The Mandelbear's Musings

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac just hit the bookstores this morning; I it up on Kindle this afternoon. Which means I only just finished Part I (I'm a slow reader, actually), which sets out two visions of the year 2050: "The World We Are Creating" -- that's Chapter 2, and "The World We Must Create" (Chapter 3). I've read a lot of dystopian SF that's not as grim as Chapter 2.

But this is not science fiction, unfortunately. The authors, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, are respectively the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010-16, and her strategic advisor.

To quote from an article published yesterday under the headline "Former UN Climate Chief Calls For Civil Disobedience"

“Large numbers of people must vote on climate change as their number one priority,” they write. “As we are in the midst of the most dire emergency, we must urgently demand that those who seek high office offer solutions commensurate with the scale of the problem.”

But they note that electoral politics have failed to meet the challenge, largely because of systemic roadblocks including corporate lobbying and partisan opposition.

They endorse Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg. They evoke legendary activists who effected change on the scale required by the climate crisis, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

“Civil disobedience is not only a moral choice, it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics,” they write, citing scientific resources on the impact of civil disobedience.

“Historically, systemic political shifts have required civil disobedience on a significant scale. Few have occurred without it.”

— Forbes: Jeff McMahon

It links to a follow-up article, "10 Things You Can Do About Climate Change, According To The Shepherds Of The Paris Agreement " which basically just summarizes the 10 chapters in part III.

( Quoted under the cut: )

Just go read it. Let me know what you think.

Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
The Great Lesson of the 20th Century — and How America Never Learned It
--Umair Haque

... is a very disturbing article. Hat-tip to thnidu.

When I say “the modern world”, what do you think of? Probably a great city somewhere, with broad avenues, spacious parks, art and culture, old museums, people buzzing about, public transport thrumming.

Now think of America. People dying for a lack of insulin. Young people who can’t afford to start families of their own. The average person living perched right at the edge of ruin, one missed paycheck, one illness, one emergency away from disaster. Kids massacring one another at schools. Infants on trial. Politicians who proclaim “God is a white supremacist!” An endless and gruesome list of stuff that’s beginning to put the dark ages to shame.

Here’s what I think. American never joined the modern world. It’s the modern world’s first failed state. It became something like a weird, bizarre dystopia, replete with falling life expectancy, hand-to-mouth living, relentless and legendary cruelty, instead of a truly modern society. But why?

...

Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.

But the question we still haven’t answered is why. Why did America never join the modern world? The answer goes something like this. Americans never learned the greatest lesson history taught. That poverty causes ruin.

You see, in America, poverty was seen — and still is — as a kind of just dessert. A form of deserved punishment, for being lazy, for being foolish, for being slow. For being, above all, weak — because only the strong should survive.

...

So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.

What was that about those who fail to learn from history? Welcome to the 19th Century.

It was the evening of the Virginia Tech shootings, and I was on the phone with my brother, who teaches at another college in Virginia (ODU). He said "Somebody's going to lose their job over this", and then added, "But I hope not. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail." I agreed -- the campus cops did exactly the right thing under the circumstances. When you come across two shooting victims in a dorm room you start looking for a jealous ex, not a demented mass-murderer.

And as for whether anyone should have seen it coming, or could have prevented it... Doubtful. The only things that might have prevented it would have been teaching young kids not to tease or bully people who are different from them, and a health care system that provides decent mental health care, and a culture that makes it easier for an asocial loner to seek out care than to avoid it. Good luck.