Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the urgent need to address climate change and resource depletion, as these issues will reshape political dynamics and threaten human survival and ecosystems.
Richard Heinberg highlights the profound impact that oil depletion and climate change will have on the political landscape, suggesting that these environmental crises extend beyond traditional issues like freedom and democracy. Instead, they pose existential threats that could endanger the survival of millions of people and entire ecosystems, thus transforming the nature of political struggles in a world increasingly marked by resource scarcity and ecological challenges.
In practice
During a speech on environmental policy, one might use this quote to underscore the importance of proactive measures in addressing climate change.
If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.
The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.
There’s no need for us to be held back by the past or how things have been so far. The important thing is what seeds we are sowing now for the future.
When I'm working, on sets or stages, my contracts specify in the rider that no plastic bottles be used. When I'm playing with my band, we all use metal and non-plastic containers for drinking to be ecologically sensitive and show others that this is the way to go.
In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach.
What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit -- unless you find new routines -- the pattern will unfold automatically.
There's no problem on the planet that can't be solved without violence. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement.
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