The Politics of a Dangerous Climate Crisis
Racing Down the Climate Highway to Doom
The World Mental Health Coalition’s “Prescriptions for Survival” series, PrescriptionforSurvival.org, which launched in March 2020 because of the Covid pandemic, has now expanded in scope with “Prescription for Survival 2022” to include persistent Covid, global economics, dangerous leaders, nuclear war, and climate catastrophe.
We have spoken of dangerous leaders, but now we can generalize to a dangerous situation where those most responsible for global and national affairs are terribly misleading us. Namely, those in key corporate positions are controlling not only the media and the politicians but increasingly the universities—and are leading humanity to one end: doom. Whether Climate Doom comes before Nuclear Doom is almost up to chance.
The United Nations Climate Summit, COP27, which just ended after two weeks in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, is another major part of the unfolding disaster. Most people do not realize that the “C” in “COP” does not refer to “Climate”, but rather “COP” stands for “Conference of Participants.” Indeed, there are more than six hundred well-paid fossil fuel industry lobbyist “participants” at this COP, and the mega fossil-rich country of the United Arab Emirates tops the list in participants, estimated to be nearly a thousand, and the host country has severely constrained all civil-society nongovernmental protests, in line with its track record of more dedicated activists in prison than the total number of “Participants” of the COP. Not only this, next year, COP28 will be held in the United Arab Emirates!
In such a setting of entrenched interests, shortsighted political leaders, and an ineffectual United Nations, little more than false, non-solution green-washing of the extremely urgent climate destruction can emerge. This is precisely what happened.
The climate crisis has become a mental health crisis. As it involves humanity’s choice of irrational greed over sustainability, of rapacious power over peaceability, and of pervasive apathy over survival, it is necessarily a matter of our collective suicidality.
Further reading:
· ‘On the Highway to Climate Hell’: The Climate Crisis, Activism, and Broken Politics