PART SIX: CLIMATE APOCALYPSE

[CW: Starvation, wildlife destruction, suicide, images of physical symptoms of certain diseases (SFW), violence]

A massive special thank you to @ramencult, @PearseAnderson, @TallgirlBigcity, @NCRA13, @madelinegombis.

They helped massively with this and have created detailed research documents for this.

If you would like to find our research document or read this in document form, you can do so here:

Research Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13hjFQnyRHfQiSZ2fHD4jjvudaPOR99WwZHwdImylD_4/edit?usp=sharing

Thread Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h11xGr3rUOyf9VhY5yEXwgCpul-q49McQCZ1jhNiQXk/edit?usp=sharing

How old will you be in 2030?

Your answer to that question, and how much of your life you will have left after 2030, will be perhaps the most important question you will have to ask yourself in your life.

No, I'm not exaggerating when I say that.

In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - a group of all the best climate scientists - released a report.

The report refuted a previously held belief by the scientific community - that being under 1.5°c warming since pre-industrial levels would be OK

That report found that, contrary to what we used to believe, 1.5°C warming would actually be incredibly damaging to our world - and us.

The 2°C ceiling we had continuously set ourselves was shown to be significantly more catastrophic than we anticipated.

The problem with science is that nothing is concrete - after years of rigorous education and study, scientists communicate their findings without making concrete conclusions - they always employ as much nuance as possible.

The reason this is a problem is because when scientists go on TV and talk about climate change, because of their hesitation to use strong, alarming language...they can often struggle to convey how truly petrified we should be.

So, that's what this thread is for. I fully intend to scare the living shit out of you and instill you with a cold, gripping panic about what is coming within the lifetimes of most of ours - degree by degree.

BUT - there is hope. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and this thread ends with hope, so get through it all.

I want to show you why climate change is not just something we can just turn off - climate change is us rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, and when it reaches the top it starts to roll downhill the other side; and then we can't stop it. 2030 is the top of that hill.

I want to show you why climate change is not just something we can just turn off - climate change is us rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, and when it reaches the top it starts to roll downhill the other side; and then we can't stop it. 2030 is the top of that hill.

Droughts are getting longer and more severe, and wildfires that look like the gates of hell have sprang open rage across western North America and Australia, & the Indonesian Government is talking about moving their capital of Jakarta to a different city because of flood risk.

We are in the grips of a crisis now, right this second. So...how can it get worse? And what can we do about it?

1.5 DEGREES OF WARMING:

This used to be the point at which scientists thought we were OK. We most definitely are not. At this temperature, heatwaves across Europe will happen every single year, and these 'new' heatwaves will be as hot as the Sahara Desert.

If, like me, you live in a Western European country, domestic air conditioning is not something a huge amount of people have as it doesn’t usually get hot enough to need it.

Which means that heatwaves are a new front of class warfare - those with the cash to afford air conditioning in their homes will be safer from heat stress than poor people.

At 1.5 degrees, this will become a yearly occurrence not just in Europe but many parts of the world where the heat will become extreme and borderline uninhabitable - killing tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people every year.

And in years where it becomes as hot as the Sahara...who knows how many?

In the 2002 heatwave, billions of Euros worth of crops were destroyed and rivers began drying up in Italy, causing irrigation systems to fail to function along with hydroelectricity systems.

Wildfires raged across Portugal and the heat became so intense in the Mediterranean that stressed plants began to EMIT carbon dioxide instead of taking it in.

This means we will enter into a lethal positive feedback loop if it gets too hot where carbon emissions will become a runaway cart from us. But it's not just Europe that will feel this extreme heat:

North and Central North America, North and South Africa and the Middle East all too will be targets of extreme heat. Billions of crops being destroyed, rivers drying up and irrigation systems failing - people will be literally dropping dead in the fucking streets.

This is 1.5 degree warming. We're expected to hit this by 2032. I will be in my early thirties when this begins happening. This is what the Paris Climate Accord committed world nations to. It is anything but fucking "safe".

This is why the IPCC looked at over 6,000 studies into this and came to the conclusion of "Oh fuck we actually need to really fucking avoid 1.5 degrees warming".

So...can it be avoided? Can we avoid hitting 1.5 degrees warming?

