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To be complacent about climate is not just to be shockingly oblivious but to endorse future human suffering on an almost inconceivable scale.
In December, the New York Timesreported that “Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years and very likely the past 125,000.” (Though it’s not the Times’s style, that latter figure should have had a couple of exclamation points after it!) Furthermore, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chief scientist, “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far.” In fact, each of the six decades since 1960 saw a higher global average temperature than the 10 years that preceded it. In addition, every decade-to-decade increase has been larger than the previous one. In other words, the Earth’s not just steadily warming; it’s heating up at an ever-faster pace.
And you don’t have to wait for the distant future to see the impact of such accelerated heating. Just look at current global data. Comparing 2023 to 2022, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported a worldwide rise of 60% in the number of deaths from landslides, 278% from wildfires, and 340% from storms. Worse yet, those of our fellow humans suffering the most from the impact of human-induced climate change aren’t the ones causing it. More than half of the deaths reported by OCHA occurred in low- to lower-middle-income countries, and 45% of those killed lived in countries that produce less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Imagine that for (in)justice!
The climate crisis simply can’t be lost in the shuffle.
Putting an end to global warming should be an overwhelming moral imperative for every nation on this planet. But climate-change stories, extreme as they may be, almost never lead the news, nor does dealing with the phenomenon seem to be at the top of any leader’s list of national priorities. How about last month’s COP28 global climate summit in Dubai? It produced an agreement that committed the world’s nations to doing… well, essentially nothing.
With the news cycle stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of sudden, compelling crises and unending wars, world powers seem almost willfully blind to the possibility that the global environment (and with it, civilization itself) is spinning out of control — and not in some distant future but right now.
Long Emergencies
With the recent COP28 agreement, the rich nations have at least finally acknowledged that fossil fuels are indeed a problem. Still, they continue to reject a planned, systematic phase-out of oil, natural gas, and coal on an ambitiously expedited timetable (as laid out in proposals for a global Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty).
Governments, it seems, always have on hand some other dire emergency that supposedly justifies setting climate change aside. Perhaps the closest the rich countries have ever come to seriously tackling the subject of greenhouse gas emissions, which might be thought of as a long emergency, was in the various U.S., European, and global Green New Deals of 2018-2019. But those inadequate proposals were soon eclipsed by the Covid-19 pandemic and a still-surging rise of far-right extremists who consider global warming a completely off-the-charts subject. Then, in 2022–2023, just as interest in climate was rising again thanks to scary new reports from the world’s climate-science community, the Russian invasion of Ukraine elbowed global warming out of our field of vision, while a stunning war-related spike in fossil-fuel prices killed off any immediate interest in reducing carbon emissions.
Then, last fall, the genocide in Gaza began. In November, TomDispatch’s Tom Engelhardt wrote that “while the nightmare in the Middle East is being covered daily in a dramatic fashion across the mainstream media, the burning of the planet is, at best, a distinctly secondary, or tertiary, or… well, you can fill in the possible numbers from there… reality.” He certainly wasn’t suggesting, nor am I, that the Palestinians are getting too much attention. On the contrary, they need even more of it, but the climate crisis simply can’t be lost in the shuffle.
A Side-Trip to India: No Eye-Catching Crisis in Sight? Just Conjure One Up
Such failures of attention are, of course, hardly confined to the United States. Similar shortsightedness can be seen right now in India, where my family and I are spending January with relatives in Mumbai. Here, too, politicians are making a ruckus about immediate, in-your-face issues — some real, others concocted — while ignoring the more slowly developing but far more consequential threat of climatic breakdown.
In recent years, India has endured a string of cataclysmic droughts, floods, heat waves, and other disasters, along with a chronic but climate-related plague of urban air pollution. In this Mumbai dry season, we’re living in the midst of a dense off-white “fog,” inhaling a toxic brew of dust, motor-vehicle exhaust, factory emissions, and clouds of fine particulate matter created by the construction and demolition of buildings. Overhead, the cloudless daytime sky is a dull, depthless white. Blue patches rarely appear and not a star is visible at night.
Such in-your-face bad air quality is impossible to ignore, but the Indian public is also alarmed by the odorless, invisible carbon-dioxide emissions that underlie the increasing pace of climate chaos on the subcontinent. There is, in fact, a massive constituency-in-waiting here for climate action. A 2022 poll indicated that 81% of voters were worried about human-induced climate change. Fully 50% were “very worried,” and a similar share said that they had been personally harmed by greenhouse warming.
As in the U.S., 2024 is an election year here. So given the above polling numbers, you’d think that boosting climate mitigation and adaptation would be a great way to garner votes. But climate efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP party continue to be, at best, sporadic and desultory. Instead, they’re pursuing what they see as a far more reliable way of revving up their voter base ahead of the election: announce the inauguration of a new Hindu temple.
How in the world would that work, you ask? Well, we’re not talking about just any temple. This one, currently under construction, sits on a site once occupied by a famed mosque, the former Babri Masjid in the northern city of Ayodhya. That hallowed, five-century-old Muslim place of worship was demolished in 1992 by BJP-backed fanatics. Religious fervor over the demolition sparked violence across the country, leaving more than 2,000 people dead.
