This commentary is by Tim Stevenson, a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions from Athens, Vermont, and author of “Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age” and the forthcoming “Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Social Collapse.”
When the delegates convened at the recently concluded 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, they knew that for the world temperature to reach 1.5˚C would result in fatal consequences for thousands, likely millions, of people through heat, drought, floods, famine and storms.
After all, look at what was already occurring with a rise of only 1.1˚C?
They also knew that the average global temperature would exceed 1.5˚C within a decade unless comprehensive action was taken immediately, especially by the world’s largest economies, which together generate 80 percent of carbon emissions.
Far from bringing the latter under control, however, emissions have actually been accelerating, with the three main greenhouse gases fueling catastrophic global heating, reaching record highs in 2021, in contradiction to the promise nations made in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The 636 fossil fuel lobbyists who attended COP27 outnumbered the combined delegations of the 10 countries most impacted by and least responsible for the crisis. Such was their dominant presence that Rachel Rose Jackson of Corporate Accountability quipped, “COP27 look(ed) like a fossil fuel industry trade show.”
This fox-in-the-henhouse charade was further evidenced by the fact that COP27 was the first to which oil and gas companies were invited to participate in the official program of events. No wonder youth activist Greta Thunberg labeled the event as a “sham,” like its 26 predecessors.
In light of the fact that, as one scientist put it, “we are very, very close to irreversible changes,” and that, according to the U.N. climate agency, nothing less than an international commitment to a “rapid transformation of societies will limit the worst impact of the climate crisis,” it is both shocking and entirely predictable that COP27 would evade the issue above all others that cried out to be addressed: the burning of fossil fuels and the concomitant rise in carbon emissions and global temperatures.
This cursory overview underscores why climate/societal collapse is already here. This has been documented in scientific, peer-reviewed literature in recent years, as well as the irrefutable evidence of rapidly growing climate disintegration as we witnessed in this past summer from hell.
It also emphasizes what we’ve maintained since 2005, with the advent of Post Oil Solutions: We’re on our own.
But while this may be true, it nevertheless begs a question that we typically avoid raising. Despite being inherently good people, do we have the spiritual maturity to rise to the challenge of a collapsing society, to forge ahead into the unknown, and create a new livable reality out of the ashes of the old?
Yes, our history is replete with examples of people showing up in time of emergencies. We have often risked our lives to save others.
But it’s equally true that, in the face of our unprecedented existential crisis, there is no credible mass movement demanding that we stop burning the fossil fuels that threaten to end the civilization we’re all tethered to.
Perhaps understandably, we are not willing as a people to live without the way of life that threatens us, and other living beings, with extinction, because it is the only existence we’ve ever known.
As is the case with any addict, like oil CEOs with their petro profits, we’re not yet willing to give up the capitalist way of life, and its fatal illusions of material abundance (at least for us privileged few), and disempowering convenience. Too many of us want the fossil party to continue for as long as possible.
Additionally, there is what the medical ethics scholars David Schenck and Larry R. Churchill refer to in their essay “Ethical Maxims for a Marginally Inhabitable Planet” as “our greatest moral threat, the creeping normalization of catastrophe.”
Characteristic of this phenomenon, we are generally oblivious to our frog-in-boiling-water existence, inured as we’ve become to the routine devastation and calamity afflicting our planet.
Finally, we’re simply overwhelmed in the face of the collapse-in-progress by our sense of powerlessness. Rather than do what we need to do, we do the best we can, continuing with some semblance of life as we’ve known it to be, living the old normal that is no more.
Moving on from this dying civilization is especially challenging when we are so intimately attached to it. To accept that we are on our own, and that each of us has the responsibility to take care of ourselves in terms of doing whatever we can to grow up and increasingly realize the person of heart values we inherently are and need to be is not easy.
But while this person is all we can be, it is also the most important contribution we can make to the new world that is waiting to be born. Regardless of the outcome, committing ourselves to a consistent everyday practice of wholesome intentions is always an end in itself, prefiguring as it does in the living moment a transformed us.