Hey folks—
To my mind, the most fundamental way in which our climate debate lags behind reality is the inability to grasp the depth of societal change that’s now inevitable.
Discontinuous changes in natural systems will increasingly become unprecedented problems in human systems, and those problems will demand response on massive scales.
It’s not that the need to respond — to acknowledge and mitigate risk, to defend systems and places, to ruggedize to grow our capacities to act, and to aid the many millions of people in harm’s way — renders the need to act to prevent further harm less urgent. Quite the opposite. Bold action is more important than ever.
It’s that responding at the scales demanded — tens of trillions of dollars, hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of thousands of communities and infrastructure systems and institutions — is an even bigger problem now than the challenge of “merely” bringing our entire economy into alignment with planetary realities
If the prize for solving the world’s sustainability challenges would have been (as Bruce Sterling said) to be able to turn our collective attention to more interesting problems, the price of failing to solve them is that we now have even bigger problems to solve, as well. This discontinuity is likely to be the most pressing fact about our lives for decades to come. It is a crisis unlike any humanity has ever experienced before.
