Alex Mell-Taylor, author of the piece excerpted below, is angry. I can certainly understand why, and I'm angry too.
The article takes a look at China, Japan, Russia, the United States, and the EU, examining the cynical pledges and woefully insufficient efforts made by our so-called leaders to tackle the climate challenge.
We know it's not enough, and they know it's not enough, yet they continue to lie and pretend and push forward with Business As Usual...
We need to recognize that things are dire. We will potentially reach global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (at least temporarily) this decade. If we continue along this path and refuse to make radical changes on a systemic (not individual) level, we will face a world of increasing famines, sea rise, and a series of compounding effects that cascade into downright apocalyptic scenarios.
From China to Germany to the United States, I see a lot of far-off pledges and no immediate steps to radically halve current emissions, and certainly none to engage in strategies that reduce consumption such as Degrowth. Everyone is just banking on being able to switch their energy grids over “in time,” which, even disregarding the fact that electrification still has a carbon cost, this strategy assumes that the pollution made to get to that point won't be enough to wreck our environment.
The era of denialism is over, and in its place is the era of lukewarm commitments, where leaders pledge to build up solar, wind, and other renewables while simultaneously preserving fossil fuels well into the next decade, if not beyond.
At such an increase, we will move from 14% of the world being exposed to extreme heat waves to almost 40%. Droughts will be even more common, impacting tens of millions of more people annually. Potable water will become scarce. More species will die. The list goes on.
You should be angry over your leader's cowardice. You should not accept the lie that going "faster" is unreasonable. What is unreasonable is their hesitance: their insane holding pattern with the fossil fuel industry as they march us confidently into a more unstable world.
We need to operate under the assumption that our leaders, the ones who built the system now choking us to death, are wrong. That they will need to be fought against. That we will need to march, protest, and block infrastructure, as well as engage in other more direct actions that make them uncomfortable.