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Posted
2 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

#teamgaia #reapsow

This climate thing is just too hard

Quote

To our north, the former central banker Mark Carney — whose 2015 warnings about the financial risks from climate change helped set the stage for Paris by alarming the world’s banking elite — became prime minister of Canada in March and as his very first act in office struck down the country’s carbon tax, before storming to a landslide victory in the April election.

To our south, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a former climate scientist, has invoked the principle of “energy sovereignty” and boasted of booming oil and gas production in her country — and enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any elected leader anywhere in the world.

Almost everywhere you look, the spike of climate alarm that followed Paris has given way to something its supporters might describe as climate moderation but which critics would call complacency or indifference. “You can’t walk more than two feet at any global conference today without ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ being thrown around as the order of the day,” says Jason Bordoff, a former Obama energy adviser who now runs Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “But it’s not clear to me that anyone knows what those words mean other than this whole climate thing is just too hard.”

 

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Posted
Just now, Vegas64 said:

This climate thing is just too hard

 

It is hard. And we are not up to the task as a society. We have individuals and groups that could do it. But when you bring us all together as a species, we can’t do it. Oh well. 

Posted (edited)
8 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

It is hard. And we are not up to the task as a society. We have individuals and groups that could do it. But when you bring us all together as a species, we can’t do it. Oh well. 

This is an interesting read. At one point we did rally together as a globe. The article seems to suggest Climate as happy coming together of countries was actually the result of being bored and in-between a generational, purposeful war:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/magazine/climate-politics-us-world-paris-agreement.html

Quote

 

By any simple measure, the treaty looked like a breakthrough — in a representative tribute, The Guardian called it “the world’s greatest diplomatic success.” But frustrated advocates were still filled with rage, sure that not enough was being done and armed with the scientific reports to prove it. Remarkably, the world’s leadership class mostly embraced the critique, inviting activists on stage at Davos and the U.N. General Assembly in performances of collective self-laceration designed, it seemed, to inspire yet more climate concern. What is perversely striking today is that those years do not look now like a low point for political commitment to climate action but the opposite — at least when it comes to rhetoric, which is, of course, free.

At the time, trying to raise concern about warming, I found myself again and again in conversation with world leaders of one kind or another — presidents and prime ministers, treasury secretaries and environmental ministers and climate diplomats, among others. Most were a bit less alarmed than I was and a bit more mindful of the obstacles to a rapid transition. But in those conversations and in public speeches and commentary, their concern was nevertheless palpable. In fact, they were often proud to showcase it as a totem of good faith, and to invoke the ambitious Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees — which many scientists had already concluded was a lost cause — as a necessary objective.

It helped that climate activism in the aftermath of Paris — Fridays for Future and the climate strikers, Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise — looked like a generational uprising, made more intense, of course, by the new powers of social media. Even those in power who weren’t moved felt they had to respond, and high-profile scientific reports gave them extremely short timelines on which to do so.

In describing their own awakenings, many leaders would also invoke private conversations they’d had on the subject with their children and grandchildren, who invariably faulted them for not moving faster, as relatives of corporate leaders did too. In a sense, the crisis seemed to offer a kind of redemptive opportunity to the whole technocratic liberal elite, whose social status and moral claim on leadership had somewhat crumbled since the financial crisis. The United States hadn’t yet been rocked by the election of Donald Trump, nor Britain by Brexit, or the rest of the rich world by the wave of populist backlash that Brexit foreshadowed. But with the global war on terror long since dissipated into tragic farce and a new Cold War not yet well crystallized in the public imagination, the American-led global order seemed to be missing some sense of purpose, too. Here came the existential project of climate action to fill that semi-spiritual void, at least for some of those who felt it.

 

 

Edited by Vegas64


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