The recent IPCC report is a terrifying read. The crucial target of 1.5 degrees Celsius now seems – damningly for our politicians – beyond reach.
Even in a ‘do everything right scenario’ we would still breach this target, and only keep warming to this level through the use of negative-emissions technologies (technologies which barely exist and cannot yet be used at scale). Yet, a more careful reading of the report would reveal something else. The 1.5-degree target is beyond reach because our current political and economic systems are incapable of dealing with a crisis of this scale.
Are there any solutions?
Faced with a crisis of monumental proportions that requires a systemic response, our politicians are only capable of incremental and tokenistic solutions. Our politicians proudly boast about electrifying the car fleet while ignoring the environmental and social impacts of material extraction, thus avoiding uncomfortable questions about the sustainability of a car-dependent transport model. They talk of building a ‘hydrogen-ready’ pipeline while ignoring the fact that the pipeline will be used to transport gas and most of the hydrogen available today comes from burning fossil fuels. They boast about creating green areas while doing nothing to curb an unregulated and out-of-control construction sector. They talk about the need to incentivise certain practices, but never about disincentivising or simply halting environmentally harmful ones.
Assumptions of incremental changes have been built into the IPCC report’s models itself, as the report is not only a synthesis of existing scholarship, but also one that must be approved by all governments (though scientists can veto any suggestions that are politically convenient, but scientifically illiterate).
Incremental change is not how you deal with an emergency. What we need is system change. We need to transform our political and economic institutions, as well as our underlying cultural assumptions, so that they recognise our interconnectedness with nature and the intrinsic value of the living world.
What will become of Malta’s Climate?
If we continue down our current path, Malta will definitely become a desert. Malta will become uninhabitable, impossible to grow crops, and the heatwaves we experienced this summer will become a permanent seasonal feature. And it will only get worse.
Nowhere are our politicians disconnecting with reality clearer than in how our Minister for the Environment, Hon. Aaron Farrugia, bragged about down-negotiating our emissions target to 19% by 2030. Let’s be clear. A 19% reduction in emissions by 2030 (if followed by other countries) would mean the death of millions, perhaps billions of people. It would mean we would cross crucial tipping points in the climate system that would profoundly alter the climatic conditions that have allowed humans to flourish in the past 10,000 years. An abysmally low emissions target like the one our politicians are proposing is a target over which governments elsewhere have been taken to court on human rights grounds, and lost.
In the climate and ecological crisis, five centuries of colonialism have finally come to their pitiful, logical and terrifying end. Europeans have not only conquered, subdued and destroyed other human cultures through five centuries of colonialism – we have also conquered and destroyed nature itself.
But we are part of nature, not separate from it. In destroying nature, we also destroy ourselves. In defending nature, however, we defend ourselves. Every fraction of a degree matters, and it is not too late to turn things around.
Thus, on the 18th of September, we will be protesting in solidarity with the rest of the global climate strike movement and asking our politicians to treat this crisis like the emergency it is. The only way to make our politicians act on this existential threat is to force them to. This means protests and other tactics of civil disobedience to make our voices heard. Together, we must force them into action. Join us!
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