Un-normalising The Climate Crisis

There’s another pandemic under our noses, and it kills 8.7m people a year | Climate change

Rebecca Solnit:

We have learned to ignore other forms of death and destruction, by which I mean we have normalized them as a kind of moral background noise. This is, as much as anything, the obstacle to addressing chronic problems, from gender violence to climate change. What if we treated those 8.7 million annual deaths from air pollution as an emergency and a crisis – and recognized that respiratory impact from particulates is only a small part of the devastating impact of burning fossil fuels? For the pandemic we succeeded in immobilizing large populations, radically reducing air traffic, and changing the way many of us live, as well as releasing vast sums of money as aid to people financially devastated by the crisis. We could do that for climate change, and we must – but the first obstacle is the lack of a sense of urgency, the second making people understand that things could be different.

Governments and industries have run out of excuses for their inaction, but even now they continue to drag their feet or pretend that they’re doing something. And I suspect that part of the reason for their fear of climate change activists — and the determination of some to discredit said activists — is that people may decide the political class are the roadblock, and remove them altogether.