“The world and ourselves are not two different entities, the world is us and we are the world… The world is burning and the world is me. I am terribly disturbed, terribly confused, and there must be some order somewhere in all this. That is what is making me look. But if you say “The world is alright, why do you bother about it, you have got good health and a little money, wife and children and a house, leave it alone.” -then, of course, the world isn’t burning. But it IS burning all the same, whether you like it or not. So that is what makes me look, not some intellectual conception, nor some emotional excitement, but the actual fact that the world is burning — the wars, the hatred, the deception, the images, the false gods, and all the rest of it. And that very perception of what is taking place outwardly, makes me aware inwardly. And I say the inward state is the outward state, they are both One, indivisible.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti, 1969
By Eric Lutz @ Vanity Fair:
“There is no kind way to put it,” United Nation’s Secretary-General António Guterres said Monday in a keynote address to the Economist Sustainability Summit in London: The chief goal of the 2015 Paris agreement — to keep the Earth’s temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — is in critical danger.
“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” Guterres said. “The 1.5 degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care.”
Last year, an alarming UN assessment found that some of the deleterious impacts of climate change had become irreversible — but that significant action could keep the crisis from spiraling out of control even more. That sense of urgency seemed to be missing, though, when world leaders gathered in Glasgow a couple months later. While the climate conference in November was meant to be the commencement of a “decade of ambition and innovation to preserve our shared future,” as President Joe Biden described it, leaders emerged from COP26 with only a watered-down accord — one that acknowledged global warming was happening and that something needed to be done about it, but that ultimately failed to provide much in the way of a blueprint for doing so.
Guterres warned the path to addressing global warming has only become less clear in the months since, as other crises, like the war in Ukraine, have dominated international attention and threatened to exacerbate the climate emergency. Not only has the window of opportunity for action continued to close — the political will has been diluted by a “cauldron of challenges,” including the “scandalously uneven” recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and the “fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine,” which itself could exacerbate the climate crisis, Guterres said. Indeed, the horror of Vladimir Putin’s invasion has relegated global warming to the back-burner, even as its onset coincided with another dire warning from the IPCC that the climate is changing faster than the world can adapt. The war has also threatened the international cooperation needed to address the climate crisis and, as Guterres pointed out Monday, led to an “‘all of the above’ strategy to replace Russian fossil fuels” that have been subject to harsh sanctions. “Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or kneecap policies to cut fossil fuel use,” Guterres said. “This is madness.”
In August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the planet was locked into a hotter future, thanks to human activity and a lack of action to reverse course. It was a grim assessment, but came with one hopeful note: With aggressive, concerted action now, humanity could still prevent even worse climate disaster. At COP26 in November, leaders pledged in a pact to “revisit and strengthen” emissions targets, direct “public and private finance” to combat global warming,” and do more to support communities to “adapt to climate impacts.” But the agreement lacked teeth and didn’t go far enough, as exemplified by an 11th hour concession to India in its language about coal: Where the pact originally called on nations to “phase out” fossil fuels, the accord ultimately called on them to “phase down” their use. “If we hadn’t done that,” Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, said in defending the amended language, “we wouldn’t have had an agreement.”
That alteration underscored the weakness of that accord. “These are welcome steps, but they are not enough,” Guterres said at the time. There was already a maddening lack of urgency among world leaders in addressing global warming. But the prospect of moving the 1.5 goal “from life support to the recovery room,” as Guterres put it Monday, has only seemed to grow more distant. “If we continue with more of the same, we can kiss 1.5 goodbye,” the secretary-general warned. “Even two degrees may be out of reach. And that would be catastrophe.”
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