Yes. But the IPCC said that it would take the same level, if not a more intense amount, of national mobilisation that was seen by the major powers in World War II - but on a global scale.

Let's not mince words; it's the single greatest challenge humans have ever had to face as a collective species. It *is* possible - just unfathomably difficult and would require widespread economic planning and large, rapid changes in our own individual lifestyles.

So that's 1.5 degrees warming, and that's bad. How much can a half a degree make?

A colossal difference.

2 DEGREE CELSIUS WARMING:

At two degrees warming, we will see the human species gripped in an absolute horror show.

At this level we expect 6.6 million square kilometres of permafrost to start thawing.

Why is that so terrible?

Firstly, because melting permafrost releases a hell of a lot of methane (which has a higher warming effect than carbon dioxide) which means that melting ice caps and permafrost becomes a self-accelerating extinction.

But that is also so fucking terrifying because we know that there are pathogens frozen in that permafrost - pathogens like anthrax.

In August 2016, 20 people in Siberia were hospitalised after being infected with fucking anthrax and a 12 year-old boy was killed after the body of a deer killed by anthrax millions of years ago thawed and the anthrax pathogen that killed it made its way into the water...

...and food supply of the local population. But we know anthrax. What we don't know is what living nightmares is potentially lurking in that permafrost. Are we potentially reawakening the next bubonic plague by thawing that permafrost?

The scary truth is that we won't know...until it's too late.

People are wrong when they say Hell doesn't freeze over. It's been frozen over for thousands of years - it's been frozen in Arctic permafrost. Thawing the permafrost could quite literally be opening the gates of Hell.

Not just that.

As the rest of the Earth warms, animals will be forced to migrate en masse. This means animals carrying tropical diseases (such as malaria) that you might have never come into contact with could be coming to your country, your state, your county...

your neighbourhood, your street. Get ready for the tropics in Oklahoma, France, Germany, UK, Louisiana and Arkansas.

Lumberers cutting down tropical rainforests will be coming into contact with wildlife that carry diseases people from the Global North have really not had to deal with - shit like Ebola, camel flu and SARS.

To give you an idea of why this should really fucking scare you is because diseases like camel flu have a mortality rate of 36% - meaning that more than a third of people who catch it will die from it.

If you think that our medical bodies are suddenly just *prepared* to deal with deadly tropical diseases arriving at European and American shores...you're delusional. If mosquitoes become commonplace in Europe and North America, that means mosquito-borne...

...diseases become commonplace too. Malaria, dengue, Zika, West Nile Virus, yellow fever and a litany of other diseases could become far more common in Europe and N. America.

To give you an idea of how deadly these diseases are, according to UNICEF, malaria is the biggest killer of children on Earth. Period. 3000 children die every day from malaria, and it kills over a million people each year - most of them children.

When places that weren't incredibly hot start to become incredibly hot, and when already incredibly hot places start to become intolerably hot...humans and wildlife will start to move where it's cooler. Wildlife will bring all of their tropical diseases with them.

And if you want to see what barbarism we will truly devolve into...I would like you to examine what happened during the Syrian refugee crisis. In some of the best conditions...European nations like mine still allowed children like Aaylan Kurdi to drown in the oceans.

Now...I would like you to imagine what will happen when a population starts worrying about what diseases the wildlife will be carrying...and whether any humans will be carrying them too. It would only take one powerful right wing populist to make that feral fever dream reality.

If you think the response of nations like the UK, Italy and Hungary to the refugee crisis has been inhumane...just you wait until European populations start seeing outbreaks of tuberculosis and polio amongst other diseases we consider ourselves safe from.

Increased population densities will also create ideal conditions for a devastating pandemic - with the collapse of global infrastructure and the vast numbers of people moving from place to place...

... we will be incapable of stopping the outbreak next time SARS or MERS jumps over from animals to humans. European nations will condemn *millions* to drown in those oceans.

European nations *will* see climate refugees - men, women and children - drown in those oceans if their populations are scared of previously tropical diseases spreading onto their continent.

They will see refugees coming ashore shot on sight. The darkest days of humanity truly are in front of us if we carry on as we are. Never underestimate what savagery people will devolve to when they're scared.

