansion of the Alberta tar sands in Canadian court. The grassroots environmental justice groups in New York City that have been fighting the siting of toxic refineries and incinerators in the neighbourhoods for decades. And the students who have been demanding that their universities divest their endowments from fossil-fuel stocks, on the grounds that such businesses have made an immoral bet against all of our futures.

...
Naming climate change as a clear and present danger is not a solution in itself, of course. But it is the critical first step. Forcefully expressing our collective sense of urgency will help us resist the next attempt to tell us that some manufactured economic imperative is more important than the stability of the planet – whether it’s the supposed need for more government austerity, or the need to grow the economy at any cost. That sustained sense of urgency will allow us to demand the kinds of bold action required to get off fossil fuels, and move to a regenerative economy, in the brief window we have left.