The glass half full in the fight against the climate crisis
COP30 kicks off today in Belém, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, and efforts are underway to truly begin implementing the Paris Agreement, which marks its tenth anniversary with mixed results. While the efforts made so far have yielded evident results, they are still insufficient to prevent global warming from exceeding 2°C. Much will be said, and we will revisit worrying data on the progression of warming and the targets for halting it.
However, there is a shift in the discourse surrounding the climate crisis. In two opposing directions. On one side, we have the deniers, led by Trump and his followers, who deny the obvious and believe that there is no climate crisis and therefore no need to make efforts to reduce emissions. The heat waves of recent years, the data, and scientific studies contradict them, but since they are also, in a way, quite scientific deniers, their arguments don't apply here. It's a serious problem because they have a lot of power and are creating a void with their lies across all the networks and media outlets they control, which are many.
But, on the other hand, the climate discourse is taking another, more interesting turn, one that could revitalize a struggle that has recently lost momentum. This discourse seeks to move away from catastrophism by moderating its rhetoric and focusing on all that has been done and improved. That is to say, it doesn't deny—quite the contrary—the figures and data on the climate crisis, but places them in a historical context that demonstrates the effectiveness of the measures adopted and highlights the areas where more attention is needed to mitigate the effects of what has already happened. In this way, it aims to combat both the environmental anxiety created by alarmism and the furious criticism from deniers when the data seemed excessively inflated. Furthermore, underlying this is the public's weariness with an issue they have become aware of, but which no longer mobilizes them as it did a few years ago.
Thus, another crucial issue is increasingly entering the public agenda, one that could be important in combating the rhetoric of climate change deniers: inequality. The climate crisis will not extinguish humanity, as Bill Gates provocatively stated not long ago, but it will end the lives or the way of life and survival of many people, especially the most disadvantaged. The effects of the climate crisis—heat waves, floods, droughts—affect poor countries more severely. These countries are not responsible for the emissions that caused the crisis, but they suffer its consequences due to geography and because they lack the resources to mitigate its effects. And in wealthy countries, it is also the poor, those living in precarious housing and areas, with no possibility of escape, who suffer the consequences. As with other issues, such as housing, economic inequality is once again a central theme in political discourse, as demonstrated by Zohran Mamdani's recent victory in New York. The injustice of this global inequality, where the rich pollute more and thus become richer, but the poor pay the price, will undoubtedly become an increasingly key theme in global discourse.
