A  cademic papers often take time to leach out into public consciousness. One that did not filter through was a study from Anglia Ruskin University th

There is no ‘getting back to normal’ with climate breakdown

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2021-08-11 23:00:07

A cademic papers often take time to leach out into public consciousness. One that did not filter through was a study from Anglia Ruskin University that analysed “nodes of persisting complexity”, in the face of “global decomplexification event”. What’s that, you ask. Places you can probably still get electricity and toilet paper when climate breakdown destroys the rest of the world. New Zealand and Finland top the list. Perhaps coincidentally, it recently emerged that Google founder Larry Page has been granted New Zealand residency.

The recently released “last chance saloon” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will surely add pressure on governments to “do something” about all this. After all, we can’t all move to a nice “persistent node”. But doing something, as we know, is hard. So, what we can expect instead is for governments to redouble their usage of a time-tested rhetoric of distraction called “getting back to normal”.

Instead, of telling us that we need to truly transform the way we live and organise society, we will be told that we can still carry on as we were, except perhaps with our fossil fuels and one-use goods replaced with green energy and recyclables. Maybe a bit less air travel, but still ‘back to normal’ with green edges. This way of thinking is perhaps as dangerous as the climate crisis itself. While banging on about inflation as a threat to the poor is a rhetoric of reaction, getting back to normal is a rhetoric of distraction. Rather than pandering to our prejudices, it builds directly upon how our psychology has evolved over millennia – it plays upon two things that we are hardwired to believe.

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