The war is just beginning
Julian Cribb has pulled together several disturbing scientific reports on climate. They should have the world on a war footing but other wars have taken prominence. In 2022 annual global mlitary spending reached US$2.2 trillion. And according to Cribb, US$1 trillion per annum is also spent on government subsidies to fossil fuel companies.
Furthermore, McKinsey claims the world needs to spend another US$3.5 billion per annum on emissions reduction to achieve net zero by 2050.
The spending deficit could be achieved by diverting the military spending and the subsidies to emissions reduction.
But are we smart enough to make this happen?
As Cribb maintains, many in power live in “some hallucinatory world where everything is fine.” This agrees with the late James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and scientist who developed the Gaia theory. After the failure of COP15 in 2009 he said, “The inertia of humans is so huge that you can’t really do anything meaningful.”
While the rich and powerful remain protected from climate change, their inertia will continue. The rest of us will challenge them in the courts, in the board rooms and at the ballot box. The war is just beginning.
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