Can Our Civilization Change…Before It’s Too Late?

The Overton Window Versus the Extinction Window, or the Political Economy of Extinction

Image Credit

This is the summer climate change got real, got scary, and it happened unbelievably fast. Canada burning, heat domesscorching, floods roaring. Here’s another factoid to add to that list. The waters off the coast of Florida hit 95 degrees the other day. Think about that for a second. A marine heatwave. Ocean temperatures are off the charts — and as they soar, the impacts range from merely horrifying — extinctions of marine life — to frankly cataclysmic, acidification, oxygen depletion, and ultimately, the loss of the ability to store more excess heat. Are we at that point? Surely we’re reaching it, and we don’t want to find out the hard way.

So there’s Florida, in the crosshairs of climate change, almost ludicrously so. A narrow, exposed peninsula, jutting into the tropics. It’s exposed to all of climate change’s key impacts, from rising sea levels, to heatwaves, to hurricanes, to boiling oceans, and their knock-on effects on basic systems for water, agriculture, insurance, finance, and so forth, all of which are already beginning to crack. Given all that, you don’t have to think too hard to understand why Florida’s home insurance rates are rising at the fastest rate in America — if you can still get some, that is.

And yet look at Florida, in another way. You’d think that it’d be responding to some of those…existential threats. LOL, you’d be dead wrong. Florida’s politics is a worldwide joke at this point. There’s Ron DeSantis, demonizing kids…criminalizing teachers and doctors…persecuting families…attacking journalists. The War on Woke, they call it. 

But wokeness isn’t going to flood, scorch, drown, and impoverish Florida — climate change is. Fast. It’s anyone’s guess how long Florida’s really got, and when I say that, think about how climate change’s effects suddenly leapt into a new degree of ferocity, just like that, this summer, smashing records, shattering forecasts, outpacing models. It happens that fast. Florida? In a sane world, it’d be doing something, anything, to try and survive what’s coming next — but nope, there it is, leaning so fanatically far right that…it’s latest political spectacle is…what…building a seawall?…hardening its infrastructure…? Nope, it’s “investigating” visitors from, wouldn’t you know it, “woke” States. LOL.

But Florida’s example is part of a larger global trend, and it’s a dismal one. Look at what just happened in Britain.The head of the opposition, the Labour Party, and this is supposed to be the side of sanity and progress, is reported to have said…wait for it…buckle up… “I hate tree huggers!!” LOL. I hate “tree huggers”? What is this, 1972? No, it’s 2023. And look around, because the planet’s on fire. If you think I exaggerate, take a look at the fire map of America and Canada, or just look at a climatic portrait of the planet. So here is one of the most powerful politicians in the world, on the side of progress, supposedly, lashing out at… “tree huggers”…which is a slur, really, of a kind, for people who commit the cardinal sin…of…caring about the planet.

Image

Heaven forbid we do that. Everything’s fine. Forget that 95 degree water off the coast of Florida. Forget the giant smoke plume from Canada burning that lingered over London and Paris. Never mind the killing heat beginning to arrive as people fry under heat domes from Texas to China.