For three decades, the destruction of the mosque and its planned replacement with a temple dedicated to the god Ram have been a toxic current running just beneath the surface of Indian politics, occasionally erupting in conflict. So, to gin up their Hindu-supremacist base and ensure victory in this spring’s elections, BJP leaders rushed to organize a ceremony consecrating the temple on January 22nd — months before construction will even be completed.
The outpouring of right-wing religious nationalism triggered by that event has had the side effect of ensuring that global warming will remain out of the political headlines for months, if not longer.
It’s Not All in Your Mind
An institutional preoccupation with acute “red-meat” issues (to the detriment of addressing long-term emergencies like climate change) reflects all too human predilections that fit well with studies psychologists have done on how our brains react to crises.
Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert, for instance, is known for his hypothesis regarding the kinds of threats we humans respond most strongly to, those he’s termed the “four I’s” — “intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous.” Those adjectives, he’s found, catch the kinds of emergencies that stimulate our quickest and most intense responses. In a 2019 interview with NPR, Gilbert elaborated on how, particularly when it comes to climate, such a response system can translate into a failure of political action. To most people, the potential devastation of climate catastrophe still seems all too far in the future. And although climatic hazards like ever more devastating hurricanes and floods come close to being instantaneous, the heating of the atmosphere that underlies their increasing virulence has, until recently, progressed very slowly. Humans have a great ability to adapt psychologically to gradual change, but with global warming, that power doesn’t serve us well. After all, if this year feels more or less like last year, is there really anything to respond to?
Two other characteristics of climate change, related to two of Gilbert’s I’s, separate it from many other emergencies, both short and long. For one thing, governments tend to respond most decisively to human enemies acting all too intentionally, but climate change, as he told NPR, “doesn’t seem like it’s a person at all, so we just kind of ho and hum.” Nor does it seem immoral. “As a social creature,” he observes, “we are deeply concerned with morality, the rules by which people treat each other.” Even though the overheating of this planet is indeed being caused by human activity, he points out, climate change “is meteorological. It doesn’t present itself as an affront to our sense of decency” — at least until people around you are being killed by a heat wave.
The time has passed for societies to grapple only with the individual crises in the 24-hour news cycle. It’s time to shift into polycrisis mode.
In addition, in a capitalist economy, the short term is more or less the whole ball game. Corporations are as committed to maximizing stock values for their stockholders, quarter by quarter, as politicians are committed to maximizing themselves for voters. Any politician who dares declare that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a more urgent matter than cutting the price of gasoline will hear a giant sucking sound as voters and campaign donors vanish into thin air.
Clinical psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon is executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund and author of Facing the Climate Emergency. In that book, she argues that curbing climate chaos will require Americans to shift collectively into “emergency mode.” That state, she observes, is “markedly different from ‘normal’ functioning [and] characterized by an extreme focus of attention and resources on working productively to solve the emergency.” In “normal mode,” as Salamon points out, with no urgent threat in sight, response time isn’t critical. In emergency mode, where there’s a dire threat to life, health, property, or the environment, a quick, effective response is essential — and dealing with the threat must take priority over all other matters.
When it comes to fast, far-reaching action, emergency mode, she adds, shouldn’t just be for short-term problems. In fact, according to Salamon, what climate action truly requires is shifting into what she calls “long emergency mode,” in which tight focus on a single problem is no longer tolerable. Climate change is now caught in traffic with too many other immediate emergencies, none of which can be set aside for years or decades, but none of which threaten the very existence of life as we’ve known it on this planet.
Given that, Salamon urges that climate-emergency mode radiate through our society as quickly as possible, which won’t happen if politicians, corporations, and even some climate-movement figures continue soft-pedaling the message. It won’t happen if the public continues to get the impression that future technological breakthroughs and the magic of markets will ensure the inevitability of the reduction and then elimination of carbon emissions with little disruption of everyday life.
No Time for Happy Talk
Spurring a grassroots takedown of the corporate and political resistance to genuine climate action requires articulating a vision of a better world that awaits us beyond the fossil-fuel era, but more than that is needed. It must become far clearer that our growing global emergency is deeply linked to an ongoing business-as-usual attitude and that a staggering amount of work and sacrifice is actually required. In contrast, happy talk like the current mischaracterization of the COP28 agreement as an “unprecedented” climate “breakthrough” will prompt people to strike ecological catastrophe off their list of urgent concerns.
To be complacent about climate is not just to be shockingly oblivious but to endorse future human suffering on an almost inconceivable scale. At COP28, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, spoke in stark terms about the moral imperatives of stopping the horror in Gaza now and preventing almost unimaginable future horrors triggered by ecological breakdown. In doing so, he offered a vision of a climate-change-devastated future that should stun us all:
“Are these events disconnected, is my question, or are we seeing here a mirror of what is going to happen in the future? The genocides and the barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis… Most victims of climate change, [who] will be counted in their billions, will be in those countries that do not emit CO2 or emit very little. Without the transfer of wealth from the north to the south, the climate victims will increasingly have less drinking water in their homes and they will have to migrate north… The exodus will be of billions… There will be pushback against the exodus, with violence, with barbaric acts committed. This is what is happening in Gaza. This is a rehearsal for the future.”