If you combine the deforestation of tropical areas like the Amazon where diseases that humans don't often come into contact with are carried in the wildlife, with these areas getting too hot to live in so the wildlife migrates where it is cooler (carrying these same diseases)...

...with the fact that we are very quickly running out of antibiotics that work.

it should paint quickly the image that we are hurtling towards a world where the spread of unknown pathogens that had been sealed away in permafrost...

, anthrax, MERS, SARS and Ebola is combined with an effective collapse in modern medicine.

However, what is more likely to spread rapidly throughout the Global North is mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika.

How will this affect us?

If ecosystems start to break down, that means bees will eventually die. Which means that we will stop having pollination. Which means plants will die. Which means our crops will die.

If you don't think this will affect you...just you wait until food becomes the rarest commodity on Earth. If you think you have seen human barbarity, just wait until those same humans are starving and desperate for food.

This won't mean millions starving.

It will mean billions starving. Including you.

If the MERS, SARS, anthrax or fungi doesn't get you first, starvation will.

And in this new world...how do you think people will react to it?

For example...what do you think this would do to suicide rates?

Because I can very much seeing enormous suicide gatherings being set up where people mass commit suicide just to escape the absolute horror of the world we're hurtling towards.

And in a world where the end times are upon us, do you really think society will carry on in an orderly manner? Do you not think looting and barbarism would start to become commonplace among the population?

The protected circle of humanity will continue to shrink as resources become more and more scarce from the Global North...to national citizens in those nations...to only those that can afford to be protected…

And I guarantee that you are not in that inner circle of people who will be protected.

Don't think Walking Dead because this world makes the Walking Dead look quite mild by comparison.

We already have the technology to begin fighting this - but it’s not economically available to the masses.

And when it comes to rising ocean levels its becoming increasingly difficult to predict because not only are we heating the air, heat is getting trapped in the oceans too..

...which means that ice sheets in the Arctic circle and Greenland are melting from above *and* below - meaning they're melting much MUCH faster than we estimated even in our most extreme estimates.

This will mean that Florida and New York could be completely underwater. If you're worried about refugees from Central and Latin America or Africa,

you'll want to start thinking about the tens of millions of people that will be fleeing inland as climate refugees to escape the inundation of their homes.

Warming oceans doesn't just mean rising ocean levels either - it means more ocean water gets evaporated, which means larger, faster and deadlier hurricanes and torrential disastrous downpours.

Climate change is putting our ocean ecosystems in mortal danger, which is incredibly dangerous considering 50% of our oxygen on Earth comes from phytoplankton, so if you're asthmatic you should be paying close attention to this.

And as things get hotter, certain soils will become completely unusable.

And guess what?

This is two degrees warming. This is the point at which the boulder has reached the top of the hill and will start rolling down the other side, when it will be happening too fast for us to stop it.

This is where it becomes a runaway train that we can’t stop as we trigger such aggressive positive feedback loops that nothing can stop it.

Two degrees is the death knell for humanity and most life on Earth.

We're on course to reach potentially up to 5.5 degrees celsius (according to the Hadley Centre’s model). But we’ve got three degrees warming to come next.

So let’s look at what will come of that.

THREE DEGREES WARMING:

At three degrees, the world will have been reshaped so dramatically that it will barely be recognisable to today. Cities like Osaka in Japan, Shanghai in China and Miami in the United States will have been completely flooded and populations of tens of...

...millions will need to flee away from coastal areas; farmland that feeds hundreds of millions of people will become unusable; and the Amazon rainforest will burn to the ground as a result of wildfire (Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas).

In many parts of Southern Africa (such as Botswana), drought will become a permanent feature.

The dunes of the Kalahari at this temperature will start to grow again, and massive sandstorms will see the entirety of nation like Botswana become an uninhabitable desert.

Botswana could just become a nation of sand dunes by 2070 if the Kalahari Desert grows, which means Botswana would effectively drown under sand as none of the nation would be inhabitable any more.

And if we reach 3 degrees warming globally, that would create such an aggressive positive feedback loop that it would quickly catapult us into an extra 1.5 degrees Celsius warming as it reverses the carbon cycle.

Instead of absorbing it, plants and soil will start to release it in unfathomable amounts. When that boulder reaches the top of the hill and starts rolling down the other side, it will pick up momentum and get faster and faster and faster and we won’t be able to stop it.

