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.
Never underestimate the ability of a small group of committed individuals to change the world.
For a while she considered being ill, but she changed her mind.
Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day? Well, that's where all the other jobs that once made us middle class are going, to that same magical, class-killing, job-sucking wormhole into which travel agency jobs vanished, never to return.
That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution
Often I have heard the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly ideal as possible in this imperfect world.
Unless we change direction, models show that the profit of the entire consumer goods sector could be wiped out by 2050.
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