{"id":4848,"date":"2022-03-28T20:20:29","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T03:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/?p=4848"},"modified":"2022-03-28T20:20:29","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T03:20:29","slug":"in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/2022\/03\/28\/in-a-world-on-fire-stop-burning-things\/","title":{"rendered":"In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the New Yorker, Bill McKibben wrote an essay titled “In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things<\/a>” Here, he references many new reports which fortify the case for moving to renewable energy now and reinforcing the need to stop burning.<\/p>\n

On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ant\u00f3nio Guterres, had, he said, \u201cseen many scientific reports in my time, but nothing like this.\u201d Setting aside diplomatic language, he described the document as \u201can atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,\u201d and added that \u201cthe world\u2019s biggest polluters are guilty of arson of our only home.\u201d Then, just a few hours later, at the opening of a rare emergency special session of the U.N. General Assembly, he catalogued the horrors of Vladimir Putin\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, and declared, \u201cEnough is enough.\u201d Citing Putin\u2019s declaration of a nuclear alert, the war could, Guterres said, turn into an atomic conflict, \u201cwith potentially disastrous implications for us all.\u201d<\/p>\n

What unites these two crises is combustion. Burning fossil fuel has driven the temperature of the planet ever higher, melting most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic, bending the jet stream, and slowing the Gulf Stream. And selling fossil fuel has given Putin both the money to equip an army (oil and gas account for sixty per cent of Russia\u2019s export earnings) and the power to intimidate Europe by threatening to turn off its supply. Fossil fuel has been the dominant factor on the planet for centuries, and so far nothing has been able to profoundly alter that. After Putin invaded, the American Petroleum Institute insisted that our best way out of the predicament was to pump more oil. The climate talks in Glasgow last fall, which John Kerry, the U.S. envoy, had called the \u201clast best hope\u201d for the Earth, provided mostly vague promises about going \u201cnet-zero by 2050\u201d; it was a festival of obscurantism, euphemism, and greenwashing, which the young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as \u201cblah, blah, blah.\u201d Even people trying to pay attention can\u2019t really keep track of what should be the most compelling battle in human history.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the New Yorker, Bill McKibben wrote an essay titled “In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things” Here, he references many new reports which fortify the case for moving to renewable energy now and reinforcing the need to stop burning. On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3061,6,7,9,12,2520,13,14,15,3279],"tags":[427,701,3983,3984],"class_list":["entry","post","publish","author-sergneri","post-4848","format-standard","category-climate-change","category-environment","category-ethical-and-green-living","category-faits-divers","category-finanace","category-nuclear-industry","category-pandemic","category-politics","category-racism","category-science","category-the-anthropocene","post_tag-climate-change","post_tag-fossil-fuel","post_tag-ipcc","post_tag-world-on-fire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4848"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4850,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4848\/revisions\/4850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sergneri.net\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}