This heatwave has eviscerated the idea that small changes can tackle extreme weather

George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Dangerous heat will become the norm, even in the UK. Systems need to urgently change – and the silence needs to be broken.

Can we talk about it now? I mean the subject most of the media and most of the political class has been avoiding for so long. You know, the only subject that ultimately counts – the survival of life on Earth. Everyone knows, however carefully they avoid the topic, that, beside it, all the topics filling the front pages and obsessing the pundits are dust. (...)

This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. (...) But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. (...)

We have seen nothing yet. (...)

We do not deserve this. The billionaire press and the politicians it promotes may deserve each other, but none of us deserves either group. They are constructing a world between them in which we have not elected to live, in which we may not be able to live. (...)

They do so on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, animal farming, finance, construction firms, car manufacturers and airline companies, but also on behalf of something bigger than any of those interests: the power of incumbency. (...)

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to see that mainstream environmental movements have made a terrible mistake. (...) It goes something like this. There is too little time and the ask is too big to try to change the system. People aren’t ready for it. We don’t want to scare away our members or provoke a fight with the government. So the only realistic approach is incrementalism. (...)

But while they have been playing patience, power has been playing poker. The radical right insurgency has swept all before it, crushing the administrative state, destroying public protections, capturing the courts, the electoral system and the infrastructure of government, shutting down the right to protest and the right to live. While we persuaded ourselves that there is no time for system change, they proved us wrong by changing everything. (...)

Only a demand for system change, directly confronting the power driving us to planetary destruction, has the potential to match the scale of the problem and to inspire and mobilise the millions of people required to generate effective action. (...)

There was never time for incrementalism. Far from being a shortcut to the change we want to see, it is a morass in which ambition sinks. (...)

Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. (...)

So let’s break our own silence. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and others by pretending that small measures deliver major change. (...)

But a major question remains. Given that we have left it so late, can we reach the social tipping point before we hit the environmental tipping point?

Complete article

> See also: Why There Is No Public Sense Of A Climate Crisis (Media Lens)

The dangerous heat England is suffering at the moment is already becoming normal in southern Europe.’ A firefighter tackles a wild fire in Gironde, France, 17 July 2022. Photograph: Thibaud Moritz/AFP/Getty Images.

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