What Needs to be Done

My shopping list of ideas for the future.

Created by author using MidJourney.

Contemplating climate change is like contemplating your own mortality. We developed ignorance as a survival mechanism because the terror of the abyss is so overwhelmingly paralyzing that it becomes impossible to carry on with our daily lives. A certain level of denial is a prerequisite for normal functioning.

Yet, when I contemplate the fact that we are well on our way to 4 degrees of warming, and even the current 1.4 degrees feel like an ongoing catastrophe — which, by the way, is on an exponential scale, meaning that the difference between 1.4 and 1.7 is far greater than the difference between 1.1 and 1.4, and each next step will be even more horrifying — I cannot help but feel an existential angst that I have never felt before.

To ease my mind a bit, I contemplate what could or should be done to prevent it from happening. At the moment, nothing is being done; it is just business as usual, hence the predicted 4 degrees. What we are currently getting is merely greenwashing, propaganda, and wishful thinking. Basically, it’s verbal cosmetics. So, without further ado, here’s my list.

A Global Climate Lockdown

We saw during the first wave of the pandemic how well this works. The planet was able to breathe for a while…