“I think climate scientists (and journalists) are underestimating people.”
(writes Barbara Moran in this paper)
I rather think that scientists (and quite a few journalists) underestimate the addictive and affective power of capitalism, the way in which everyone finds themselves trapped by the great machinery of global productivism – as consumers, and/or as the exploited.
Rather symptomatically, and even somewhat naively, the article concludes with a call for planification, which she calls “cathedral thinking” (“It’s the idea of working towards long term goals — like a medieval cathedral. These goals require vision, shared commitment, and decades, even centuries, of planning. The planners and builders don’t live to see the end product, but future generations reap the rewards.”)
Neoliberal capitalism was established precisely against planning policies, considering them an intolerable brake on free trade. In other words, general, international planning is not for tomorrow (the various COPs being no more than forums for international trade).
You can say all you like that 1.5°C is now inevitable, that coral reefs are doomed, that entire regions will suffer extreme weather phenomena, but it won’t change a thing: we are literally entangled – and some more tragically than others.