At three degrees, it is expected that rainfall in some areas of the Amazon Rainforest will just...stop...by 2100. The Amazon Rainforest will reach Saharan levels of heat, and instead of there being several thousand kilometres of lush vegetation there that is...

...keeping our planet alive...there will be no vegetation in sight. Three degrees will meet the total browning and killing off of the Amazon Rainforest entirely.

20% of the world’s oxygen is produced by the Amazon, and another 50% is produced by phytoplankton in the oceans (which will be dead at two degrees warming I might add). So please, I would like you to imagine a world where 70% of our oxygen is gone.

The Amazon is one of the richest areas of biodiversity on Planet Earth, so we will be condemning thousands of different species to extinction, which will mean the global collapse of ecosystems and food chains. Once again, meaning starvation.

In Australia, rainfall will become far more rare in places like Perth and Sydney, and the Murray-Darling River Basin will begin to dry up - meaning the intense rationing of water and potential evacuation of the population away from the south and to the Tasmania region northwards.

And this isn’t even mentioning how many could die from savage wildfires - for those who aren’t aware, there is something called ‘crown fires’ which spread in an outward direction faster than people can run.

For example, in 1983 a crown fire in Australia spread over 500m...in 15 seconds. It killed 12 firefighters. Australia will burn.

In the States, it is ironically the people who keep voting for the party that doesn’t acknowledge climate change...

...that will be the first and most brutally hit by the climate apocalypse. Super Hurricanes with 180mph winds will ravage Houston. Millions of people will flee the South and these lethal hurricanes that will tear apart the nation...

...more successfully than any foreign enemy ever had...or could dream of doing. New Orleans will be completely underwater and the entire city will be abandoned.

During the Super Hurricane, manholes will be launched out of the ground five metres into the air without warning...

as water completely overwhelms the sewer lines. People won’t be avoiding cracks in the pavement anymore, there is no superstitious danger here; there is only the real danger of being killed by a leaping manhole cover.

Galveston will have been completely inundated by waves literally dozens of metres high.

The structural integrity of the towers in Houston’s central business district will be truly be threatened, and the winds will be so intense that windows will shatter...

and bark will be ripped from the trees. These new Super Hurricanes, we will have to create an entirely new category of hurricane for it.

Central America will be ravaged by drought, which means that Central Americans will abandon the continent...

...and flee northwards to the United States and Canada.

If anyone believes there’s a crisis at the border now…they haven’t seen anything yet. When you have 42.6m fleeing their continent northwards to find any chance of survival...

...that is when Americans, much like the Europeans had, will decide how they will deal with this - barbarism, or mercy?

On the other side of the world on the Indian Subcontinent, we look to Pakistan. Pakistan is hugely reliant on water from the Indus River for irrigation...

...and that river is reliant on mountain glaciers, especially from the K2 mountain. By 2090, and potentially earlier, that Indus River is expected to dry up completely - meaning that two neighbouring nuclear powers could come desperately close to conflict over water and food.

In the situation where the breadbasket of the country fails and food supplies dwindle, people will flee the country and Pakistan, a nuclear power, will become a failed state.

Back to America and in New York - the most populous city in America with a count of 8.5m (about the same as London, UK) - will not be economically viable anymore as great swathes of Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Staten Island and Long Island will be underwater.

By 2080, Long Island and New Jersey will be losing 3 metres a year permanently to the ocean. Millions of people will flee New York City either into the neighbouring states or into the mainland New York state.

The Big Apple will be forever lost.

For my British comrades in London, we could see the Thames flood barrier having to be raised up to 200 times a year to prevent flooding of the Thames.

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS?

If you live in North America or Europe...the answer is you. Kind of.

The energy sector by far contributes to most greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (which includes electricity and heating, industry, transport, etc…)...

at about 76% of our greenhouse gas emissions, and another 14% from agriculture - especially cattle farming. As cattle belch, they release methane which has a more intense heat-trapping effect than carbon dioxide.

This means that when Brazillian loggers cut down an area of the Amazon rainforest the size of France for cattle and soybean farming, it’s a huge double whammy for climate change.

