The climate emergency is the perfect disaster to slip right past human cognitive flaws. It’s a long term problem, so the consequences seem remote. Others will mostly bear the costs (for now), so it’s hard to summon concern or empathy — even if those others are the children and grandchildren of those now living.
Another part of the reason for the lack of action is that people don’t understand how dire and serious the emergency in fact is due to frequent millenarian and apocalyptic nonsense in human history over the years.
Well, this time the potential apocalypse is real and not nonsense, but no one wants to hear that since yet another human cognitive flaw waylays this perception: optimism bias. That won’t happen to me or my kids. That’s for other people.
Bolsanoro burning down the Amazon is probably the last straw. We’re done, I’d guess, and we’ve found the Great Filter.
No, I don’t think climate change will cause human extinction directly. Though, is that our sole criterion, just to avoid extinction? Is that the best we can do? I have no idea why so many centrists/ liberals use this as any sort of standard. Because it’s definitely going to cause civilizational collapse and if you think that’s so much better, we have nothing to talk about.
But the nuclear and conventional wars that are inevitably part and parcel of the climate emergency likely will cause extinction or nearly so, and that’s how your children and grandchildren will die.
