Content warning: Climate catastrophe and direct action
Earth's futures can be divided into two categories: futures which support human life and those that don't.
The IPCC reports have avoided framing things this way, but burn enough fossil fuels quickly enough and you tip over into the later.
Note that this logic applies to any sub-region of the Earth too: some unknown number of years ago, thanks to ExxonMobil's sales of oil and duplicity about the known risks, the tipping point into "unlivable future" was crossed with respect to a segment of the Trishuli river in Nepal, and just this year that future was realized quite suddenly. In individual apartments across North America and Europe this summer thousands of people found themselves in unlivable futures due to heat waves, and millions more avoided that fate narrowly through the use of air conditioning which could well fail in future heat waves...
What the IPCC reports have been detailing for literally more than three decades is what it would take to tip things the other way. They report this in various forms, but usually at the level of how much CO2 emissions can be permitted on what schedule in order to prevent (locally-)unlivable futures (abstracted as a number of degrees of warming relative to a baseline).
The IPCC reports of emissions and mitigations can be translated into actions: what kind of policy would have to be enacted when by which government in order to avoid an unlivable future. In general however, hierarchical nation-states have proven collectively incapable of meeting *any* of these targets, and so indeed, translating emissions targets into policy actions is increasingly impossible, and has always been an improbable path towards survival. The longer nation states fail to meet the necessary emissions goals (or even accelerate oil drilling), the more drastic action is necessary. We can continue to talk about what kind of national policies might avoid unlivable futures, even as those futures are realized for more and more people, but national policies are not the only kinds of actions that can change the future. Fire example, a national policy shutting down an oil pipeline might avert a certain amount of emissions, but the pipeline owner could also shut it down themselves, or an activist could sabotage it, and the effect would be the same. Lots of different actors have different kinds of actions they can take to create similar effects, and it's the effects that are necessary to avoid unlivable futures.
Effectively, assuming that we will not wind up in a totally unlivable future, this leads to a principle of action substitution. We know what effects are necessary, and if nation states refuse to enact those via policies and companies likewise refuse to make any voluntary changes, then the only actions that remain to be taken are drastic direct actions. Simply put: the longer nations and corporations refuse to do anything to create livable futures, the more people will simply take direct action to achieve the needed carbon emissions reductions, because the alternative for them is death and that alternative is becoming clearer with each climate casualty, so it will be increasingly impossible to threaten them into giving up their lives for corporate profits.
#ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency
@cdarwin@c.im
