How bad do we let things get? Should we wait until the planet can’t sustain life anymore? Should we wait until it’s 100 degrees F in the Artic? Until wildfires blanket entire continents or the last glacier is gone? Should we wait until fascist billionaires take even more from us? Until there are Flock cameras at every mail box? Maybe we should wait until the wells run dry or the tornadoes never stop. When is it going to be enough? I’m so tired of seeing things getting worse. Every. Single. Day. I’m ready. I’ve been ready. How about you?
How do we coordinate? How do we look after each other? What is the signal? If we don’t work together then we are just continuing our slow march to destruction to the drum of the parasitic billionaires. Please, for us, for the cats, the dogs, the birds and trees. The fish and the whales, the beatles and the centipedes. Please tell me it’s worth it to you, that you’re willing to get uncomfortable, that you’re willing to fight. There are more of us than them, and we are rapidly running out of time to make that mean something.
EU is pretty much doing what you’re describing: it has some (weak but still) EV transition plan, it’s pushing hydrogen (to de-carbonize industries), it’s installing a lot of renewables. I would say they doing as much as people and industries are letting them. Push any harder and industries will move, people will lose their jobs and you will see even more discontent. And doing more would cost money which would mean higher taxes or less investment which people would also not like. We could tax the rich but this also isn’t very likely as there will always be a place for them to hide their money in (if not US than Russia or Argentina).
This is how it’s going:
This is what “best effort” gets us right now. Even if by some miracle all other countries started doing the same (and as we know US for example is doing the exact opposite) we would see 50 more years of emissions. This is obviously not going to happen so we’re pretty much fucked. Rioting will definitely not change any of that.
Kind of true, but industries are working to slow the transition down like working against modernising the electric grid.
So it’s time for best effort, without quotation marks.
Of course industries are trying to slow down the process but I don’t think overcoming them is as easy as trying harder. As I said, they do employ a lot of people so you have to modernize them without destroying them. It’s a slow process and you have to fight lobbyist and corruption on every step.
Then we have to keep thinking. It’s worth finding a way to overcome corruption and other obstacles to transform in years and not decades.