This is a really solid paper Sarah. I identify strongly with many of your points. You are asking many of the same questions I asked in my early papers.
I have some thoughts/comments.
Why Aren’t We Doing Anything?
You already know the answers to this. You enumerate them clearly.
"life goes on normally for most, on the surface anyhow".
"There were too many other crises to write about: Wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and other parts of Africa. Street gangs in Haiti. “Critical” Federal Reserve Board decisions on the timing of interest rate rises. Initial public offerings (IPO) for social media platforms. And whatever sports events or famous-person activities filtered to the top of the stack."
"we (ARE) caught in the headlights like the proverbial deer?
"Climate stability unraveled so quickly".
"What we were told would take decades happened in a few brief years."
WHY no response?
"people aren’t responding because so many corporate, financial, and media interests are so dedicated to keeping the old system going — and remain so effective at imposing a false narrative of the potential for a return to normalcy on an anxiety-ridden public."
Or, as I put it in,
Living in Bomb Time — 15 : Behold the spectacle that is COP26. In which the old order is revealed to be paralyzed, impotent, and morally bankrupt.
The current world leadership doesn’t seem able to grasp the speed and force of the climate shifts that are currently happening. This isn’t that surprising; all their adult lives the research seemed to say that noticeable effects of a warming climate probably wouldn’t start happening until around 2070. Most of them expected to be dead before the consequences of global warming became apparent.
So, I don’t think that Biden, or Kerry, or most of the other world leaders are deliberately risking a climate apocalypse for some sort of personal gain. Their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren will be living in the world of the coming decades, even if they are not. They do not want to crash global civilization, they don’t want billions to starve, they don’t want to set the Horsemen lose on the world.
However, I do think that the current world elites are incapable of dealing with the crisis. Both their approaches and policy choices indicate a fundamental lack of appreciation for how much the carbon bomb of the last two decades has accelerated planetary warming. They are pushing “solutions” that might have worked if we had done them 30 years ago but are laughably inadequate now.
They seem incapable of internalizing how bad things have gotten and how fast they are about to start getting much, much worse. The crisis still, after all this time, isn’t real to them.
Which means that we aren’t going to do what we should be doing this decade. We are going to waste this last opportunity to slow down the disaster and reduce the damage it’s going to inflict on the world.
You know the ANSWERS. Unless this was meant to be a Socratic dialog, I think it weakens your point to present things in this fashion. Be BOLD.
Fighting climate change involves either remaining dependent on China for a while longer — maybe enough longer that China’s economy would be declared larger than that of the US, representing a major loss of face for an already ego-endangered America. Or the fight becomes expensive.
OMG can you believe what Yellen said. Talk about putting national "selfishness" on display for the Global 80% to see. We are being very short sighted here. Mostly because our leadership either thinks:
A. We have more time.
B. They already know how bad it's about to get.
"look at the broader, even deeper social crises gripping the world, though, the Chinese are no more clued into a solution than anybody else. At some point, economic growth is incompatible with preserving an Earth that is livable not just for thousands of endangered plant and non-human animal species, but for humans themselves."
Yeah, with what they SHOULD know, you would think they would be doing more. They are making a lot of moves that "on the surface" SEEM as if they think there is going to be some stability for awhile.
They are openly acting with "Cautious Optimism".
On the surface, anyway. I see signs of darker intent. I see Xi, "battening the hatches" and getting ready for "famine times".
But hey, I was always the "worst case" guy.
People still don’t have a story they can believe in, so they’re still paralyzed by fear of the unknown.
Do you run into the fog of a future that’s hugely different from today but otherwise ill-defined? Dreamers tell you it will be enjoyable, but the outlines are vague, and they’re just guessing.
Or do you keep your head down and pretend you don’t know you’re running over a cliff in broad daylight?
I think the kind of people reading an article like this are the ones who can see that the "fog of the future" is one that is dark, smokey, and smells of blood.
What we need is a LEADER who has a narrative of where we can go from here.
