There is no ‘getting back to normal’ with climate breakdown | Mark Blyth
As the IPCC report makes clear, there are now only unknown and unfamiliar alternative futures that we can choose from
Academic 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”.
Read the original article at The Guardian