President Petro was describing just a few of the likely catastrophic interactions and feedbacks that, amid other crises, climate change will bring to this planet in what’s coming to be known as the “global polycrisis.” If governments continue to focus on “solving” only the most immediate, seemingly most tractable emergencies (often making matters worse in the process), we’re in trouble deep. The time has passed for societies to grapple only with the individual crises in the 24-hour news cycle. It’s time to shift into polycrisis mode. All of us will then have to deal with the sprawling web of connections among this planet’s emergencies, immediate and long-term, especially the future devastating overheating of our world, as one big problem that must be solved — or else.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
Stan Cox is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond (2020), The Path to a Livable Future (2021), and the ‘In Real Time’ blog, all from City Lights Books. See the evolving ‘In Real Time’ visual work at the illustrated archive; listen to the ‘In Real Time’ podcast for the spoken version of this article; and hear a discussion of it on the Anti-Empire Project podcast
In December, the New York Timesreported that “Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years and very likely the past 125,000.” (Though it’s not the Times’s style, that latter figure should have had a couple of exclamation points after it!) Furthermore, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chief scientist, “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far.” In fact, each of the six decades since 1960 saw a higher global average temperature than the 10 years that preceded it. In addition, every decade-to-decade increase has been larger than the previous one. In other words, the Earth’s not just steadily warming; it’s heating up at an ever-faster pace.
And you don’t have to wait for the distant future to see the impact of such accelerated heating. Just look at current global data. Comparing 2023 to 2022, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported a worldwide rise of 60% in the number of deaths from landslides, 278% from wildfires, and 340% from storms. Worse yet, those of our fellow humans suffering the most from the impact of human-induced climate change aren’t the ones causing it. More than half of the deaths reported by OCHA occurred in low- to lower-middle-income countries, and 45% of those killed lived in countries that produce less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Imagine that for (in)justice!
The climate crisis simply can’t be lost in the shuffle.
Putting an end to global warming should be an overwhelming moral imperative for every nation on this planet. But climate-change stories, extreme as they may be, almost never lead the news, nor does dealing with the phenomenon seem to be at the top of any leader’s list of national priorities. How about last month’s COP28 global climate summit in Dubai? It produced an agreement that committed the world’s nations to doing… well, essentially nothing.
With the news cycle stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of sudden, compelling crises and unending wars, world powers seem almost willfully blind to the possibility that the global environment (and with it, civilization itself) is spinning out of control — and not in some distant future but right now.
Long Emergencies
With the recent COP28 agreement, the rich nations have at least finally acknowledged that fossil fuels are indeed a problem. Still, they continue to reject a planned, systematic phase-out of oil, natural gas, and coal on an ambitiously expedited timetable (as laid out in proposals for a global Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty).
Governments, it seems, always have on hand some other dire emergency that supposedly justifies setting climate change aside. Perhaps the closest the rich countries have ever come to seriously tackling the subject of greenhouse gas emissions, which might be thought of as a long emergency, was in the various U.S., European, and global Green New Deals of 2018-2019. But those inadequate proposals were soon eclipsed by the Covid-19 pandemic and a still-surging rise of far-right extremists who consider global warming a completely off-the-charts subject. Then, in 2022–2023, just as interest in climate was rising again thanks to scary new reports from the world’s climate-science community, the Russian invasion of Ukraine elbowed global warming out of our field of vision, while a stunning war-related spike in fossil-fuel prices killed off any immediate interest in reducing carbon emissions.
Then, last fall, the genocide in Gaza began. In November, TomDispatch’s Tom Engelhardt wrote that “while the nightmare in the Middle East is being covered daily in a dramatic fashion across the mainstream media, the burning of the planet is, at best, a distinctly secondary, or tertiary, or… well, you can fill in the possible numbers from there… reality.” He certainly wasn’t suggesting, nor am I, that the Palestinians are getting too much attention. On the contrary, they need even more of it, but the climate crisis simply can’t be lost in the shuffle.
A Side-Trip to India: No Eye-Catching Crisis in Sight? Just Conjure One Up
Such failures of attention are, of course, hardly confined to the United States. Similar shortsightedness can be seen right now in India, where my family and I are spending January with relatives in Mumbai. Here, too, politicians are making a ruckus about immediate, in-your-face issues — some real, others concocted — while ignoring the more slowly developing but far more consequential threat of climatic breakdown.
In recent years, India has endured a string of cataclysmic droughts, floods, heat waves, and other disasters, along with a chronic but climate-related plague of urban air pollution. In this Mumbai dry season, we’re living in the midst of a dense off-white “fog,” inhaling a toxic brew of dust, motor-vehicle exhaust, factory emissions, and clouds of fine particulate matter created by the construction and demolition of buildings. Overhead, the cloudless daytime sky is a dull, depthless white. Blue patches rarely appear and not a star is visible at night.
Such in-your-face bad air quality is impossible to ignore, but the Indian public is also alarmed by the odorless, invisible carbon-dioxide emissions that underlie the increasing pace of climate chaos on the subcontinent. There is, in fact, a massive constituency-in-waiting here for climate action. A 2022 poll indicated that 81% of voters were worried about human-induced climate change. Fully 50% were “very worried,” and a similar share said that they had been personally harmed by greenhouse warming.
As in the U.S., 2024 is an election year here. So given the above polling numbers, you’d think that boosting climate mitigation and adaptation would be a great way to garner votes. But climate efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP party continue to be, at best, sporadic and desultory. Instead, they’re pursuing what they see as a far more reliable way of revving up their voter base ahead of the election: announce the inauguration of a new Hindu temple.
