To put things in the simplest terms possible:
The global climate precariat — all of those whose lives and communities are endangered by the storms, floods, droughts, hurricanes, wildfires, and wars produced or intensified by a destabilizing global climate system — are a vast segment of humanity. It is growing daily.
Together, the global precariat and its allies — activists motivated by compassion, fear, solidarity, or clearheaded reason, and everyday people working for social-ecological change — constitute what is potentially the largest political force on Earth. Together we could build a better, more just, and more sustainable world.
The only thing that is stopping us is the belief that walls, borders, weapons, armies, politicians, and/or gods will protect us at the expense of others. Those who spread the latter beliefs — politicians, media networks, think tanks, and the fossil capital that fuels them — are the enemies of reason, love, and humanity. They need to be fought with reason, love, and humanity.
It’s coming to the point where that fight needs to be made visible and unmistakable in everything we do.
“The only thing that is stopping us”
well that and we lack any means of converting and organizing these masses into a coherent whole…
For that we need two things: good, clear messaging (articulating a counter-hegemonic narrative that could resonate with multiple publics, to put it into political jargon), and an effective and reasonably transparent global media system. There are lots of people working on both, so it’s more a matter of doing better with each.
10-15 years ago, a lot of people thought we were getting there with the second. What we missed was the huge capacity for new forms of enclosure and capitalization (of behavior/attention, as Shoshana Zuboff and others have shown), which have led to the rise of the new tech oligarchs. If this has been the ‘wild west’ phase of digital/social media, it’s now time to rein that in and submit it to democratic oversight and a public service orientation. Easy to say, I know, but at least we know what needs to be done. Fortunately, it’s possible to weave all of that into the ‘messaging’ for the first point described above.