The Guardian
Last year I was recommended a podcast called "Designing the Revolution" by Roger Hallam. Roger is a sociologist, campaigner, and was the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion in the UK.
I found his arguments very compelling to say the least so I'll try give a brief overview of the basic idea.
To begin, we can look at a the movie Don't Look Up which is about a meteor heading towards Earth, and is an allegory for the current situation of climate and ecological collapse (Though I haven't seen the movie yet). The meteor is coming towards Earth, it's locked in, it can't (or wont) be stopped. The top scientists tell say "Humanity faces a planet-killing, civilisation threat" (Quote from the movie, though also real...), yet, politicians and elite ignore the problem. The effects of meteor impact will cause a breakdown in food and water systems, the collapse of the economy, mass refugee crisis, war, etc...
Sounds pretty familiar eh... But why is this relevant? Well, the two important similarities between the meteor and the climate crisis is that they will both cause cascading cataclysmic damage, and they are both locked in. By "locked in", I mean that the effects are coming down the road whether we like it or not, we can't change them, they're baked in, set in stone, etc...
Now, this can all be a bit hard to take in without a grasp of how the Earth science works, so... The reason why we have all heard the term "1.5°C" when talking about global warming is because this is the upper most "safe" limit of warming, where any warming past that point risks activating tipping points in the Earth system, causing the Earth to start warming on it's own accord. For example, there is huge amount of methane trapped in Siberian permafrost, and this methane will be released into the atmosphere if that permafrost melts, causing even more rapid warming, and more melt (methane is 80x more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2 over a 20 year period). This is whats called a positive feedback loop, and it could very likely cause global warming to start increasing at an exponential rate in the coming decades.
Now, we are going to permanently surpass the 1.5°C threshold in the next 5 years, and fossil fuel usage is still increasing. So, what implications does this have for societies around the world? Roger argues that the harsh physical reality that global warming will impose on societies around the world will create the conditions where revolution is inevitable. Fiscal crisis of the state, mass inequality, loss of legitimacy for the regime, not to mention famine... What do we think that 1.2 billion refugees will do to the global economy?
The Guardian
The logic is that we know at least 2°C of warming is definitely locked in, which means that it's physical affects are locked in, which means that revolutionary episodes are inevitable around the world in both non-democratic and democratic contexts.
To be cont...
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