How in the world would that work, you ask? Well, we’re not talking about just any temple. This one, currently under construction, sits on a site once occupied by a famed mosque, the former Babri Masjid in the northern city of Ayodhya. That hallowed, five-century-old Muslim place of worship was demolished in 1992 by BJP-backed fanatics. Religious fervor over the demolition sparked violence across the country, leaving more than 2,000 people dead.
For three decades, the destruction of the mosque and its planned replacement with a temple dedicated to the god Ram have been a toxic current running just beneath the surface of Indian politics, occasionally erupting in conflict. So, to gin up their Hindu-supremacist base and ensure victory in this spring’s elections, BJP leaders rushed to organize a ceremony consecrating the temple on January 22nd — months before construction will even be completed.
The outpouring of right-wing religious nationalism triggered by that event has had the side effect of ensuring that global warming will remain out of the political headlines for months, if not longer.
It’s Not All in Your Mind
An institutional preoccupation with acute “red-meat” issues (to the detriment of addressing long-term emergencies like climate change) reflects all too human predilections that fit well with studies psychologists have done on how our brains react to crises.
Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert, for instance, is known for his hypothesis regarding the kinds of threats we humans respond most strongly to, those he’s termed the “four I’s” — “intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous.” Those adjectives, he’s found, catch the kinds of emergencies that stimulate our quickest and most intense responses. In a 2019 interview with NPR, Gilbert elaborated on how, particularly when it comes to climate, such a response system can translate into a failure of political action. To most people, the potential devastation of climate catastrophe still seems all too far in the future. And although climatic hazards like ever more devastating hurricanes and floods come close to being instantaneous, the heating of the atmosphere that underlies their increasing virulence has, until recently, progressed very slowly. Humans have a great ability to adapt psychologically to gradual change, but with global warming, that power doesn’t serve us well. After all, if this year feels more or less like last year, is there really anything to respond to?
Two other characteristics of climate change, related to two of Gilbert’s I’s, separate it from many other emergencies, both short and long. For one thing, governments tend to respond most decisively to human enemies acting all too intentionally, but climate change, as he told NPR, “doesn’t seem like it’s a person at all, so we just kind of ho and hum.” Nor does it seem immoral. “As a social creature,” he observes, “we are deeply concerned with morality, the rules by which people treat each other.” Even though the overheating of this planet is indeed being caused by human activity, he points out, climate change “is meteorological. It doesn’t present itself as an affront to our sense of decency” — at least until people around you are being killed by a heat wave.
The time has passed for societies to grapple only with the individual crises in the 24-hour news cycle. It’s time to shift into polycrisis mode.
In addition, in a capitalist economy, the short term is more or less the whole ball game. Corporations are as committed to maximizing stock values for their stockholders, quarter by quarter, as politicians are committed to maximizing themselves for voters. Any politician who dares declare that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a more urgent matter than cutting the price of gasoline will hear a giant sucking sound as voters and campaign donors vanish into thin air.
Clinical psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon is executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund and author of Facing the Climate Emergency. In that book, she argues that curbing climate chaos will require Americans to shift collectively into “emergency mode.” That state, she observes, is “markedly different from ‘normal’ functioning [and] characterized by an extreme focus of attention and resources on working productively to solve the emergency.” In “normal mode,” as Salamon points out, with no urgent threat in sight, response time isn’t critical. In emergency mode, where there’s a dire threat to life, health, property, or the environment, a quick, effective response is essential — and dealing with the threat must take priority over all other matters.
When it comes to fast, far-reaching action, emergency mode, she adds, shouldn’t just be for short-term problems. In fact, according to Salamon, what climate action truly requires is shifting into what she calls “long emergency mode,” in which tight focus on a single problem is no longer tolerable. Climate change is now caught in traffic with too many other immediate emergencies, none of which can be set aside for years or decades, but none of which threaten the very existence of life as we’ve known it on this planet.
Given that, Salamon urges that climate-emergency mode radiate through our society as quickly as possible, which won’t happen if politicians, corporations, and even some climate-movement figures continue soft-pedaling the message. It won’t happen if the public continues to get the impression that future technological breakthroughs and the magic of markets will ensure the inevitability of the reduction and then elimination of carbon emissions with little disruption of everyday life.
No Time for Happy Talk
Spurring a grassroots takedown of the corporate and political resistance to genuine climate action requires articulating a vision of a better world that awaits us beyond the fossil-fuel era, but more than that is needed. It must become far clearer that our growing global emergency is deeply linked to an ongoing business-as-usual attitude and that a staggering amount of work and sacrifice is actually required. In contrast, happy talk like the current mischaracterization of the COP28 agreement as an “unprecedented” climate “breakthrough” will prompt people to strike ecological catastrophe off their list of urgent concerns.
To be complacent about climate is not just to be shockingly oblivious but to endorse future human suffering on an almost inconceivable scale. At COP28, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, spoke in stark terms about the moral imperatives of stopping the horror in Gaza now and preventing almost unimaginable future horrors triggered by ecological breakdown. In doing so, he offered a vision of a climate-change-devastated future that should stun us all:
“Are these events disconnected, is my question, or are we seeing here a mirror of what is going to happen in the future? The genocides and the barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis… Most victims of climate change, [who] will be counted in their billions, will be in those countries that do not emit CO2 or emit very little. Without the transfer of wealth from the north to the south, the climate victims will increasingly have less drinking water in their homes and they will have to migrate north… The exodus will be of billions… There will be pushback against the exodus, with violence, with barbaric acts committed. This is what is happening in Gaza. This is a rehearsal for the future.”