But, let’s not forget this absolutely vital statistic (THIS NEEDS TO STICK IN YOUR MIND):

71% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just 100 companies.

I’ll say it again.

71% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just 100 companies.

It gets worse.

OF THOSE TOP 100 COMPANIES, 5O.25% OF GLOBAL EMISSIONS COME FROM 25 COMPANIES. JUST 25.

Here they are:

Whilst Europe, North America and China are the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters by far (Chinese people have less individual responsibility because they have literally more people in one country than America and the EU combined)...

...it’s not evenly spread who is putting out those emissions in these developed nations. The richest 10% of Earth are emitting half of all lifestyle greenhouse gas emissions on Earth.

The rich are killing the world with their extravagant lifestyles. Their private jets, private yachts, multiple cars and homes - it’s all energy, it’s all fuel, and it’s *all* contributing to the Climate Apocalypse.

The rich, with their first class travel, their Lamborghinis and supercars...will kill us all.

So look here, what I *really* don’t want you to do is individualise the problem. What I mean by that is I don’t want you to think that your individual actions as a consumer are going to do anything to mitigate the horror show that I have put in front of you here.

So, dear God, stop thinking in terms of “I need to have a meat-free day once a week” or “I need to use a hessian bag instead of plastic” or “I need to go vegan” or “I need to take a reusable cup to Starbucks” or “I need to cycle to work”.

HOWEVER

That is NOT TO SAY don’t do those things. All those things HELP...but they won’t make the difference. INDIVIDUAL CONSUMER CHOICE WILL NOT SAVE HUMANITY. THE MARKET WILL NOT REACT FAST ENOUGH TO SAVE HUMANITY - NOR WILL CONSUMERS.

So...what are we gonna do about it?

WHAT ACTION MUST BE CALLED FOR:

- WE MUST REACH CARBON NEUTRALITY BY 2030 - THAT MEANS ZERO. NO MORE FOSSIL FUELS. NO MORE COAL MINES. NO MORE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINES. NO MORE CATTLE FARMING. NO MORE OIL RIGS.

THE WORLD MUST BE POWERED TOTALLY ON 100% CLEAN, RENEWABLE ENERGY.

- WE MUST REACH CARBON NEGATIVITY BY 2035 - WE NEED TO IMPLEMENT PROGRAMS OF CARBON SEQUESTRATION TO REVITALISE PLANT LIFE.

-WE MUST RADICALLY CHANGE OUR USE OF PLASTICS ON EARTH.

-IF WE MUST HAVE MEAT, IT MUST BE LAB GROWN. TOTAL GLOBAL ELIMINATION OF CATTLE FARMING.

-THOUSANDS OF KILOMETRES OF FARMLAND MUST BE ROLLED BACK TO REFOREST ALL ACROSS THE WORLD.

- WE NEED TO INVEST INTO HYDROPONIC FARMS TO RETURN AS MUCH FARMLAND AS POSSIBLE TO FORESTRY

WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO ABOUT IT?! :

Now, I realise that I have just shown you a myriad of ways in which the incoming climate apocalypse could kill you, and you very well might want to wallow in anxiety and misery right now.

But you listen to me here - on this account, we have a zero tolerance policy towards fucking wallowing. So I won’t have it.

I didn’t bring you all this way to give you zero roadmap on how to escape.

told you not to think like a consumer. Instead I want you to think “How can I prepare my community?...How can I make sure elderly folk in my community are getting what they need?...What obstacles are in my way?”. And the reason I say that folks is this:

In the IPCC report released last October, they said that we need a level of global mobilisation on the level of what we had with World War II. That means a *daily* forceful push towards halting this apocalypse.

That means preparing for General Strikes.

We need hundreds of millions of people across the United States, EU, UK, Canada and Russia to refuse to go to work until global governments take the required action to halt the Climate Apocalypse.

Now for many people reading this, that will sound like an impossibility.

But I want you to think. What do you really need?

You need shelter - a roof over your head. You need clothes, warmth, food, water and potentially medicines if you’re diabetic or someone with another condition that needs medicine.

These General Strikes will not just be workers not going to work.

When they try to drag you out of your apartment, you and your neighbours must protect each other. What will they do? Arrest the entire street?

We need MASS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.

Will it grind the economy to a halt? Yes.

