A Case for an Immediate Climate Lockdown
Manifesto, a public draft
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Many of us realize that our rampant consumption and the hidden forces of capitalism push our biosphere beyond its limits. We are the driving agent of an extinction level event, to which we’ll be no exception. Our current youth, children, and yet-to-be-born will have to face insufferable and unimaginable conditions well beyond what we’re experiencing now. We can be almost certain of wars, famine, heat waves, wildfires, deadly pandemics, (and as a result) a collapse of human values and society as we know it.
All of that is already in its process. It is enough to compare the current state of the world with that of only 10 or 15 years ago. A planet can handle some degree of technological activity, but we’ve gone too far. And that “too far” step has to come undone.
Because all complex and chaotic systems have a lot of feedback loops built into them, we can expect that further warming will proceed at a much faster pace. Whatever change we experienced during the past 20 years will now take even less. So if your place went from 25°C to 30°C in the summer, you could expect the next +5°C to occur much faster because warmer earth is rigged for more warming (melting glaciers and polar caps reduce overall albedo, forests burn and release more CO2 back into the atmosphere and further reduce absorption, etc.).
The warmer it is, the warmer it will get. And faster still! The best time to act was in the 1980s when this became the news; the second best time is now.
Although it is too late to stop, we can still make it easier on ourselves. We do have the power to reduce the number of casualties and the amount of suffering. But we have to act immediately.
What I’m about to write below is a conversation starter, perhaps even a seed of a new paradigm that could emerge out of it. So please, read this with a grain of salt. It is not meant to be a detailed plan but rather a set of examples that represent an underlying idea which is mostly; let’s get done with denial (i.e., business as usual) and start dealing with the present at hand.
1. Immediate Climate Lockdown
Much like with the first wave of COVID-19, we must immediately stop all…
