If Brian May really wanted to raise awareness of climate change, he’d chain himself to Theresa May

It is hard not to have the deepest respect for the loveable, brilliant rockstar and astrophysicist, but I hear he’s wanting to do a megaconcert to “raise awareness” of climate change.

Raise awareness of climate change! Who isn’t “aware” of climate change?

Flying in millionaire rock stars and an audience from all over the world in order to raise awareness of climate change is like going on a binge to celebrate joining AA.

Don’t get me wrong — it sounds like a lot of fun.

Brian May! Wow! And all these other old rock stars! Get to see ’em together for one last time! “I was in London, and there was Ringo, and then Bono, and then Sting, and then most of Queen!— they did Bohemian Rhapsody with a tape of Freddie Mercury, and then they did this less-famous B side that only I (and two million people who bought the album) knew and then he talked about the planet and they did a tribute to Bowie and then We Will Rock You! I was so sad when I had to go back to California, that nine hour time difference is brutal.”

But what good is more awareness? We need action!

I used to go to marches in New York City, I can’t remember the first and the last one being the Climate Change March, and after I left there were many others — marches against Trump, the Women’s Marches, the March For Science, with many characters I knew, the Billionaires for Bush and all the funny signs and the puppets.

They make everyone happy. You meet new friends. You feel “group energy”. It’s a big party!

But these big events are immensely environmentally costly and accomplish little or nothing concrete. Yes, people make connections, you can very reasonably argue that the Women’s Marches lead to more women being elected, but the left has been doing parties, concerts and benefits for forty years and during that time it’s been one crushing defeat after another, particularly in the United States.

This is not a game here! They are using live ammo and they are winning, and winning, and the best we can do against them is to throw parties? I don’t even know if these are better than nothing because they are a substitute for actual action.

Someone said that these events are inspirational for kids.

Kids. I think about them a lot — have you thought about what a six-year-old will see by the time he’s my age, fifty years from now in 2069?

In the last fifty years, we’ve killed about half of the non-domesticated mammals on the planet; about half the fish bigger than about my hand; about half of the flying insects; about half of the amphibians.

In half a century we replaced about half of all the creatures in the world big enough to really notice with cows, pigs and chickens and a whole hell of a lot of carbon dioxide.

And it’s only accelerating.

So think of what life will be like for those six-year-olds I saw in New York City parades, what it will be like for them fifty years from now, when we’ve killed another half of all non-meat creatures, when Sandy’s cousin comes for a visit every seven or five or three years? How do you think they will feel when they look back at these marches and concerts to raise awareness?

“That all worked out. Those brave boomers, sacrificing so much to have their huge fun gatherings. That was definitely the right response to this world-shattering crisis — both the appropriate direction and the appropriate magnitude.”

Sarcasm plays badly in text, so let me say, that no, they are going to curse our fucking names for just rolling over and letting it happen, and pretending that we could consume our way out of the impending catastrophe.

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We are out of other options. Widespread civil disobedience to shut down cities and the economy is the only solution. The government will commit acts of violence; people will be hurt and even die.

Historically, this has been the only, literally the only effective tactic for the people to force significant change (and yes, it has failed too, but we cannot give up on the world). This article goes both wider and deeper into this matter and is essential reading.

(This is one of the reasons I left the United States. Years before, I had been advised by a lawyer to stop going to demonstrations as a non-citizen, because if I were arrested it would badly damage my life — and I realized I simply did not love the United States enough to become a citizen. I gave those guys a chance — thirty years is a long time — and almost everyone I care about is there, but I don’t love the USA itself, not at all, and there was never a time I did.

(If I could have become a New York City citizen I would have. New York City I still love dearly even though she is so sadly degraded from her peak — sic transit gloria mundi. But in about two and one-half years I will be Dutch, and then I can get arrested here all I like — and I intend to. Extinction Rebellion is extremely active here, and also this is a country that treats political dissent with respect, even when they are breaking the law.)

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A dire emergency that threatens our entire future and he’s all, “Let’s have a concert and waste a ton of carbon in the process”? Hello — we cannot consume our way out of this mess. (I might also add that the previous Live Aid was not at all about AIDS as apparently a lot of people seem to think, but actually had serious negative effects.)

If Brian May wanted to raise awareness of climate change, he could bicycle over to 10 Downing Street and chain himself to the door (perhaps not Theresa May herself) with a sign and give interviews to reporters about it until he got arrested.

He could explain that Theresa May’s government is currently bending all their thoughts about the Brexit, an imaginary problem that is entirely artificial in both its genesis and continued life, while ignoring a massive threat to the continued existence of our species and all others.

He could point out that humanity is about to kill one million species in a globe-spanning murder-suicide.

He could call for specific action — like a group of impartial, international scientists of the highest renown to come up with binding recommendations as to how to deal with the problem.