But currently that exact same economy is driving us towards human extinction. So, call me nuts, but I’ll take halting that fucking trajectory to actively carrying on with it.

Here’s what you need to do:

In your local community, you need to start knocking on your neighbours doors and talking to them about this. Ask a local Church, synagogue or mosque if you can use their place for an hour or so a week to talk about climate change and organise.

If you haven’t got that in your community, inquire with a county/council-ran community centre. Fuck it, failing that use a public park for God’s sake.

You need to start preparing for how your community will keep it’s shit together during potentially several weeks of a Strike.

Arrange food stores and people who will be able to cook for several hundred people at a time. Community centres and religious buildings will need to be some of the few places that are warm in these events, and when people don’t have anything to do in the days...

...when they’re not working they can spend their days in these centres. Otherwise they can be helping secure supplies or assisting the strike in other means.

Now here’s the thing that will get some people a bit uppity:

SOME PEOPLE WILL STILL NEED TO WORK ON A VOLUNTARY BASIS

Paramedics, firefighters, doctors, truck drivers; people who deal with medical emergencies or matters relating to supply chains WILL NEED TO STILL SUPPLY communities.

These people will need to be prioritised, and if folks can enroll in their local St Johns Ambulance or Red Cross and learn first aid training to be able assist with these types of things that would be helpful...

...HOWEVER, logistically it would be the easiest to keep as many people in one place as possible to avoid ambulances needing to go far to help people. Elderly people would absolutely need to be housed universally in community centres in order to keep them...

...warm, fed and looked after - the same goes for sick individuals.

What will this require?

Yes. It will require you potentially stealing things to carry it out. However, what is fucking worse - stealing...or the end of the human species?

During the Strikes, every single person must be thinking about what they can do to provide for people. Is there snow blocking lorries carrying food and other supplies? Grab a shovel and get clearing that snow if you can.

IF YOU ARE A POLICE OFFICER:

(DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT FAMILIAR WITH AMERICAN POLICE SO I CANNOT SPEAK DIRECTLY TO THEM BUT IF YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO WOULD AGREE WITH THIS MESSAGE WHO IS A POLICE OFFICER, SEND IT TO THEM AND ASK THEM TO START SPREADING IT AROUND THEIR OFFICES)

If you’re an officer...I need you to seriously consider what is more important - letting some people get away with stealing supplies from rich businessmen in order to keep the strike going to force our governments to take *real* action on fighting climate change...

...or upholding a law that will eventually kill you, your children and your grandchildren?

Sometimes in life...your human morality compass and what the law dictates contradict. In the event that you find yourself faced with the dilemma of what to do with people who are...

stealing supplies to feed people who are striking, I urge you not as someone with any shred or moral superiority or anything of that nature - but as a fellow human being who wishes to see a world that they could bring grandchildren into -

DO NOT OBSTRUCT STRIKING WORKERS FROM DOING WHAT THEY MUST; THE SURVIVAL OF THE HUMAN SPECIES DEPENDS ON IT.

HOW WE BRING THIS INTO REALITY:

What I need you to do, right this fucking second, without hesitation, is to join a union. If you’re in the UK you can choose from @unitetheunion , @GMB_union, @bfawu1 , @UsdawUnion , @unisontweets , @CWUnews , @RMTunion - loads of them.

You need you to, right now (don’t put it off to later, do it right now), join a trade union if you’re not already in one.

Next, is the big fucking part:

The American @AFLCIO , the British @The_TUC , the French @CFDT, CFTC, CGT, CFE-CGC and FO, the German DGB, Italian CGIL, CISL and UIL and the litany of Spanish trade unions to back motions calling for general strikes.

This must also go for their respective partners in Austria, Poland, Switzerland and the rest of the EU and Turkey.

THERE MUST BE INTERNATIONAL COORDINATION ON WHAT DATE IS CHOSEN TO DO THIS - IT MUST BE GIVEN ENOUGH TIME FOR PEOPLE TO PREPARE NETWORKS IN THEIR LOCAL COMMUNITIES TO CREATE SUPPLY CHAINS.

IT IS VITAL THESE TRADE UNIONS MOVE TO ENDORSE THIS AS WORKERS IN EVERY INDUSTRY MUST GO ON STRIKE.

