This piece so misleading that the UCL should be ashamed to be associated with it.
Sloppy, whiny and just lacking any critical thinking or honest assessment about the climate predicament or its causes and filled with cutesy word games from the first paragraph.
"We hear so much about climate change doom..." it starts and neatly ties our concern for humanity to the frequency of the message instead of the problem itself by glibly stating " No wonder eco-anxiety and climate grief..are prevalent".
Eco-anxiety is prevalent because the biosphere is getting destroyed and rivers are drying up and not because The Guardian has another article about the climate calamity.
Then it goes on to lay the groundwork for the coming word-salad by offering a false-equivelance right up front- try to change the way things are or "enjoy" hedonistic overindulgence. Spoken like a true Westerner cocooned in privilege as if those are the only two choices for billions facing disaster outside the comforts of London. Yes, the rest of the world calls it disasters, not an unfortunate by-product of settlement choices.
Then, after inaccurately claiming that "no-viable scenario exists for human extinction" it glibly and rather cavalierly concedes "Some realistic scenarios have high mortality and sweeping disruption, which no one wants." Well, ain't nobody got time for that !
I wonder how many millions (billions?) have just been grouped together in those words..."realistic scenarios with high mortality". The writer obviously believes he is not included in that population.
Those are people's daughters, sons, teachers and doctors and lovers Prof. Not statistics, and only time will tell who gets included.
Still the "hope" this piece pushes is that once those billions are gone there will be PLENTY of people left to carry on, mostly one hopes in the industrialized West I guess...
And then in an astonishing case of victim blaming comes this: "Disasters are not caused by environmental events such as hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes, landslides, and floods. Instead, they are caused by people lacking power, choices, and resources..." I am not too fond of any government's response by any stretch of imagination but it must be nice to be able to solve the climate crisis by suggesting that " We could avoid harm if those with knowledge, power, and money would choose to help others." and .. "People will either have high death rates or feel forced to leave. "
How many refugees from drought stricken parts of the world is Europe willing to take if the suggestion is for people to move? How many millions of deaths before they do?
Then after proffering " a plethora of eco-hope and eco-inspiration" it falsely claims : "For starters, no new money is required to implement successful solutions.
What a gargantuan lie and I guess the main reason this article has been written in the first place!
In other words please leave the fossil fuels subsidies inplace, don't tax anyone else to raise money just move things around since the whole "disaster thing" actually is NOT a disaster or collapse or calamity but a thing (not named ) caused by: " it comes from our values, attitudes, behaviour, and actions."
Such crap. I wonder if it was commissioned by BP.
It got one thing right though : It will get worse.
Hopism is going to kill us.
https://medium.com/politically-speaking/doomism-is-depressing-8106345f6fda