President Petro was describing just a few of the likely catastrophic interactions and feedbacks that, amid other crises, climate change will bring to this planet in what’s coming to be known as the “global polycrisis.” If governments continue to focus on “solving” only the most immediate, seemingly most tractable emergencies (often making matters worse in the process), we’re in trouble deep. The time has passed for societies to grapple only with the individual crises in the 24-hour news cycle. It’s time to shift into polycrisis mode. All of us will then have to deal with the sprawling web of connections among this planet’s emergencies, immediate and long-term, especially the future devastating overheating of our world, as one big problem that must be solved — or else.
Stan Cox is the author of The Green New Deal and Beyond (2020), The Path to a Livable Future (2021), and the ‘In Real Time’ blog, all from City Lights Books. See the evolving ‘In Real Time’ visual work at the illustrated archive; listen to the ‘In Real Time’ podcast for the spoken version of this article; and hear a discussion of it on the Anti-Empire Project podcast
In December, the New York Timesreported that “Earth is finishing up its warmest year in the past 174 years and very likely the past 125,000.” (Though it’s not the Times’s style, that latter figure should have had a couple of exclamation points after it!) Furthermore, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s chief scientist, “Not only was 2023 the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record — it was the warmest by far.” In fact, each of the six decades since 1960 saw a higher global average temperature than the 10 years that preceded it. In addition, every decade-to-decade increase has been larger than the previous one. In other words, the Earth’s not just steadily warming; it’s heating up at an ever-faster pace.
And you don’t have to wait for the distant future to see the impact of such accelerated heating. Just look at current global data. Comparing 2023 to 2022, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported a worldwide rise of 60% in the number of deaths from landslides, 278% from wildfires, and 340% from storms. Worse yet, those of our fellow humans suffering the most from the impact of human-induced climate change aren’t the ones causing it. More than half of the deaths reported by OCHA occurred in low- to lower-middle-income countries, and 45% of those killed lived in countries that produce less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Imagine that for (in)justice!
The climate crisis simply can’t be lost in the shuffle.
Putting an end to global warming should be an overwhelming moral imperative for every nation on this planet. But climate-change stories, extreme as they may be, almost never lead the news, nor does dealing with the phenomenon seem to be at the top of any leader’s list of national priorities. How about last month’s COP28 global climate summit in Dubai? It produced an agreement that committed the world’s nations to doing… well, essentially nothing.
With the news cycle stuck in a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam of sudden, compelling crises and unending wars, world powers seem almost willfully blind to the possibility that the global environment (and with it, civilization itself) is spinning out of control — and not in some distant future but right now.
Long Emergencies
With the recent COP28 agreement, the rich nations have at least finally acknowledged that fossil fuels are indeed a problem. Still, they continue to reject a planned, systematic phase-out of oil, natural gas, and coal on an ambitiously expedited timetable (as laid out in proposals for a global Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty).
Governments, it seems, always have on hand some other dire emergency that supposedly justifies setting climate change aside. Perhaps the closest the rich countries have ever come to seriously tackling the subject of greenhouse gas emissions, which might be thought of as a long emergency, was in the various U.S., European, and global Green New Deals of 2018-2019. But those inadequate proposals were soon eclipsed by the Covid-19 pandemic and a still-surging rise of far-right extremists who consider global warming a completely off-the-charts subject. Then, in 2022–2023, just as interest in climate was rising again thanks to scary new reports from the world’s climate-science community, the Russian invasion of Ukraine elbowed global warming out of our field of vision, while a stunning war-related spike in fossil-fuel prices killed off any immediate interest in reducing carbon emissions.
Then, last fall, the genocide in Gaza began. In November, TomDispatch’s Tom Engelhardt wrote that “while the nightmare in the Middle East is being covered daily in a dramatic fashion across the mainstream media, the burning of the planet is, at best, a distinctly secondary, or tertiary, or… well, you can fill in the possible numbers from there… reality.” He certainly wasn’t suggesting, nor am I, that the Palestinians are getting too much attention. On the contrary, they need even more of it, but the climate crisis simply can’t be lost in the shuffle.
A Side-Trip to India: No Eye-Catching Crisis in Sight? Just Conjure One Up
Such failures of attention are, of course, hardly confined to the United States. Similar shortsightedness can be seen right now in India, where my family and I are spending January with relatives in Mumbai. Here, too, politicians are making a ruckus about immediate, in-your-face issues — some real, others concocted — while ignoring the more slowly developing but far more consequential threat of climatic breakdown.
In recent years, India has endured a string of cataclysmic droughts, floods, heat waves, and other disasters, along with a chronic but climate-related plague of urban air pollution. In this Mumbai dry season, we’re living in the midst of a dense off-white “fog,” inhaling a toxic brew of dust, motor-vehicle exhaust, factory emissions, and clouds of fine particulate matter created by the construction and demolition of buildings. Overhead, the cloudless daytime sky is a dull, depthless white. Blue patches rarely appear and not a star is visible at night.
