Thinking we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperature record.
filed in Climate Change
Lies are a lot like gourds. They come in hundreds of different varieties, sizes, and bulbous, twisty shapes. Some are off-puttingly spiked and prickly, while others remind us of fall childhood memories.Some lies, if prepared correctly like squash or pumpkin, can appear delicious and irresistible, concealing a dark reality: “I can’t believe you’re not a model! For five thousand dollars I can photograph you so you have a portfolio.” The central aim of most lies is to avoid consequences. When an untruth is especially desperate and self-serving, it can be unintentionally hilarious: “Yes I tried marijuana… but I did not inhale.”
Embezzling money or murdering someone for the insurance pay-out are part of a phylum of lies that cross into serious criminality. These deceptions’ sphere of influence often stays fairly localized. But sometimes covering up the initial lie can spawn lots of other lies that spread and spread, like with Watergate or Bernie Madoff. What started as a little decorative Thanksgiving-gourd-sized lie suddenly becomes larger and quite ugly. This family of lies strives to not only avoid consequences, but to gain status and resources, another common end game of many deceptions. And then there are the large society-wide lies: hulking distortions and misrepresentations watered and tended to by leaders, mass media, culture, and industry.
This particular sub-genus of grifts, half-truths and strategic omissions have led throughout modern history to wars, mass death, societal collapse, and the theft of humanity’s great treasures. “Manifest Destiny.” “Aryan superiority.” “The divine right of kings.” “The domino theory.” “Israel has a right to defend itself.” “Oxycontin isn’t addictive because it’s time-released.” These county-fair, blue ribbon-winning prevarications tend to be driven by a myriad of short-term incentives, irrational manipulated fears, unexamined assumptions, convenient blind spots, and of course… the desire to avoid consequences and expand status and resources.
“People always pay their mortgages” became the half-true rallying cry used by Wall Street, news media, and politicians to collapse the world economy in 2007. Turns out when you change lending rules to feed an unregulated derivatives market by giving mortgages to people who can’t pay them… they don’t. “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction” (along with the subvariations on the central lie—“We want to bring democracy,” “If you don’t support the troops, you support the terrorists,” “Saddam orchestrated 9/11,” etc) killed a million people, devastated the entire nation of Iraq, and in many ways also gutted the United States, all while enriching oil companies, weapons manufacturers, big banks, juicing TV ratings, and expanding the power of the Bush/Cheney presidency.
However, there is one type of rare, gargantuan, towering lie that makes all the other mass lies throughout human history seem like frightened, scurrying, little adorable fibs.
It is a lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually—as the deception entered mainstream culture—even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day. It is a constantly growing gourd that even as a baby back in the 1970s was the size of three aircraft carriers. These days it is so massive it is almost easier to refer to what isn’t part of it (Disneyland, a BLT, that green croc by the side of the highway) than what is.
This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.”
To be clear, we are not talking about the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President. And we’re not referring to cartoonish hucksters and “climate skeptics” like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson.
Polling shows only 14.8 percent of Americans deny the basic sixth grade science behind global warming. To put that in perspective, as much as 10 percent of the population still believes the Earth is flat.
No, the monstrous, misshapen garden colossus lie we’re referring to is subscribed to by most of the U.S., has stopped and slowed climate action far more than outright denial, and keeps growing and growing. Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.”
Less embarrassing than “climate change is a Chinese hoax,” but every bit as unscientific and ridiculous, it is the preferred lie of the ruling class, mainstream news media, and corporations.
Sir David King—former science advisor to the United Kingdom, professor at Oxford and then Cambridge, winner of too many awards to list and as establishment as they come—was quoted as saying that what we do over the next three to four years will determine the fate of humankind.
He said this… in 2021.
Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it.
All of these distortions have robbed us of the most critical element people need to understand a threat and adjust their actions accordingly: context.
And make no mistake, when it comes to how much time we have, the data and the geological record are crystal clear.
For some badly-needed context, the last three years, likely for the first time in over 100,000 years, have averaged above the Paris Accords’ “do not cross” 1.5 degrees celsius planetary warming. Only ten years ago, that was considered catastrophic, but now mainstream news tells us it’s just a number.
And with a bump coming next year from a growing, historic El Niño up to 1.7 degrees celsius average warming, likely to cause agricultural failure and food shortages, we are staring right at the vaunted 2C number.
Why is 2C so vaunted?
Let’s do the context thing again: 2C will mean we have completely left the stable climate period known as the Holocene. This is the 11,000-year-old era that has given us large-scale crop and livestock agriculture, which gave us cities, written language, modern science and medicine, and warm beds and showers.
Before that, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other.
The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.
That is what we stand to lose. In fact, if our institutions, news and elected officials continue to feed and water the oil company-conceived mega-falsehood that climate breakdown is something just “our great-grandkids need to worry about,” human civilization as we know it will collapse and billions could die. And we’re not talking about the far distant future. We are talking about collapse within years, not centuries. For real.
This is right around the corner. A joint study by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the University of Exeter suggests that a 2C temperature increase by 2050—which we are hurtling towards, with no plans of slowing down—could result in two billion deaths. And that is virtually the best-case scenario, as temperature rise predictions have worsened and put 1.5C of warming out of reach. According to the United Nations, in order to limit warming to 2C, we would need “emissions to drop around 35 per cent by 2035.” Even if “current national commitments” were fully implemented they “would cut emissions only 12 to 15 per cent by that date.”
