Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash

Florida was devastated by hurricane Ian, an unprecedented storm that matches expectations of climate scientists who have long predicted more severe weather patterns. This follows another once in a thousand year storm that devastated New York City a decade earlier, Sandy.

When rare thousand year storms happen with increasing regularity, you don’t need to be a genius or a scientist to understand something significant is happening. You just need to have your eyes and mind open. If you are blinded by ideology, you won’t see anything. The conflict between those with eyes open and those with closed ideological minds is an old one.

Today, the survival of the human race depends on who wins.

When the conflict is between right and wrong, reasonable people can disagree. But when it’s between reality and nonsense, the truth IS the truth and who wins the argument doesn’t change reality.

The climate is collapsing due to our continued (and increasing) use of fossil fuels. That’s a scientific fact. As long as we do nothing about that, we will speed toward doom. Make no mistake — that’s not inevitable. Doom is a choice.

Physics and chemistry gives us a way out: stop burning fossil fuels. This is inconvenient and unpleasant — it will cause great suffering and pain. But failing to do that will cause much worse suffering and pain, and the collapse of civilization itself.

We have this terrible choice to make BECAUSE we allowed fossil fuel profiteers to lie to us, and to make policy. THEY chose doom and WE allowed them.

No More Cooperation or Silence

WE can change our minds now. To do so requires great civil disobedience. We must ridicule their continued lies and delays. We have to hold them responsible.

We do not and must not “debate” them because that is delay and then they “win” and kill everyone’s children — including their own. There is nothing to debate — reality is showing us the truth every single day.

One third of Pakistan is under water. It’s inevitable that additional tragedies of this scope and bigger will occur. It’s time to stop tolerating excuses and delays.

We must make one unrelenting and non-negotiable immediate demand: every government must declare a planet-wide climate emergency and take whatever measures climate scientists recommend.

NOW.

Failure of governments to do so must be rejected. Those governments must resign. They are catastrophic failures. In those cases, young climate activists must be put in charge. Because THEY will fix the climate. THEY won’t sell out or make excuses. The young have the moral standing and proper attitude to save the Earth. THEIR Earth.

Young climate activists won’t fail like the “mature responsible adults” who are currently in charge. Nobody could fail as consistently or as dismally as today’s leaders and their predecessors over the last few decades.

The Galileo Precedent

Galileo built a telescope and pointed it at the sky. He saw moons circling Jupiter. According to the Church, those moons did not exist. They couldn’t exist because that would destroy God’s perfect universe.

But Galileo saw what he saw. He wasn’t an unbeliever. He loved the Church. But he was not blinded by ideology or religion.

He wanted the Church to look. They would see what he himself saw: moons orbiting Jupiter. This was part of God’s wonderful universe.

But the Church was enamored of its own power and ideology. The Church would not look. It would use its power to force Galileo to recant what he said. Galileo would be forced to deny reality and affirm the nonsense perpetuated by the Church.

That won’t happen here. We are at an even stranger place. Today, the reality is widely acknowledged — the climate IS collapsing and we DO need to slash C02 emissions to survive. Very few authorities deny this.

And yet no government on Earth is doing what this reality requires: immediate emergency action.

What We Need To Do NOW

We have our eyes open. We see what’s happening and we know what is required. We need to stop playing the game the authorities are playing. We need to throw a monkey wrench into “business as usual” every day. We need to show our contempt for their dangerous nonsense, and assert the truth forcefully and repeatedly.

We need to become an ungovernable pain in the ass. We need to do this in every country on Earth — from Saudi Arabia, to Iran, to the United States, to Russia. This has begun in many countries already, albeit sparked by other injustices. Nonetheless, we must move forward with our efforts.

We will know we have succeeded when everyone is talking about climate collapse and other issues (which, in the scheme of things, are mostly distractions) barely register. The authorities with their propaganda campaigns, PR firms, think tanks and media are doing everything possible to control the conversation.

But there will be no further conversation: we will speak out directly, stubbornly, consistently. There will be no distraction. Our statements will only be confirmed by further catastrophes — storms, shortages, wildfires and more.

Nature Herself will continue to make our demands unavoidable. Please do your part.