Such in-your-face bad air quality is impossible to ignore, but the Indian public is also alarmed by the odorless, invisible carbon-dioxide emissions that underlie the increasing pace of climate chaos on the subcontinent. There is, in fact, a massive constituency-in-waiting here for climate action. A 2022 poll indicated that 81% of voters were worried about human-induced climate change. Fully 50% were “very worried,” and a similar share said that they had been personally harmed by greenhouse warming.
As in the U.S., 2024 is an election year here. So given the above polling numbers, you’d think that boosting climate mitigation and adaptation would be a great way to garner votes. But climate efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Hindu-nationalist BJP party continue to be, at best, sporadic and desultory. Instead, they’re pursuing what they see as a far more reliable way of revving up their voter base ahead of the election: announce the inauguration of a new Hindu temple.
How in the world would that work, you ask? Well, we’re not talking about just any temple. This one, currently under construction, sits on a site once occupied by a famed mosque, the former Babri Masjid in the northern city of Ayodhya. That hallowed, five-century-old Muslim place of worship was demolished in 1992 by BJP-backed fanatics. Religious fervor over the demolition sparked violence across the country, leaving more than 2,000 people dead.
For three decades, the destruction of the mosque and its planned replacement with a temple dedicated to the god Ram have been a toxic current running just beneath the surface of Indian politics, occasionally erupting in conflict. So, to gin up their Hindu-supremacist base and ensure victory in this spring’s elections, BJP leaders rushed to organize a ceremony consecrating the temple on January 22nd — months before construction will even be completed.
The outpouring of right-wing religious nationalism triggered by that event has had the side effect of ensuring that global warming will remain out of the political headlines for months, if not longer.
It’s Not All in Your Mind
An institutional preoccupation with acute “red-meat” issues (to the detriment of addressing long-term emergencies like climate change) reflects all too human predilections that fit well with studies psychologists have done on how our brains react to crises.
Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert, for instance, is known for his hypothesis regarding the kinds of threats we humans respond most strongly to, those he’s termed the “four I’s” — “intentional, immoral, imminent, and instantaneous.” Those adjectives, he’s found, catch the kinds of emergencies that stimulate our quickest and most intense responses. In a 2019 interview with NPR, Gilbert elaborated on how, particularly when it comes to climate, such a response system can translate into a failure of political action. To most people, the potential devastation of climate catastrophe still seems all too far in the future. And although climatic hazards like ever more devastating hurricanes and floods come close to being instantaneous, the heating of the atmosphere that underlies their increasing virulence has, until recently, progressed very slowly. Humans have a great ability to adapt psychologically to gradual change, but with global warming, that power doesn’t serve us well. After all, if this year feels more or less like last year, is there really anything to respond to?
Two other characteristics of climate change, related to two of Gilbert’s I’s, separate it from many other emergencies, both short and long. For one thing, governments tend to respond most decisively to human enemies acting all too intentionally, but climate change, as he told NPR, “doesn’t seem like it’s a person at all, so we just kind of ho and hum.” Nor does it seem immoral. “As a social creature,” he observes, “we are deeply concerned with morality, the rules by which people treat each other.” Even though the overheating of this planet is indeed being caused by human activity, he points out, climate change “is meteorological. It doesn’t present itself as an affront to our sense of decency” — at least until people around you are being killed by a heat wave.
The time has passed for societies to grapple only with the individual crises in the 24-hour news cycle. It’s time to shift into polycrisis mode.
In addition, in a capitalist economy, the short term is more or less the whole ball game. Corporations are as committed to maximizing stock values for their stockholders, quarter by quarter, as politicians are committed to maximizing themselves for voters. Any politician who dares declare that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a more urgent matter than cutting the price of gasoline will hear a giant sucking sound as voters and campaign donors vanish into thin air.
Clinical psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon is executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund and author of Facing the Climate Emergency. In that book, she argues that curbing climate chaos will require Americans to shift collectively into “emergency mode.” That state, she observes, is “markedly different from ‘normal’ functioning [and] characterized by an extreme focus of attention and resources on working productively to solve the emergency.” In “normal mode,” as Salamon points out, with no urgent threat in sight, response time isn’t critical. In emergency mode, where there’s a dire threat to life, health, property, or the environment, a quick, effective response is essential — and dealing with the threat must take priority over all other matters.
When it comes to fast, far-reaching action, emergency mode, she adds, shouldn’t just be for short-term problems. In fact, according to Salamon, what climate action truly requires is shifting into what she calls “long emergency mode,” in which tight focus on a single problem is no longer tolerable. Climate change is now caught in traffic with too many other immediate emergencies, none of which can be set aside for years or decades, but none of which threaten the very existence of life as we’ve known it on this planet.
Given that, Salamon urges that climate-emergency mode radiate through our society as quickly as possible, which won’t happen if politicians, corporations, and even some climate-movement figures continue soft-pedaling the message. It won’t happen if the public continues to get the impression that future technological breakthroughs and the magic of markets will ensure the inevitability of the reduction and then elimination of carbon emissions with little disruption of everyday life.
No Time for Happy Talk
Spurring a grassroots takedown of the corporate and political resistance to genuine climate action requires articulating a vision of a better world that awaits us beyond the fossil-fuel era, but more than that is needed. It must become far clearer that our growing global emergency is deeply linked to an ongoing business-as-usual attitude and that a staggering amount of work and sacrifice is actually required. In contrast, happy talk like the current mischaracterization of the COP28 agreement as an “unprecedented” climate “breakthrough” will prompt people to strike ecological catastrophe off their list of urgent concerns.
