Once again, it’s unbearably hot, the nights aren’t cooling and nature, along with us humans, is suffering. Yet the roads are still full of mostly combustion-engined vehicles, EVs sloughing off tyre particulates, the skies full of aircraft. It’s amazing - but not at all surprising - that we all don’t just stop to think about what we’re doing to everything.
Last month, during the second - and so far worst - heatwave, Ars Technica hosted an article from Inside Climate News on the “sad inevitability” of Europe’s heatwave. I have to say, the article takes its time to get to the point, embellishing everything with the effects rather than the contributing factors involved in the whole miserable set of conditions we’re still in. But eventually the authors started linking to papers such as one from PNAS called simply and clearly Climate change will accelerate the high-end risk of compound drought and heatwave events.
Ultimately, we really really do need to aim for and hit net zero - but with everyone carrying on as normal for as long as possible (hindered by bosses worrying more that we won’t be productive enough, our only chance is to focus on large-scale structural change, voting for parties that will prioritise climate action, and switching economies to carbon-neutral industries.
In this context, the prospect of a company like VW looking to jettison tens of thousands of jobs, maybe a hundred thousand looks scary - but perhaps Volkswagen with its trade unions and state investments is a good place to start: they will be able to (have to!) throw resources at aiding their employees in the search for transformation jobs in transformation industries. The Americans and Chinese would basically just dump the jobless on suddenly underfunded communities, as the British did to the mining towns in the 1980s. The fear is that the sclerotic and currently very fossil-conservative government here in Germany will combine to prevent any sort of realignment towards energy efficiency or transformation.
In the meantime, I voted in a local referendum for a large wind turbine project that’s been proposed for the nearby hills: news just in - it turns out that 2/3 of those who voted voted for the project to continue… So that’s something, I guess!
