Hell and High Water: The Climate Emergency Is Here
The stakes of the climate crisis have never been higher — and now they’re staring us in the face.
Over the last 5 years in politics, decades have happened. Politics — both global and national — has moved at break-neck speed. Populism rose from the ruins of the financial crisis, and was blunted by the cruel, complex reality of a pandemic.
In such a rapidly-changing political climate, the pace of change in the atmospheric climate was forgotten — and, at times, denied. But just as politics underwent a rapid evolution, so too did the state of the natural world. What before was known merely as climate change, is now a climate emergency.
We offered respite to our planet last year. The pandemic shut down, and continues to shut down, large parts of the global economy, reducing carbon emissions, giving us clean air and water, and bringing some endangered species back from the brink.
You’d have been forgiven, too, for forgetting about the scale of the climate emergency in 2020. When four million people have died and hundreds of millions suffered financial, social, and mental hardship, worries about the ethereal “climate” could not seem further away.