The other scenario, which scientists now say “recent data aligns more closely with,” is 3C of warming. At that level, the Exeter authors warn of up to 4 billion deaths. Four billion. That is half the planet. In 26 years or less. Even for those lucky enough to survive the worst weather events, life as we know it would cease to exist due to war, involuntary mass migration, and “catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.” According to the lead author of the report, there is no realistic plan in place to avoid this scenario.
How effective and finely tuned is this civilization-killing lie? Recently, out of curiosity, I asked the people at my nonprofit media studio, Yellow Dot, to create a graph with two data points: mentions of climate on U.S. broadcast news and recent spiking global warming numbers. And this is what they sent me:
One look at the near perfect correlatory X at the center of this graph, and it is clear something about humankind and western civilization is profoundly and deeply broken. The revelation hit me as almost biological in its clarity: as a species, we are behaving like a pod of dolphins beaching themselves because some kind of brain parasite disrupted their echolocation. Our ability to share knowledge and understand the situation we’re in has become utterly compromised, and deadly.
If so many people weren’t dying and going to die, it would almost be impressive. The lie and the financial markets, corporations, and billionaires that suckle on it have created a vast, highly sensitive information system over the decades, consisting of careerists, company men, and people who fear for their jobs. That system has so internalized big capital’s desires that it nearly instantly responds to any threat to big capital’s hegemony. And remember, by “threats” we are referring to the reality of billions of deaths.
Lately, as extreme weather goes into uncharted territory, broadcast and much of online and print news has increasingly been framing each freakish weather disaster as a one-off event disconnected from one of the fastest and most deadly shifts in Earth’s history.
For example, take this clip from an NBC news report two weeks ago, about tornadoes striking New York City. It’s remarkable for how it paints a picture of the scale of the crisis we’re facing, without ever mentioning what the crisis is. And there are thousands of news pieces just like it:
Pieces like this put millions of people in active danger by robbing them of the key information they need to adjust their personal risk assessment. Namely, that because oil companies are flooding the planet with heat trapping gases, our environment is getting more and more dangerous every day.
The most recent study of the earth energy imbalance or EEI—the difference between the heat the Earth absorbs from the Sun, and the amount it sends back out into space—shows 12 Hiroshima bombs of heat being trapped by greenhouse gases every single second of every day. As recently as 2020, it was only 5 or 6 atomic bombs’ worth. That’s how fast the crisis is accelerating, but you’d never know it by watching the TV news.
It’s one thing to warn your teen daughter who is going into the city for the weekend not to take a ride from a stranger, and entirely another to fail to mention that the city she’s going to is hosting a serial killer convention.
At this exact moment, oceans are hotter than they’ve ever been since record-keeping began, and air temperatures on average are warmer than they’ve been in around 100,000 years. We refer to humans of the Pleistocene as Hunter Gatherers and not farmers, fishermen, influencers or IT consultants for a reason. Good luck taking corn to market in 135 degree Fahrenheit heat while dodging dry lightning with a saber-toothed tiger stalking you.
Back in 2015, the number chosen for preserving the Holocene and avoiding at least a billion people starving, dying in extreme heat, or in storms or fires was set at 1.5 degrees Celsius, through a mixture of science and political considerations, formalized in the Paris Climate Accord.
We are, once again for the people in the back, averaging over that number for the past three years. And never mind that several renowned scientists, like Michael Mann, think even 1.2C of warming should have been a do-not-cross line.
Still have doubts? If you do, I don’t blame you. We live in a consumer culture hammering us daily with triggering political proclamations, sales pitches, and clickbait designed to spike engagement responses in the brain. “Immigrants are coming for your way of life!” “This new SUV is the best ever!” “Great White Shark Eats Porn Star!” Most of it is misleading, in one way or another, so there’s a natural tendency to assume that “Planet about to boil!” might be too.
But Big Oil and its PR agencies know this, and they’ve weaponized the healthy skepticism we’ve developed as a survival mechanism against those voices speaking the truth about the urgent state of the climate.
After all, who are you going to believe? The New York Times, an outlet famous for downplaying climate urgency, or some weird scientist saying crazy things? Even when a profession famous for dead-eyed, bottom-line risk assessment like insurance actuaries releases a statement about how serious the situation is, corporate news media turns it into what people used to call a “below the fold story,” framing it as just another minor environmental item—not headline news.
In service of the Great Lie, the government of the United Kingdom even tried to bury a climate report from its own intelligence agency before it was leaked. To my knowledge there aren’t many spies being called tree huggers, unless they’re undercover of course. But the MI5 and MI6 are clear-eyed about the danger that’s coming. The report warned that “global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity.”
No one wants to eat a raw pumpkin. It looks like a Dr. Seuss character’s brain, is full of seeds, and has no real taste. But like with any good lie, when the right sugar, spices, a buttery crust, and time in the oven is added, pumpkin pie becomes a cherished classic.
The same thing happens with the climate lie. The financial markets, massive oil companies, the banks that finance them, the travel industry, car companies, your career and job security, the people you’re having dinner with who don’t want to be bummed out, all of these incentives and forces don’t want you to know you are eating a big, weird gourd.
And as long as we go with their mendacious flow, hundreds of millions, and then billions will die well before “Net Zero by 2050” or “our great grandkids’ future” arrive. Because we are out of time. And we need to get to work immediately. There are a million things to do.
Exposing the Big Game 