Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis?

We are burning ancient plants and animals (aka fossil fuels, not renewable) to jet around and wear fast fashion, and build highways and skyscrapers, and heat outdoor swimming pools in autumn, and shiver inside in summer, and convert lush ecosystems into sprawling and unwalkable suburbs with silly lawns, and commute alone in our cars to jobs that do

Though these actions are worth taking, a fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold corporate polluters accountable. In fact, one recent study suggests that the emphasis on small personal actions can actually undermine support for the substantive climate policies needed.3 That’s quite con

Most of the institutions shaping the world today are incapable of imagining anything other than their everlasting existence. And so things carry on, no matter how toxic, how ridiculous, or how contrary to values that most people share.

Staring down the barrel of human-driven climate change, an astronomical cost of living, and a poor economic outlook, most people recognize that they are far closer in life to desperate refugees than they are to the politicians, war profiteers, and rapacious capitalists who create them.

I kept thinking about the fact that humans have an extremely small chance (if we have one at all) to save ourselves from destruction in the next few years, and that the only thing that could save us would be everyone just stopping, refusing to be part of the insistence on growth that almost no one questions, even though it is deadly.

Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas, and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled govern