After Helene: How To Make the Climate Crisis Totally Disappear

Years ago, when I warned that one day the climate crisis will be forgotten, many didn’t believe me.  Trawling through social media posts in the aftermath of Helene, I came across the pain, the suffering, anger and desperation described in the personal accounts of witnesses who lost everything: their house, their loved ones, sometimes an entire community that simply disappeared forever in the floods.  Some people have literally nothing left other than a post code.  There is no land to get back to, and no road to get there.  Everything they knew has disappeared.

In the comments section, I searched and searched desperately over and over for two phrases: climate crisis, or climate change.  Nothing.  Nada, even in threads which had dozens of comments and conversations.  There was a lot of commentary about “oh my god this is terrible what are we going to do”, what the government should do, what it didn’t do, what local authorities and FEMA should be doing, and what planning needs to take place for the next chapter of “rebuilding”. 

Ahem, yes, some people think that rebuilding will take place by a civilisation which is now getting so frequently pummelled by multiple disasters of the type of magnitude that none of our cities, governments and institutions were meant to deal with.  What very few have woken up to is that once infrastructure damage becomes this frequent, systemic, widespread and apocalyptic, there is no recovery.  Like a car, civilisation has been “totalled”.  As multiple disaster zones fight over government assistance, the public gets angry.  They can vote for a fascist government, but they still won’t escape hunger, destitution and possibly being forced to migrate.  Where to?  Hard to say given that this is a global crisis.  The old trick of getting up and leaving to colonize another continent, grab some slaves and make money is not in the cards.  Mars is a fantastic option, but it would be a shame to devastate yet another planet, even one that is almost as toxic to biological life as human civilisation itself.  Trust me if you think Mars is a dump, humans can f**k it up even more.  It’s what we excel in.

Climate denial may be rife in the US, but climate indifference is big worldwide.  The climate crisis has all but disappeared from awareness not only due to the news embargo in Florida and elsewhere, but because humans have virtually no capacity for big-picture thinking.  It hasn’t clocked-in that this is a planetary catastrophe that is only just warming up. Disaster victims are naively assuming that governments will have future budget to allocate in rebuilding flood-prone areas where historic towns were built hundreds of years ago.  Those towns were built in a different time, for a different climate.  This civilisation and all its infrastructure are unfit to survive the tsunami of weather events which will disrupt, demolish, devalue and decommission homes, businesses, roads, energy networks, farmland, healthcare, education and everything else this “organised” society depends upon.  Much of it will end up looking like Gaza, never to be rebuilt.

Instead of thinking about the next day, how to prepare, adapt, and create community resilience, how about looking into the past for clues: realising this was all caused by carbon emissions and an ecological and population overshoot that started thousands of years ago.  No multi-billion-dollar rebuilding program will address the disasters that are only just beginning, when currencies crash and become laughably meaningless.  We need to shut down Big Oil, shut down unnecessary consumerism, shut down this wasteful economy and keep a very low profile on this planet for the next few thousand years.

Ain’t Gonna Happen.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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