I wonder if you remember the Tomorrow People or Tomorrow’s World? Both broadcast by the BBC in the 1970’s. The former depicted a shiny possible space future with psychic characters who battled evil, some I seem to remember with pink or blue hair. The latter focused on technologies in development. I was always somewhat disappointed when at the end of each feature the presenter would say, “So in a few years time…” I wanted it all right now. I was after all a child.
Recently someone at XR Writers Rebel said, “The emissions of today with determine the climate of tomorrow.” I guess one could also say the technologies we adopt now will too determine the climate of tomorrow.
Around that time I also read that the first floating wind farm in Italy is in the pipeline, so to speak, a Sicilian project. Though it’s taken time and won’t be ready for some years. See
Read elsewhere the Siliciam Mafia tried to get a hand in on this technology in 2010. It begs the question who owns these technologies? If the private sector invest what happens if the banks have another wobble? If government invests what if a new regime steps it and cancels it all?
The emissions of today will also determine the growing turbulence of weather conditions we are witnessing in Europe this summer and last few summers. From a Eurocentric/ U.K. point of view, too hot in June to August in Europe breaking records, too cool in July and August this year in the U.K. with the jet stream dipping again and low pressure.
What do I mean by turbulence? Turn the tap on a bit see it flow smoothly, turn it too the max see the flow becomes chaotic. A better analogy would be someone turning it on and off at random. Maybe an even better example would be watch a pan of water heating up. A little heat and it will heat to simmer, more the bubbles get bigger, movement becomes agitated, it might boil over or boil dry if you are not careful. Climate change gives us both drought and flooding.
Our movements are growing, they are globally connected, but movements rarely have much cash, money, money, money to invest in technology. At the risk of sounding like Teresa May figure we need at least ethical investment that is strong and stable and ultimately system change.
The issue there is, as it always has been, as Engels put it, the “special bodies of armed men”. And now with surveillance technology that wouldn’t be out of place in Black Mirror I don’t pin my hopes on an uprising unless the banks and the rest have already gone down. Then it might be, as in Czechoslovakia 1989, velvet.
Listened to Profile on Radio 4 recently focusing on the boss of Ecotricity, portrayed as a somewhat eccentric, neurodivergent trailblazer, an innovator, a grafter, now a millionaire. So he’s doing alright out of it! How much is invested back I wonder?
At least, I like to think, we (humanity) are no longer the unknowing veritable frog in a beaker of water. It goes like this: drop a frog into boiling water it will jump out, drop it into cool water and heat slowing it will boil to death. Or are we?
Either way I figure we can all do our bit. We can’t all drape the prime ministers home in black fabric, leading to the hysterical headlines, well done Greenpeace for that.
We can’t all be involved in arrestable actions, even XR recognise that, however we can all make a difference and it will take all of us to build a new world out of the ashes of the old.
And while the climate emergency is not in the future, but now, let’s not lose sight that what we do now effects tomorrow. We have a sobering choice to create a liveable future or not. Is a huge responsibility and, I feel, a huge honour to be alive at this time, to face this challenge.
And we will, I believe, with the right kind of sustained action, ingenuity, imagination and a lot of hard work, collectively, become the Phoenix, who rose from the ashes in mythology, whose qualities as a spirit animal include resilience, passion, determination, compassion and perhaps, above all, forgiveness. Be the Phoenix, not the frog!
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A blog post by Anne Enith Cooper
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