<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/11/no-getting-back-to-normal-climate-breakdown-ipcc-report>
"Academic papers often take time to leach out into public consciousness. One
that did not filter through was a study from Anglia Ruskin University that
analysed “nodes of persisting complexity”, in the face of “global
decomplexification event”. What’s that, you ask. Places you can probably still
get electricity and toilet paper when climate breakdown destroys the rest of
the world. New Zealand and Finland top the list. Perhaps coincidentally, it
recently emerged that Google founder Larry Page has been granted New Zealand
residency.
The recently released “last chance saloon” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) report will surely add pressure on governments to “do something”
about all this. After all, we can’t all move to a nice “persistent node”. But
doing something, as we know, is hard. So, what we can expect instead is for
governments to redouble their usage of a time-tested rhetoric of distraction
called “getting back to normal”.
Instead of telling us that we need to truly transform the way we live and
organise society, we will be told that we can still carry on as we were, except
perhaps with our fossil fuels and one-use goods replaced with green energy and
recyclables. Maybe a bit less air travel, but still ‘back to normal’ with green
edges.
This way of thinking is perhaps as dangerous as the climate crisis itself.
While banging on about inflation as a threat to the poor is a rhetoric of
reaction, getting back to normal is a rhetoric of
distraction. Rather than
pandering to our prejudices, it builds directly upon how our psychology has
evolved over millennia – it plays upon two things that we are hardwired to
believe."
Via Robert Sanscartier.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
