The collapse of the Florida constructing was a turning level in George Floyd’s local weather motion – so?
Guest contribution by Eric Worrall
According to The Guardian, all of the bad things that happened last year should convince society to take on carbon taxes and renewables.
Our turning point on climate change is right here, right now
Rebecca Solnit
Mon July 12, 2021 10:31 PM AEST
People die. Aquatic animals bake in their shells. Fruit is cooked on the tree. It’s time to act
People long for clarity, immediacy, groundbreaking events. We look for turning points because our minds are good at recognizing the special – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. Because of this, we, most of us, have never been very good at understanding climate change at all. Climate was an overarching condition of our lives and our planet, and the change was gradual and complicated and difficult to see if one did not track this species or temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow destruction of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the Holocene era that we left as we created the Anthropocene through a few centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction .
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A building collapse is an ideal piece of news, sudden and specific in time and place, and in the case of this one on the Florida coast, easy for the media to cover as a spectacle with simple causes and consequences. A crisis that spanned three states and two Canadian provinces, with multiple repercussions, including countless deaths, was in many ways the opposite. It had to be argued that climate change – in the form of increasing ingress of salt water – was a factor in the building’s collapse in Florida, but climate change was much more dramatic as the Pacific Northwest heat records were broken day by day and the aftermath of those Heat. In Canada, the previous high temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big leap into people’s dangerous new conditions, and then most of the city where that record was set burned to the ground.
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A turning point is often something you choose individually or collectively when you find the status quo unacceptable, when you turn yourself and your goals around. The assassination of George Floyd marked a turning point for racial justice in the United States. Those who have paid attention, those with expertise or imagination, found their turning points for the climate crisis years and decades ago. For some, it was Hurricane Sandy or their own house burning down, or the permafrost of the far north turning to mush, or the 2018 IPCC report that says we have a decade to do what the planet needs from us. Greta Thunberg had her turning point, as did the indigenous women who led the protests against Line 3 of the pipeline.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/12/our-climate-change-turning-point-is-right-here-right-now
In my opinion, this is an example of what happens to people who only talk to those who heighten their fears.
I will never forget a time many years ago when someone invited me to what turned out to be a small group of student Trotskyists. You kept saying “The people are with us”.
So I asked “Which people?”
All I got were blank looks. No one really thought of asking normal people outside of their little cabal if normal people had any connection with the radical ideas the group was discussing.
I was not invited to the next meeting.
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