Now, unfortunately, there is not much I can do to deter the scabs.For anyone who is not aware, a “scab” is a worker who crosses the picket and goes back to work during a strike - thus undermining the whole strike effort.

For scabs, I can’t really sway you with social ostracisation or any such thing - I can only say that you will be huge, primary contributors to the end of the world.

COUNTERING THE ARGUMENTS I CAN ALREADY FUCKING ANTICIPATE:

[ANY AND ALL FORM OF CLIMATE CHANGE SCEPTICISM/DENIAL]: I will not waste my time debating you anymore than I will argue that the Earth is not flat.

You refuse to recognise reality either because it personally benefits you to not do so (though it won’t when the oceans fucking swallow you up) or because you’re scared and don’t want to recognise that literally the end of the fucking world is on the horizon.

Either way, I won’t waste my time arguing with people who are not operating in reality; and billions of others won’t either.

“BUT THE CATTLE FARMERS JOBS!”: They can go and work on hydroponic farms and also, the price of literally anything is worth the survival of the human species and everything that we need to survive.

“YOU WILL PUT HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE GLOBALLY OUT OF WORK WHO WORK IN THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY!”: I’m 100% sure they would rather be out of a job rather than their grandchildren or great grandchildren be the last generation of human beings altogether.

CONCLUSION (AND A MESSAGE OF HOPE):

So look here, this is how I see human history- we’re a fucking complicated species. We don’t always know what we’re doing, and I’m positive that we’re often wrong about shit.

And where I’m absolutely positive that we were wrong was in designing a system of unlimited economic growth and consumption on a planet of limited resources.

In the arc of the human story…we have in the modern day perceived the Second World War as being the big battle; the last big fight of human history.

But...the real battle is against time; against our own human nature at struggling to tackle things that have long-term effects and come slowly and insidiously. The Climate Apocalypse is the largest challenge humanity has ever had to face.

Individual nations have to face horrendous challenges before now - Spanish Flu, Black Death, Holocaust, Smallpox…but never before have we had to unite on the basis of our biology - of our homo sapienism.

This threat is the death knell of humanity if we do not move to address it. And change in history has *never* been brought about or arrived without conflict. The wheel of history of history does not churn slowly forward;

it is forcefully kicked and spun hard in some weeks, and slows for decades at a time in others. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.

However, every time that wheel has been spun forward, it has taken the collective indomitable might of human will, human intelligence, human determination, human fortitude, human perseverance to plough it forward.

Look, when a lot of conservatives nowadays talk about capitalism...they talk about it like it’s the final stage of humanity. I’m sure the aristocrats of 1780s France spoke of feudalism in the same way.

Maybe I’m naive. Call me naive if you like; it makes no difference to me.

But I have an unshakeable faith in the human spirit and character that we will do the right thing.

That we can make it, against all odds. I believe we can beat the house when the entire fucking deck is stacked against us. We’ve beaten the Black Death, Smallpox, Spanish Flu, two World Wars...

hell it’s even one in several trillion chance that you’re even here today - both from being on the right planet at the right time, and being the sperm that won the race. I’m the staunchest believer in human exceptionalism...

...and it will take the literal end of the world that we’ve brought about ourselves to change that. Two hundred thousand years. Two hundred thousand fucking years we’ve been the kings and queens of this planet.

We’re not about to give that shit up now. We can’t be about give that shit up now.

We are the smartest, savviest most adaptable motherfuckers this side of the solar system has ever fucking seen.

The reason humans have been able to survive this long is that we are the cleverest fuckers going at adapting to change.

That’s what we’ve gotta do now. Not stick with the same things that are gonna kill us - we’ve got to adapt.

Systems over human history have changed and evolved. From slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism - we’ve changed system loads of times. I don’t give a fuck what anyone says - *changing systems* when we need to, *adapting* is human nature. Not fucking profit seeking.

What I’ll leave you on is this:

Look, we’ve got one fundamental choice as a human species, today, on this Earth - either we’re going to get rid of capitalism...or capitalism is going to get rid of us.

We can beat this.

We have to.

If you would like to read the other parts of this, this is part one: https://twitter.com/HasBezosDecided/status/1155636395236634624?s=19