The Climate Crisis Is Our Third World War. It Needs a Bold Response

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with climate change and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.

We need World War Two-like mobilization to confront climate change. 

Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.

Yes, we can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. The climate emergency is our third world war. Our lives and civilization as we know it are at stake, just as they were in the second world war.

Read the story from The Guardian by Joseph Stiglitz - “The Climate Crisis Is Our Third World War. It Needs a Bold Response.”

The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response

Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.

 ‘The war on the climate emergency, if correctly
waged, would actually be good for the economy’

Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.

Yes, we can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. The climate emergency is our third world war. Our lives and civilization as we know it are at stake, just as they were in the second world war.

Read the story from The Guardian by Joseph Stiglitz - “The climate crisis is our third world war. It needs a bold response.”

The Geoengineering Fallacy

Geoengineering technologies are not yet deployable globally, but support for them is advancing fast, thanks to backing by powerful advocates eager to start experiments. But no silver bullet for climate change exists, and we must not abandon proven methods for the sake of a promise that one will be found.

BERLIN – As the world struggles to rein in emissions of climate-changing gases and limit planetary warming, a new technological silver bullet is gaining supporters. Geoengineering –the large-scale manipulation of the Earth’s natural systems – has been popularized as a means of counteracting the negative effects of climate change.

Proponents of this science feed the illusion that there is a way to engineer an exit from the climate crisis, meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and maintain a consumption-heavy lifestyle.

Read the Project Syndicate story by Barbara Unmüßig - “The Geoengineering Fallacy.”

The fact that the world is poorly prepared is not surprising

Findings that the world is poorly prepared for climate change are far from surprising, well not at least for those advocating that the world take action.

Climate change itself will be a surprise to many for while the reality of what we are doing to earth’s atmosphere has been clearly spelt out by the world’s scientists for more than a decade now, few people have been listening.

Not only have they not been listening, but most, it seems, thought it was a distant problem of little concern to them and about which they could do little.

The idea of doing little was discussed by Tatura’s Terry Court just last week at a climate change/community health forum Shepparton at which he quoted the Irish author, philosopher and statesman, Edmund Burke who said: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little”.

However, doing what little he can, environmental editor with The Age, Tom Arup, has alerted that newspaper’s readers to the fact that “Climate change is here and the world is taking a turn for the worse”.

In discussing the prognosis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Arup wrote, “It will be a less certain and more dangerous world, particularly for the world’s poor. Nor one we should look forward to.”