Abstract
It is commonplace today to hear climate change identified as the single most important challenge facing humanity. Consider the headlines from COP24, the United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Poland in December 2018. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres opened the proceedings by calling climate change “the most important issue we face” (PBS 2018). The Secretary-General’s remarks paraphrase the opening line of the U.N.’s climate change web page, which announces that “[c]limate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment” (United Nations n.d.). Such statements about the singular significance of climate change—the most important, the defining issue—are often followed by proclamations about what hangs in the balance, and this was the case at COP24. There, the celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned that “collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizons,” amounting to, in his words, “disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years” (PBS 2018).
Highlights
It is commonplace today to hear climate change identified as the single most important challenge facing humanity
Livelihoods, and communities have been violated by extractive industries, by settler colonialism, by forced migration, by environmental injustices, by police violence, by anti-Black racism, by the intersections of violence and oppression that have made and continue to make “our” civilization possible—would they agree that climate change is “the defining issue of our time” or that every available resource should be mobilized to maintain the world in its present form? This is far from obvious to me
Climate change is happening to everyone, and the violence of the extractive industries that feed it is already impacting educated, wealthy, white communities, so that new coalitions have become possible.2. Those with political and economic clout, or at least some of them, are motivated to address the root causes of climate change since they can no longer avoid its effects. This is precisely why the “we” rings hollow when it declares climate change the decisive issue for everyone, rather than for those who are most invested in the continuation of the world as it is
Summary
It is commonplace today to hear climate change identified as the single most important challenge facing humanity. The Secretary-General’s remarks paraphrase the opening line of the U.N.’s climate change web page, which announces that “[c]limate Change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment” (United Nations n.d.). There, the celebrated British naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned that “collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizons,” amounting to, in his words, “disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years” (Jordans and Scislowska 2018) As common as this rhetoric is, and despite the important strategic role that it plays in the context of international climate negotiations, it leaves me profoundly uneasy. I am uneasy with this assessment of our present state of affairs and this emergency prioritization of its continuation as the decisive issue of our time
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