We were supposed to have gone net zero by now: that was XR’s central demand, when we formed it, seven years ago. Can we all please at last acknowledge and take seriously the utter failure to do so? Only such acknowledgement will prevent us from continuing collectively to basically ignore the increasingly pressing need to actually focus resources on a strategy beginning with climate adaptation. We should admit that widely-mandated climate optimism has been actively harmful to the needful acknowledgement of reality – and to the active collective self-protection that we now desperately need to get serious about making happen.
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Here at the end of 2025, we are already living with the consequences of delay. Flooding, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires are no longer rare events; they are becoming features of normal life. And in some cases – look at California, or Sri Lanka, or (closer to home) at the many floodplains that have been and will be built on – the consequences of their not being taken seriously enough as our new never-normal have been deeply disastrous, or indeed very deadly. The idea that we can still prevent at source very serious damage is an illusion. What we can do is reduce harm, protect the most vulnerable and adapt in ways that for starters do not worsen the problem.
This is the moment to prioritise resilience at every level — from reinforcing critical infrastructure to strengthening the social fabric of communities on the frontline of climate impacts, from learning from how global South frontline communities have already been practising transformative adaptation to shared inner work turning climate despair into climate courage.
I’m not sure how much I agree with this, but I certainly found it thought-provoking.
Not the person you asked, but my critique would be: It moves the focus away from decarbonization towards solving very obvious local short-term problems. A move to gain credibility/popularity in the public eye, instead of pushing for long-time measures that have a globally distributed effect. Aka “there is no glory in prevention”.
That said, I know it’s easy to critique like I did without being directly involved. Perhaps the idea is to then use this new political capital to push for those measures again. It may be a smart move, and it will certainly be a good thing to push for adaptation measures locally anyway, before everyone can finally agree that they are needed. But it does feel like giving up on the cost-effective but unpopular decarbonization.
That’s actually a part I don’t disagree with. Local short-term problems still do need to be solved. They are the symptoms of the underlying disease that is the global capitalist economy, and we have to fight the disease instead of just fighting the symptoms - but if you don’t treat the symptoms, you might end up dying before you can treat the disease.
And, also, the personal is political. People will see the impacts of climate change on their communities, and people will commit the time and effort to adapt to those impacts locally, and that will make people more willing to vote for the national and global collective action we need even more badly.
Credibility and popularity are necessary. Getting people involved and committed on the local level is the first step to getting people involved and committed on the global level.
If climate leaders lead people in that transition instead of stopping at the local level and saying “hey, we rented some solar panels from this fossil fuel megacorp that branched out into solar power, everything’s good now, go back to consuming as usual”.