Fantastic essay from Rebecca Solnit (@RebeccaSolnit)...
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"We need to stop burning fossil fuels. Right now."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports are formidably researched and profoundly important, but they mostly reinforce what we already know: human-produced greenhouse gases are disastrously changing the planet, and unless we act now to rapidly taper off burning fossil fuels, a dire future awaits.

But “act now” means taking dramatic measures to change how we do most things, especially produce energy. The people who should be treating this like the colossal emergency it is keep finding ways to delay and dilute a meaningful response. Fossil fuel is hugely profitable to some of the most powerful individuals and institutions on Earth, and they influence and even control a lot of other people.

To say that is grim, but there’s also a kind of comedy in the ways they keep trying to come up with rationales to not do the one key thing that climate organizers, policy experts, activists and scientists have long told them they must do: stop funding fossil fuels, stop their extraction, stop their burning, and speed the transition away from their use.

Among the worst of the excuses for not doing the one thing we must do is carbon capture, which has absolutely not worked at any scale that means anything and shows no sign of so doing on a meaningful scale in the near future. But while it is dangled as a possibility, it creates a justification to keep burning fossil fuel.

The decision-makers here often seem like a patient who, when told by a doctor to stop doing something, tries to bargain. But all the excuses and delays and workarounds and nonexistent solutions won’t replace what the IPCC tells us: stop burning fossil fuel.

Move fast. Step it up. Now.

Which brings us back to something climate organizers have told us for a long time and the new report brings home. We know what to do, and we have the solutions to do it, so the biggest problems are political. They’re banks, politicians, financiers, and the fossil fuel industry itself. We don’t need any magic technology to defeat them, just massive civil society willpower set in motion.
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FULL ESSAY -- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/24/ipcc-report-we-must-stop-burning-fossil-fuels

#IPCC #Politics #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #greenwashing