And then when he gets arrested, Pete Townshend could bike over the next day and do the same thing at the House of Commons.

If every day a beloved British celebrity deliberately obstructed business in 10 Downing and the Houses of Parliament and got arrested, there would be far more “awareness” of the issue because it would be on the news everyday!, and far more actual change, and involve zero greenhouse gas output.

Don’t get me wrong — we need more awareness, but what we need to be aware of is the horrible consequences of our actions. (The following is synthesized from a lot of reading, and the numbers are to give you an overall picture —

In the best possible case, 50 years from now tens of millions of people will have died, hundreds of millions of people displaced, very roughly 25% of the wild creatures above the size of your hand that were alive in 1969 will remain at stable populations — yes, three-quarters of all the flying insects, fish, noj-domesticated land mammals and all the rest will have died but we will have stabilized that remaining area and hopefully will guard it forever. Species extinction rates will start to reduce towards background levels (we are now at somewhere like 1000, and we need to get that number to 1),

Though we will undoubtedly lose some cities to water (I’m looking at you, Miami and Mumbai) many other places like New York City and Amsterdam will harden and empolder and continue to function.

Most people in 2069 has an extremely modest lifestyle — because a great deal of our world GDP goes towards the mitigation of the environmental problems caused between 1950 and 2050, because there’s a lot less of money in general, because we’re mostly out of resources to exploit for a quick buck, and because obsessive consumption of material goods will be seen as a form of dangerous mental illness after the excesses of 1950–20x0.

But it’s not a bad world in many ways — there is something to fight for.

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However, that is not the future we moving towards as I write this.

If we continue as we have been so far, my rough estimate is that in 2069 roughly one in seven non-domesticated animals will still left alive from 1969, but worse, the ongoing extinction rates will have increased from today, as they have consistently since 1969, so there is even more carnage to come.

Some significant quantity of the area between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will be uninhabitable, due to killing heat waves or to being underwater. Four billion people live in the tropics today

Category 5 storms will even more common, and we might even see the first Category 6 storm — which is ten times a Category 5 in power. The same droughts that have gotten more common in the last fifty years will become more common yet again, seeming permanent. Droughts and storms mean disruption to the food supply.

A death toll I don’t want even to think about! If 5% of humanity is displaced, and 30% of food production disrupted, with 10 billion people at the peak

And in this world, there will still be consumer technology and very rich people in 2069, and very likely some gasoline cars still on the roads of America, probably till the end.

And all the oil and gas and coal will eventually be pumped out of the Earth and burned, condemning us to such ridiculous levels of planetary heating and seawater levels that I won’t tell you what they are.

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This horrible future I just painted is the Trump/Obama future — the future we would get under a continuation of either Trump’s or, and it makes me sad to say this, Obama’s policies on climate change.

Sure — there’s a difference between them — it got worse a little slower under Obama, and has sped up a little under Trump.

But compared with the magnitude of the issue, it makes no difference.

In order to have a hope of getting to the poor-but-happy scenario, we need to start spending 1% of the world’s GDP immediately on converting all our sources of energy away from fossil fuels.

In the US that would have be $200 billion every year spent by the government — pretty modest compared to the $4.7 trillion budget. It might cost a lot more for a while until a completely carbon free environment were worked out.

But it also means extremely rapid phasing out of *absolutely all* usage of fossil fuels for energy production — no more burning coal, oil, gas, anything! — and nearly all animal agriculture will go, and a shitload of other things like “a lot less concrete!”, and that has to be done by strong legislation and active enforcement.

Trillions of dollars will be lost from the pockets of extremely rich people and there will be every attempt to prevent this and no doubt a lot of violence.

So we had better get started.

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Two choices — one, a battered but more or less intact world, where we live modest lives and can look to an actual future for our grandchildren.

Or a planet where 90% of all wild creatures are dead, the rest are dying, and droughts, floods, and famine are part of everyone’s lives, and the prospect of the heat increasing indefinitely for centuries to come.

Two choices. Your President Carter laid it out to you much more politely and America took the other choice, the black pill instead of the green pill.

Then forty years of absolute, humiliating defeat and all the American left has done during that time is puppets and parades and concerts to raise awareness, and voting for the Democrats.

In the last election, neither “the environment” nor “climate change” were the ten top-most important issues amongst voters but almost every Democratic voter mentioned it.

Awareness is perfectly high. It’s understanding of the consequences that is low. A rock concert isn’t the venue to convey this…

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Now we’re at the point where a million species are about to die — https://nymag.com/.../un-report-humans-are-driving-1...

And the plan is STILL to ask our lords and masters really really politely this time to please maybe slow down a tiny bit on the destruction because even though they haven’t listened yet in two generations, maybe this time they will?

This is the same plan as for fifty years, and yet we’ve been walking and recently jogging down the path towards that burnt-out dying Earth.

Come on, Brian. You can do better than that!