Light the fuse

Chapter 10

Mega-climate polycrisis

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240709

Hundreds Upon Billion: Sixty million—a little fewer than the known number of those currently serving or in reserve, worldwide—would represent the mother-of-all mobilisations to date. Arguably, one billion—an eight of all humanity—would not be an unreasonable target for the number of active personnel salvaging a survivable climate. Pictured in-shot here parading on Queen Street, 1942, are about 300 American troops—about a 200 000th  the current number of people in uniform globally. image New Zealand Herald archive

By its first centennial, all bets are off as to what the ever-deepening, mega-climate polycrisis will be being called, much less by the time its first millenniala 1000th anniversary or its celebration. First known, adjectival use recorded 1660 rolls round. Cimino, in 2024, has adopted Climate Polycrisis, fully cognisant of the possibility that, by the end of the decade, English dictionaries may well have anointed another term. The Hundred Years’ War, after all, took half a millennium to be consistently named.

Although poly lacks the cracker impact of hyper, mega, super, and some other prefixes to be sure, influenced by Tooze, Cimino is convinced of the need to use some forceful term to describe:

the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects.

Currently, those saluting polycrisis, appear to be favouring either Polycrisis  or Climate Polycrisis . Cimino is opting for the latter given climate’s multiplier effect on species biodiversity and sea-level rise, to mention just two hideously entangled crises.

Power, with notable exception, is wielded by the incuriously blasé, in blind pursuit of ever greater power; hand-in-hand goes the obscene accumulation of wealth, and a secretive global oligarchy, with its track record of disinterest in addressing the Climate Polycrisis, unless to profit from one net-zero boondoggle or the next. Beholden to corporate and oligarchal like never before, what remains of the mainstream media is dismally failing to discerningly report on Climate Polycrisis, much less hold these brazen villains to account.

Of the entangled crises, the overheating climate, comprehensively, is the greatest crisis visited by civilisation upon itself, guaranteeing suffering on scale not previously recorded by history. Only in the paleorecord, is there an analogue that comes anywhere close. Cimino determinedly rejects the recent fashion for demonising the fossil-fuel industry had nurtured civilisation in good faith for centuries. Granted it has, collectively, needlessly, recast itself as a villain, but so has much of the greenwashed renewables industry, without the excuse of scientific ignorance. When Cimino first began concertedly studying the greenhouse effect, there was every indication that the dictum,

Truth is the first casualty of war

…would apply equally in the ‘war on carbon’. Demonising carbon and its suppliers, Cimino had always felt, was indulgent, undignified, and lazy. Building a low- greenhouse-gas-emissions world was a monumental undertaking. It was also as urgent as it was essential.

Not only was it fair and honest, Cimino believed, to acknowledge that anthropogenic global heating was the mother of all unintended consequences, fossil fuel would be indispensable in building the zero-carbon infrastructure desperately needed. The undisciplined response, which is refusing to evolve into the surgically strategic mobilisation necessary, is a rerun of the sorry recycling saga that sees Aotearoa shipping its unsavoury waste to low-wage countries to sort—at least that which it doesn’t spend a fortune burying a fortune, in leaching landfills…

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