To be complacent about climate is not just to be shockingly oblivious but to endorse future human suffering on an almost inconceivable scale. At COP28, the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, spoke in stark terms about the moral imperatives of stopping the horror in Gaza now and preventing almost unimaginable future horrors triggered by ecological breakdown. In doing so, he offered a vision of a climate-change-devastated future that should stun us all:
“Are these events disconnected, is my question, or are we seeing here a mirror of what is going to happen in the future? The genocides and the barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the south because of the climate crisis… Most victims of climate change, [who] will be counted in their billions, will be in those countries that do not emit CO2 or emit very little. Without the transfer of wealth from the north to the south, the climate victims will increasingly have less drinking water in their homes and they will have to migrate north… The exodus will be of billions… There will be pushback against the exodus, with violence, with barbaric acts committed. This is what is happening in Gaza. This is a rehearsal for the future.”
President Petro was describing just a few of the likely catastrophic interactions and feedbacks that, amid other crises, climate change will bring to this planet in what’s coming to be known as the “global polycrisis.” If governments continue to focus on “solving” only the most immediate, seemingly most tractable emergencies (often making matters worse in the process), we’re in trouble deep. The time has passed for societies to grapple only with the individual crises in the 24-hour news cycle. It’s time to shift into polycrisis mode. All of us will then have to deal with the sprawling web of connections among this planet’s emergencies, immediate and long-term, especially the future devastating overheating of our world, as one big problem that must be solved — or else.
'Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he's using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it'
Outraged by Elon Musk's devastating contributions to the Trump administration, tens of thousands worldwide held "Tesla Takedown" protests at over 200 locations on Saturday.
Protests began the day in front of Tesla showrooms in Australia and New Zealand. They then rippled across Europe, including Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. In the US, protests occurred in nearly every state, including the northeast, south, midwest, and west coast.
"Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he's using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it," organizers wrote on Action Network, which has an interactive map of the protest sites. "We are taking action at Tesla to stop Musk's illegal coup."
Organizers also have a message for people with ties to the company: "Sell your Teslas, dump your stock, join the picket lines."
Since Musk began dismantling the federal bureaucracy as chief of President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), critics have protested at Tesla facilities and posted videos about selling their vehicles on social media.
In an aerial view, protesters demonstrate against Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives during a nationwide “Tesla Takedown” rally at a dealership on March 29, 2025, in Austin, Texas. (Getty image)
While protesting at the Tesla dealership in west London, Louise Cobbett-Witten told The Guardian: “It’s too overwhelming to do nothing. There is real solace in coming together like this. Everyone has to do something. We haven’t got a big strategy besides just standing on the side of the street, holding signs and screaming.”
Alainn Hanson, of Washington, DC, brought her mother from Minnesota to their first Tesla protest. She told CNN: “I’m sick of billionaires trampling over working class people.”
Here are some of Saturday's actions:
Saint Petersburg, Florida
Cherry Hill, New Jersey
Washington, DC
Tucson, Arizona
Manlius, New York
Salt Lake City, Utah
Vancouver, British Columbia
Chicago, Illinois
And in London, England
Attorney General Josh Kaul accused the world's richest person and top Trump adviser of "a blatant attempt to violate" Wisconsin's election bribery law.
Democratic Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul filed a lawsuit Friday seeking to stop Elon Musk—the world's richest person and a senior adviser to President Donald Trump—from handing out $1 million checks to voters this weekend in an apparent blatant violation of bribery law meant to swing next Tuesday's crucial state Supreme Court election.
"Wisconsin law forbids anyone from offering or promising to give anything of value to an elector in order to induce the elector to go to the polls, vote or refrain from voting, or vote for a particular person," the lawsuit notes. "Musk's announcement of his intention to pay $1 million to two Wisconsin electors who attend his event on Sunday night, specifically conditioned on their having voted in the upcoming April 3, 2025, Wisconsin Supreme Court election, is a blatant attempt to violate Wis. Stat. § 12.11. This must not happen."
On Thursday, Musk announced on his X social media site that he will "give a talk" at an undisclosed location in Wisconsin, and that "entrance is limited to those who have signed the petition in opposition to activist judges."
"I will also hand over checks for a million dollars to two people to be spokesmen for the petition," the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and de facto head of the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency wrote.
As Common Dreams reported earlier last week, Musk's super political action committee, America PAC, is offering registered Wisconsin voters $100 to sign a petition stating that they reject "the actions of activist judges who impose their own views" and demand "a judiciary that respects its role—interpreting, not legislating."
The cash awards—which critics have decried as bribery—are part of a multimillion dollar effort by Musk and affiliated super PACs to boost Judge Brad Schimel of Waukesha County, the Trump-backed, right-wing state Supreme Court candidate locked in a tight race with Dane County Judge Susan Crawford.
Left-leaning justices are clinging to a 4-3 advantage on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Crawford and Schimel are vying to fill the seat now occupied by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, a liberal who is not running for another 10-year term. Control of the state's highest court will likely impact a wide range of issues, from abortion to labor rights to voter suppression.
Musk has openly admitted why he's spending millions of dollars on the race: It "will decide how congressional districts are drawn." That's what he said while hosting Schimel and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) for a discussion on X last weekend.
