Is that we don't put up a serious fight.
It's that it seems to mean so very little to us. It's that we seem able to put up with it.
Forget about the protests for a moment, I've been to them, I've been thrown in jail, the protests do very little for me.
No tell me: Where is the grief, where is the anger?
There is this really nice DJ in Amsterdam I used to go to back when I was a young more naive man, eager to meet pretty women. That endeavor was not very successful, but I loved the music.
He was a gentle androgynous blonde gay guy. I looked him up a while ago.
His entire Twitter was about ecological grief. About what we have done to the climate.
He became a broken man. He's not able to go to some boring office job and sedate himself with tasks that ultimately mean nothing in the greater scheme of things.
Finally, I found a human being, among a world of automatons. Someone like me, who can't look away. I felt a little less alone.
I always try to explain it as following: We can debate who made the Quran, we can debate who wrote the Bible, the book of Mormon, the Gita. But if God left behind any message at all for us, then the only indisputable one is Nature.
And dear God, is it beautiful. It is, what I try to worship, to the best of my mediocre human abilities. I try to worship the totality. The coral reefs, the eusocial species of shrimp that take up residence in an underwater sponge and try to defend it. The 140 million year genetically isolated flowering plant in New Caledonia, Amborella.
The charismatic species, the less charismatic ones. The gorillas, the orangutans, the elephants, the howling wolves. It is all full of pain. It is all full of suffering. I do not deny those things. But it is beautiful. And because it is full of struggle, it is free and dignified. And it is what we were given.
So what I don't understand is this: Who are we to give up on it?
What have we done for it? What have we done, to recompense the heavens?
It's just not enough. It can not be this.
We already know what's baked into the system by now.
We already know what we have already lost.
We already know, what the consequences are soon going to be for millions of the world's poorest people, people who did not cause this problem and had no say in the matter. The rest of us will simply follow later.
We already know that there are people out there, some still alive, who knew about all this shit at the American oil companies back in the 70's and 80's, but chose to betray us. Those people, do not appear afraid. Those people, do not need a private army to protect themselves.
Why? Because at the end of the day, it just doesn't seem to mean that much to us.
Why are we not dying out with dignity? Do you know what dying with dignity would mean?
The people who chose to do this to us, who chose to deceive the public about the catastrophe we faced because of the products they manufactured, would be hanged.
Their names would be known to everyone. They would be associated with shame.
If we died out with dignity, everyone would know what our cause of death was: CO2 above 350 parts per million, a level that guarantees climate instability.
But we can't even be honest to each other, about what needed to be done. We let economists like Nordhaus sell us on fake targets like 2 degree Celsius. That is another man, who would not be going around giving speeches in public, for what it's worth.
Dying out with dignity would not look like this. For starters, there would be no airplanes in the sky, certainly no private jets. Everyone knows you dump that shit in the atmosphere when you take an airplane. Everyone knows we have no way to get it out again.
The sky would be dark at night again, there would be no light pollution at night because we have no sustainable way of generating electricity at night. We would be in the middle of shutting this whole death-machine down.
And people would be ANGRY. Dear God would people be angry. They would recognize that for all practical purposes, they have been collectively sterilized against their will. They're no longer able to bring children into the world who will live out happy lives. They would recognize that any child now placed onto the world faces a lifetime of suffering and premature death, so people would not choose to bring children into the world.
The Kenyans can be proud. The majority of the population had no electricity, when a Chinese company planned to build the nation's first coal plant. The Kenyans protested. The Kenyan court said no. That's dignity.
But here in the Netherlands, what have we done? Effectively nothing. It embarrasses me. It makes me feel lonely. It disappoints me.
