The Catastrophic Cowardice of the Liberal Left
The liberal press knows the scale of the problem. It just won't say what comes next.
You know this catastrophe continues when the Guardian thinks it is still politically acceptable to run an article about how to prevent the greatest killing project in history — what the global ruling class is doing, because what the fuck do you think 2C means — which ends with the repressed, vacuous quote: "it will require organised political struggle to make it happen."
The report, from the World Inequality Lab and co-authored by Thomas Piketty among others, sets out a path to keeping warming below 2C while doubling incomes for 89% of the world's population. It proposes wealth taxes on billionaires, a roughly 50% cut in average working hours, dietary change away from red meat, and a shift in investment toward education and healthcare.
Jonathan Watts
If individual lives are at risk — if an article deals with someone at risk of suicide, for instance — there are always links at the end on taking action and getting help. But if we are dealing with the deaths of billions of brown and black people, it's like: what the fuck, nothing to do with us, just scroll on, baby.
A second report, from the British Geological Survey, mapped the parts of Great Britain most at risk of subsidence (buildings sinking) as hotter, drier summers cause the ground beneath buildings to shrink. London, Essex, Kent and a band of land stretching from Oxford to the Wash were named as the most vulnerable, with up to 1.8 million properties potentially affected by 2070. But notice something missing here.
"The GeoClimate dataset forecasts that, by 2070, about 500,000 properties could be affected under a low emissions scenario aligned to the Paris climate agreement. This rises to more than 1.8m properties under a medium scenario, closest to current global emissions trajectories."
Yep — no mention of the high emissions scenario. The worst case. Better not worry the peasants with the most essential rule of risk management: look at the worst case, and act on the basis that it will happen.
Hannah Devlin
Both reports describe the scale of what's coming in plenty of detail. Both stop at exactly the same point. The WIL report ends with a single sentence about "organised political struggle" and then just leaves it there — no link, no explanation, nothing about what that struggle actually looks like or how anyone might join it. The BGS report gives you two emissions scenarios and quietly drops the third, the one that reflects where we are actually heading. In both cases, the bit of information that would let you actually do something with what you've just read is the bit that's missing.
What is the first rule of neo-liberal journalism? Talk about the crime, but never mention the criminal. This week's Euronews article claiming that extreme heat causes 3,400 deaths in India per day does just that.
The headlines say the disaster is "driven by the burning of fossil fuels"—but who is actually doing the driving? Rest assured, that question will be ignored until our children are dealing with 3 million deaths in a single five-day heatwave in the 2030s.
A recent paper in Frontiers in Environmental Health confirms that such a heatwave is linked to nearly 30,000 extra deaths. These events are becoming more frequent, longer, and more intense as carbon emissions—fuelled by those same fossil fuel giants—push global temperatures higher.
Stop hiding behind passive voice. Name the criminals.
Angela Symons
The Daily Telegraph is currently running a terrifying alarm bell about a "Godzilla El Niño." They detail the coming chaos: 3 million potential deaths in heatwaves by the 2030s, famine that could collapse empires as it did for the Moche civilisation, and mass migration that will redraw maps. They warn of economic disruption, political flare-ups, and the weaponisation of water in Yemen and the Sahel.
But there is one vital detail they leave out. Who runs this global concentration camp?
The article treats this extinction-level event as a natural force, like a dinosaur from a movie. It speaks of "oceanic heatwaves" and "weather patterns" with a detached neutrality. It mentions that fossil fuels are driving this, yet it refuses to name the boardrooms that signed the orders, the politicians who took the donations, and the corporations that knowingly lit the fuse while counting their trillions in profit.
They describe the suffering of the concentration camp—the droughts, the floods, the starvation—but they treat the guards as invisible.
This is not an act of God. It is an act of greed.
If the reporting won't tell you what organised political struggle looks like, we will. Below are recordings from last month's Festival of Revolutions, along with upcoming events where you can hear more and get involved directly.
If a video or workshop isn't enough, there are several longer programmes running over the summer: a Collaborative Leadership Summer Intensive with Resilient Uprising in early July; an Introduction to Sacred Activism later that month; and a Strategic Leadership Intensive with Resilient Uprising in October. Full details and registration for all of these are on the events page.
