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"We have only two options before us: reimagine, or perish"Dezeen Pooran Desai | 3 January 2025 A perfect storm is upon us, and to confront it designers must this year help to lead a fundamental shift in the way we see the world, writes Pooran Desai."We have two years to save the world." So said Simon Stiell, United Nations climate chief, in April last year. We are now nine months – more than a third of the way – into those two years. We have run out of time. We have only two options before us: reimagine, or perish. "Reimagine".......... Take this option and by 2050 we'll be enjoying a planet where the living systems on which we depend are regenerating and able to support a population of 10 billion. We are crossing numerous interconnected climatic, ecological, social, economic, technological and geopolitical tipping points We will be improving our personal health and the health of our communities. We will have transformed from a consumer species, consuming the rest of nature, to a regenerated one, working as part of the rest of nature and returning the living planet to a healthy state. The second option is far less comforting. In this option we continue with our consumer economy with some incremental moves towards circularity and targets like net zero. They avoid saying it in public, but multiple scientists have told me they genuinely fear that if we follow this path, by the middle of the century we will be trying to survive on a planet only able to support maybe one or two billion people.
A stark choice. Why two polar outcomes? It is because we are crossing numerous interconnected climatic, ecological, social, economic, technological and geopolitical tipping points which interact and cascade in ways that move us away from a stable state. Climate change leads to drought, collapse in food production, mass migration and war. The big question we need to ask ourselves: can we tip from a degenerating to a regenerating state? I think so, and I believe it is simple. The good news is that a paradigm shift in science, culture and consciousness is emerging. This rebalancing from reductionism to holism, from rationality to intuition, from science to art, and from materialism to a sense of the sacred will be essential for resolving the polycrisis.
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Our prior research has identified six distinct audiences within the public – the Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive – based on their beliefs and attitudes about climate change. The Alarmed are convinced climate change is happening, human-caused, and an urgent threat, and strongly support climate policies. The Concerned think human-caused climate change is happening and is a serious threat, and support climate policies. However, they tend to believe that climate impacts are still distant in time and space, thus the issue remains a lower priority. The Cautious have not yet made up their minds: Is climate change happening? Is it human-caused? Is it serious? The Disengaged know little to nothing about climate change and rarely if ever hear about it. The Doubtful do not think climate change is happening or they believe it is just a natural cycle. And the Dismissive are convinced climate change is not happening, human-caused, or a threat, and oppose most climate policies.
Here, we apply this analysis to our large international survey of more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, collected in partnership with Data for Good at Meta and Rare’s Center for Behavior and the Environment in 2023. We find that the Alarmed are the largest group in about three-fourths of the areas surveyed (87 of the 110). In fact, half or more respondents in thirty-one areas are Alarmed. The five areas with the largest percentage of Alarmed are Puerto Rico (70%), El Salvador (67%), Costa Rica (65%), Chile (64%), and Panama (64%). By contrast, Czechia (10%) and the Netherlands (9%) have the smallest percentages of Alarmed. In the United States, about one-third of respondents are Alarmed (32%). Among all areas, the Netherlands has the highest proportion of Doubtful and Dismissive (30%), followed by Norway (27%) and Libya (25%). In the United States, about one in four respondents are Doubtful or Dismissive (25%).
The United States is less Alarmed about global warming than most other top carbon-emitting countries There are substantial differences among the 15 nations in the study that are responsible for the largest annual shares of global carbon emissions (note this study did not include China, Russia, or Iran). Among these countries, the largest proportion of Alarmed are in Mexico (62%), followed by India (58%) and Brazil (57%). The United States is the second-largest annual emitter and the world’s largest historical emitter of the carbon pollution that causes global warming. Yet, relatively few people in the United States are Alarmed about global warming, compared to other top emitters. The U.S. has the fourth-smallest percentage of Alarmed (32%), after Australia (28%), Germany (26%), and Indonesia (25%). On the other end of the Six Audiences spectrum, the countries with the largest percentages of Doubtful or Dismissive respondents are the United States (25%), Australia (24%), and Germany (21%)......read on https://
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The climate costs of war and militaries can no longer be ignored. More than 5% of global emissions are linked to conflict or militaries but countries continue to hide the true scale. Guardian Doug Weir 9 Jan 2024 In early 2022, journalists began to ask us how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was affecting the climate crisis. While we could point to landscape fires, burning oil refineries and the thirst of diesel-hungry military vehicles, the emissions data they sought just wasn’t available. When it came to the reverberating consequences of Russia’s manipulation of Europe’s fossil fuel insecurity, or to the weakening of the international cooperation necessary for coordinated global climate action, our guesses were no better than theirs.
