![]() To me, there was that dissonant deja vu again. When XR was tainted with an “ extremism” tag, or when Priti Patel described its activists as “ criminals” after they blocked denialist publications through direct action, there was uproar in sections of the UK press. I wonder if there’s a fraction I can throw in to compute how to turn the world on its head for the better, as the stomping jackboots of anti-science, far-right governments ring to my east and west. I stare at the fractions in the Kaya identity, a formula that expresses carbon emissions as a product of four factors: GDP per capita, energy intensity, carbon intensity and population. Most days, it seems easier to take refuge in graphs that detail the shelf-life of methane as a greenhouse gas in the next two centuries than address the messiness of human relationships or urgent human rights violations. The western climate movement’s rallying call to “trust the science” is vital, but I wonder if the overwhelming emphasis on it is making our solidarity more misanthropic and apolitical. But in order to do this, we must accept that climate politics are not so black and white any more. We need to align these two timelines and to broaden our definition of climate justice, if we are to achieve any measure of justice for the most vulnerable. Meanwhile people who have always suffered are contending with the fallout of inaction in the here and now. We’re at an inflection point in climate politics, where some governments are readying 30- and 40-year carbon-neutral plans and others are looking to coast into the next decade with pledges that are already five years old. On another feed from back home in India, 40 new coalmines in the last great sal forests are being served up to any bidder who’ll take them, while civil rights activists from a different era of environmental organising languish in jail, their health deteriorating. On one feed, everyone – American or not – is forced to tune in to each candidate’s climate policy because the US’s electoral fate is inextricably linked to the future of the planet. But if I’m honest with myself, it’s a world-sized rift in how we perceive the climate emergency on the different timelines I doom-scroll. Maybe it’s compassion fatigue, maybe it’s 2020. T he dissonance is enough to make me uninstall Twitter from my phone.
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