"In my opinion that's the most important thing, which is a big deal given that the congressional majority is so razor-thin," Musk argued. "It could cause the House to switch to Democrat if that redrawing takes place."
Crawford campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman issued a statement Friday calling Musk's planned cash giveaway a "last-minute desperate distraction."
"Wisconsinites don't want a billionaire like Musk telling them who to vote for," Honeyman added, "and on Tuesday, voters should reject Musk's lackey Brad Schimel."
Greenlanders are giving the administration of President Donald Trump—who renewed threats to take the Danish territory—the cold shoulder.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance, Second Lady Usha Vance, and two top Trump administration officials traveled to Greenland on Friday on an itinerary that was markedly curtailed from its original plans due to Greenlanders' frosty reception amid President Donald Trump's ongoing threats to take the Arctic island from NATO ally Denmark—even by armed force if deemed necessary.
Vance visited Pituffik Space Base—a U.S. Space Force installation on the northwestern coast of Greenland about 930 miles (1,500 km) north of the capital, Nuuk—with his wife, National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The vice president's wife originally planned on a more interactive and cultural itinerary, including attending a dogsled race. However, Greenland's leftist government said earlier this week that is had "not extended any invitations for any visits, neither private nor official."
Compounding the Trump administration's embarrassment, U.S. representatives reportedly came up empty handed after canvassing door to door in Nuuk in an effort to drum up support for the visit. The administration denies this ever happened.
And so the Trump officials' audience was limited to U.S. troops stationed at Pituffik. After arriving at the base, the vice president told troops in the mess hall he was surprised to find the snow- and ice-covered Arctic island is "cold as shit."
"Nobody told me!" he added.
Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance visited a U.S. Space Force base in Greenland Friday. Vance is expected to receive briefings on Arctic security and address US service members.
Read more: https://t.co/1OIkkT3VnD pic.twitter.com/lbXeObJTgq
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) March 28, 2025
Getting down to more serious business, Vance said: "Our message to Denmark is very simple—you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. You have under-invested in the people of Greenland and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful land mass."
Addressing Arctic geopolitics, Vance argued that "we can't just bury our head in the sand—or in Greenland, bury our head in the snow—and pretend that the Chinese are not interested in this very large land mass. We know that they are."
"The president said we have to have Greenland, and I think that we do have to be more serious about the security of Greenland," Vance continued. "We respect the self-determination of the people of Greenland, but my argument to them is: I think that you'd be a lot better coming under the United States' security umbrella than you have been under Denmark's security umbrella. Because what Denmark's security umbrella has meant is effectively they've passed it all off to brave Americans and hoped that we would pick up the tab."
This follows remarks earlier this week from Vance, who said during a Fox News interview that Denmark, which faithfully sent troops to fight in both Afghanistan and Iraq—43 of whom died, the highest per capita casualty rate of the alliance—is "not being a good ally" to the United States.
Asked by reporters on Friday if the U.S. would ever conquer Greenland by military force, Vance said he didn't think that would be necessary.
However, just a day earlier, Trump—who on Friday posted a video highlighting defense cooperation between the U.S. and Greenland—said his administration will "go as far as we have to go" to acquire the island, which he claimed the United States needs "for national security and international security."
It was far from the first time that Trump—who has also threatened to take over parts or all of countries including Panama and even Canada—vowed to annex Greenland, and other administration officials have repeated the president's threats.
"It's oil and gas. It's our national security. It's critical minerals," Waltz said in January, explaining why Trump wants Greenland.
The U.S. has long been interested in Greenland, and while the close relationship between the United States and Denmark has been mostly mutually beneficial, it has sometimes come at the expense of Greenland's people, environment, and wildlife.
Such was the case when a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber laden with four thermonuclear warheads crashed into the sea ice of Wolstenholme Fjord in 1968. The accident caused widespread radioactive contamination, and the nuclear fuel components of one of the bombs remain unrecovered to this day.
Elected officials from across Greenland and Denmark's political spectrum expressed alarm over the Trump administration's actions.
Outgoing Greenland Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede earlier this week
called Vance's trip "highly aggressive" and said that it "can in no way be characterized as a harmless visit."
"Because what is the security advisor doing in Greenland?" Egede asked. "The only purpose is to show a demonstration of power to us, and the signal is not to be misunderstood."
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke called Vance's remarks on Friday "a bit inappropriate," adding that maybe the Trump administration "should look at yourself in the mirror too."
"When the vice president.. creates an image that the only way Greenland can be protected is by coming under the American umbrella, so you can say that Greenland is already there," Løkke elaborated. "They are part of the common security umbrella that we created together with the Americans after the end of World War II called NATO."
"We have always looked at America like the nice big brother to help you out and now it's like the big brother is bullying you."
Ordinary Greenlanders and Danish residents of the island were not happy about the Trump delegation's visit.
Anders Laursen, who owns a local water taxi company, told NBC News that "we have always looked at America like the nice big brother to help you out and now it's like the big brother is bullying you."
Nuuk resident Marie Olsen said of Vance, "I think he's a big child who wants it all."
In the Danish capital Copenhagen, hundreds of people rallied Friday against the U.S. delegation's visit to Greenland. One protester decried what she called the U.S. administration's "mafia methods."