Two decades of international analysis and debate over the relationship between climate change and security has focused on how our rapidly destabilising climate could undermine the security of states. But it has largely ignored how national security choices, such as military spending or warfighting, can have an impact on the climate, and so undermine our collective security. With climate breakdown under way and accelerating, it is imperative that we are able to understand and minimise the emissions from all societal activities, whether in peacetime or at war. But when it comes to military or conflict emissions, this remains a distant goal.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has seen the first attempt to comprehensively document the emissions from any conflict, and researchers have had to develop their methodologies from scratch. Their latest estimate puts the total as equivalent to the annual emissions of a country like Belgium. Ukraine is not a one-off, with a similar clamour for emissions data around Israel’s war against Hamas. While the devastating ongoing conflicts in Sudan or Myanmar are yet to see attention on their emissions, the trend is clear: the carbon cost of conflict needs to be understood, just as the humanitarian, economic or wider environmental costs do. A proportion of those carbon costs come from military activities. For these, understanding is hampered by the longstanding culture of domestic environmental exceptionalism enjoyed by militaries, and how at the US’s insistence, this was translated into UN climate agreements. An exclusion to the 1997 Kyoto protocol became voluntary reporting under the 2015 Paris agreement. But when we began to collate and publish the emissions data that militaries report to the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), we found that only a handful of countries publish even the bare minimum required by UN reporting guidelines. Many countries with large militaries publish nothing at all......read on https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/09/emission-from-war-military-gaza-ukraine-climate-change
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Fascism shattered Europe a century ago — and historians hear echoes today in the U.S. After the mass death and destruction of World War I, with their economies shredded by inflation and unemployment, Italy and Germany turned from democracy to dictatorships. UC Berkeley scholars see troubling parallels in contemporary American democracy. UC Berkeley News By Edward Lempinen Sept. 9 2024 It was a time of historic change, and society was buckling under the stress. There had been a war, then a deadly pandemic. Economic crisis was constant: Racing inflation, unemployment and changes in technology provoked extreme economic insecurity. But a leader emerged who understood the fear and humiliation felt by his public. He validated their rage and focused blame on a scapegoat. He pledged to make the nation whole again, to return it to its rightful glory. Much of the population, suffering so profoundly from the shock of loss and change and insecurity, embraced the leader as a sort of messiah. They accepted political violence, even welcomed it, and they turned away from democracy. The scenario is historically accurate, but to which country does it apply? Italy in 1923? Germany in 1933? Or the United States today, nine weeks before the presidential election? The answer, according to some UC Berkeley scholars, is that the scenario applies generally to all three: Italy during the rise of Benito Mussolini, Germany as Adolph Hitler maneuvered his way into power, and the United States, deeply polarized and tense as the MAGA movement led by former president Donald Trump moves to reclaim the White House.
None of the scholars forecast an imminent turn to autocracy in the U.S., and all were careful to say the U.S. experience today is in important ways different from devastating conditions that preceded the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and ‘30s. But in a series of interviews, experts who have studied the political and economic history of Europe traced dramatic and deeply troubling parallels between that era a century ago and this fraught American moment. As in Europe after World War I, “there’s kind of a disdain for democracy,” said John Connelly, the eminent historian of modern Europe. “There’s a willingness to think of going beyond the technicalities of a democratic system in order to solve problems. There’s a longing — there’s a respect for strong leadership that many believe is lacking in a standard liberal democracy.” The view was not unanimous. Jason Wittenberg, a political scientist who has studied European politics and dictatorships, insisted that the U.S. military and other institutions would not succumb to strongman rule.
“My bottom line is that fears about Trump are not entirely unfounded, but they’re massively overblown,” Wittenberg said. “Yes, he could do damage. But in the worst-case scenario, there’s just no plausible circumstance under which an illiberal government could be implemented. There’s no way it could happen.”
And yet, the cautious consensus that emerged from the interviews is that U.S. democracy is more vulnerable today than it has been since the Civil War more than 160 years ago. Several scholars believe the public’s frustration and polarization, incidents and threats of right-wing violence, and a radical new Supreme Court ruling granting presidents broad immunity from the law could precipitate a break with democracy. Because the forces of history are so complex, “I’m wary of trying to draw exact parallels,” said AJ Solovy, a Ph.D. student whose research is focused on German fascism. “But the Third Reich and Germany in the 1930s offer important, useful paradigms through which to understand this particular moment in the U.S. Even if there is not a one-to-one match, the themes that emerge — insecurity, crisis, a sort of existential political angst — can help explain why so many people are attracted to the MAGA movement.” Put another way: It’s not enough to look at how the leaders of anti-democratic movements might be alike. Instead, it’s essential to look at the broader conditions that allowed for the rise of those movements.
Condition No. 1: An era of extraordinary instability, loss and perceived humiliation.....
Any discussion of 20th century fascism in Italy and Germany begins with World War I. The war brought a level of death and devastation that had never been seen before. New weapons technology turned portions of Europe into a killing field. Relentless shelling barrages didn’t merely maim and kill, but obliterated bodies on a mass scale......read on- 4 more conditions and the Conclusion https://news.berkeley.edu/2024/09/09/fascism-shattered-europe-a-century-ago-and-historians-hear-echoes-today-in-the-u-s/
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