Unimagined, unforeseen difficulties demand dramatic, innovative and imaginative response

by Robert McLean

Hitherto unimagined and unforeseen difficulties demand an equally dramatic, innovative and imaginative response.

Climate change has become even more vigorous, more vivid and has maybe reached a measurable tipping point taking the world, and particularly humanity into unexplored territory.

The ultimate outcome of war - death and
destruction. An inevitable result of climate
change unless the people can again take
control of the levers of social change.

From here on in, it is like we are speeding down a busy highway, blindfolded with little more than hope to ensure we avoid crashing.

So continuing with “business as usual” was have realised the fears of many scientists, including those of Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty, who wrote four years ago about his concerns that we would be forced into a “fire engine” mode to counter some major, and perhaps irreversible global disaster.

Well, all the numbers suggest that the feared “fire engine” mode, that need for a global and sweeping response to our inattention and willful ignorance, or is it “rational ignorance?”,  has arrived.

Two questions immediately come into focus – what and how?

The first question is probably not the most critical as it revolves around our energy use and consumptive habits, but the second question of how we go about changing those behaviours, holding on to what we enjoy about modernity and along with that preserving our civility and decency is probably the most complex and perplexing of the dilemmas.

More than a decade ago, Richard Heinberg wrote about the party being over and although his book, “The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies” now populates the remainder tables, it was rather prescient.

So how do we wean humanity off gift-rich, party-like atmosphere of the fossil fuel era without a collapse in social disarray?

Unsure, but it will take hitherto unseen leadership embedded in a charisma and with an urgency that swept the world as it gathered resources in the late 1930s in preparation for what was to become World War Two.

It is a sad but necessary comparison for war is about destruction and our attempts to mitigate and adapt to climate change are quite the reverse for this is about the bonding of humanity, it is about having a common goal, it is about the realization that unless we work together, collaborate and share our resources then as Heinberg said early this century, “the party’s over”.

Sadly, those who have profited most from this uninhibited fossil-fuelled party have control of society’s levers of change and until they either surrender that control (unlikely) or conditions on earth become such that they lose control, then we are destined for damnable difficult times.

Time is remarkably short, there is a pressing urgency about addressing the advance of climate change and I have no resort other than optimism – the hope that what I sense is a growing movement among people that will demand, irresistibly, that the “business-as-usual brigade” change its behaviour and put the welfare of the planet ahead of profit.

I hope that happens and I hope that happens quickly for we are now deep in what has been described by many as the “critical decade”.