The End of the World

A few weeks ago, a seemingly boring article about the global economy in The Guardian, a respected British news outlet, printed this gem five paragraphs into the piece:

At 3C or more of heating by 2050, there could be more than 4 billion deaths, significant sociopolitical fragmentation worldwide, failure of states (with resulting rapid, enduring, and significant loss of capital), and extinction events.

Talk about burying the lede.

There’s only 8 billion humans on this planet right now, so did a respected news outlet seriously just say we could lose half the human population before the end of the century? That 3C in just 25 years would spell that doom for us all?

This “news” wasn’t news to me, at least in the sense that I’ve known for some time our future is bleak. I’d seen some studies where we hit 3C by 2060, but something about seeing it in a respected, popular paper sent shivers down my spine.

Then on Sunday, I listened to a “fun” talk from a former national parks employee about “America’s best idea,” to quote Ken Burns, and as she talked about getting to work at the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, I just went to this incredibly dark place instead. Then, I opened up my phone and saw we’re talking about DEI and Elon Musk and Trump Tariffs, and whether it’s safe to fly with a shortage of air traffic controllers all being told to take a government buyout.

But once you digest an article about the end of the world, all that other stuff, which has its merits and needs to be discussed, just felt like the wrong thing to be focused on right now.

Am I going crazy here? We’re going to print credible stories about the end of the world in a major international outlet and then just move on like it didn’t happen – no other news outlets picking it up? Are we really so in lock-step with the status quo that even considering a damning future and what to do about it is just too much to ask? What could possibly break us out of such horrific and deadly cognitive dissonance? It seems we’re so scared and immobilized by our fears that even blatant, painful truth can be printed for all to read, but we can’t bring ourselves to really sit with it, or digest it, so we pretend it isn’t true or ignore it instead.

The terrible, ugly crimes of Donald Trump are actually easier for us to be angry about, to talk about, but something as terrible and ugly as barreling toward our preventable extinction? That’s just too much!

I considered raising my hand as we listened to everyone celebrate our national parks and say, “This is all well and good, but don’t you realize we won’t exist to visit Yosemite soon?” I didn’t, because I thought, I just don’t have the attention of the people who matter. Who am I – just some bloke on the internet who likes to write – to be able to wake anyone up in a way that turns into change? And now that Elon Musk is apparently our president and we’re just doing whatever he and Trump decide, all the old rules and institutions thrown out the window, should I just pack it all up and say, “Well, time to refocus and just enjoy my life as long as I can?”

Frankly, I know a lot of people who have given into this attitude and apathy. People I respect who feel speaking up or speaking out isn’t worth their time or energy, largely because of how insignificant they’re made to feel by our information ecosystem. But I also think they forget what connects and binds us, that these moments aren’t about politics or even science. They’re spiritual callings to the solidarity we owe one another. They’re the reminder that the only people who can save us are ourselves. And they’re an opportunity to take that power back.

I’m thinking of course of speaking up in the form of protest here.

Protesters are a lot like prophets, crying out for the wilderness. People hate them, and yet, in making us uncomfortable, they do what almost no one else can: force us to wake up and see the world differently. No one likes being shaken awake, but it can save your life, and once you’re awake and alive, you aren’t still upset by who woke you. You might even thank them.

Suffice to say, about six months ago or so, I turned my attention to what I’ve come to believe is our last, best hope – people power in the form of peaceful protest. It isn’t perfect, and protests aren’t always successful, but historically, whenever 10% of a population takes to the streets, they get whatever they want. So, in a day and age when it seems like the media won’t save us, when our institutions and politics won’t save us, who can we turn to?

Each other.

And that’s precisely what protest is designed to do, not just in waking people up but also in building lasting solidarity movements. That said, building it out over the next few years and incubating a mass climate protest movement across the U.S., and world, is no small task. But it’s our best hope to save us from ourselves. After all, if I’m scared of anything, it’s my lingering fear that if we devolve into political violence instead of peaceful protest, that ugly 4 billion number arrives for too many of us sooner than we might think.

I have a working theory, too – namely that if there had been a robust, organized mass protest movement against the U.S. healthcare industry targeting groups like UnitedHealthcare and others, Luigi Mangione would have chosen, at least for some time, to voice his discontent through nonviolent protest instead of resorting to violence. And if it had been a viable, powerful, scalable movement, I believe he could have set us on a path for a better future.

Instead, political violence – like the violence Luigi resorted to – creates more problems than it solves. It can “win,” don’t get me wrong. Our country was founded in political violence, and violence has a long history of “winning,” for whomever employs it. In fact, we’ve seen as much with, say, UnitedHealthcare’s stocks tanking. But a win won in violence only sets the stage for more violence later and leaves us with a bleak future. You need look no farther than where we are today – still dealing with the ramifications of a civil war fought 150 years ago, still with people determined to solve today’s problems leftover from that era with more violence.

There are better ways.

And tackling climate change through peaceful protest is particularly poignant because most all of our issues today go back to climate. Immigration? Climate. The economy and inflation? Climate. War and conflict? Climate.

So, as the world falls apart, I guess there’s a small part of me that’s, yes, scared to death, and of death, but also maybe, just maybe, a little hopeful. Because I know and believe in protest and that it is proven to work, or frankly, I wouldn’t dedicate myself to it.

I spent five years working in the media world for the very simple reason that I believed that change could only happen if the press was talking about it, and so I dedicated myself to making sure the press could talk about “it,” whatever “it” was, and in that time, I met so many brave journalists who had devoted themselves to doing just that – despite intense repression from governments all over the world, including against environmental reporters who were imprisoned or threatened or killed all because they reported critically on the fossil fuel industry. But where the pen often failed, the protest was able to pick up the mantle and set the political agenda, and so this “shift” in my career is, if anything, a continuing of First Amendment values I hold dear – from the freedom of the press to the freedom to peaceably assemble.

Suffice to say, the pen is mightier than the sword. And the protest is mightier than the pen. Both must be as sharp and as cutting if you mean to make change, yet they are ‘mightier’ only and precisely because the sword, while a means to an immediate and often unjust end, solves the problems of today only by carving out bigger problems for tomorrow. By contrast the pen and the protest don’t just trim the weeds but ask us to unearth the roots and transform the soil, or in the case of climate protests, they can plant a healthy ecosystem that betters us all in the process.

Our future, quite literally if we’re going to even have one, depends on it.