Over the course of my adult life, I have on multiple occasions had borderline nasty arguments with people who excuse climate crisis inaction by stating confidently and emphatically that "we" don't care about climate crisis. The trick there is to ask "who is "we" in this scenario?" Reactionary billionaires don't care, and neither do the governments or for-profit media outlets they own; but everyday people increasingly living in the fallout of an unfolding climate catastrophe certainly care - and polling has been bearing that out for over a decade or two now. This is particularly magnified if you study opinions about climate crisis and the need for action on a global scale instead of just in the so-called West, as a recent study reveals:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/89-climate-majority
The 89%: New Media Collaboration Calls Attention to 'Climate Change's Silent Majority'
"Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: "Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren't you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren't you doing this?"
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election."
Look, I'm all for a global project to speak the reality that humanity as a whole is worried about, and wants solutions to the climate crisis and our boiling world. By that same measure however, I don't think any analysis that doesn't incorporate the reality that our ruling classes and the institutions they own are absolutely planning on running the species right off the ecological cliff while claiming it's our fault because we didn't want change hard enough or something, can truly be considered complete. These people mean to kill you and your children for five pennies a share and they're more or less openly admitting it now; signing up all the progressive media orgs and the one corporate outlet that does take climate crisis seriously to talk more about why humanity *does* care about climate crisis, isn't going to change the fact that the guys who own everything know, and have picked genocide over surrendering the capitalism that's killing us.
With all that having been noted however, I still support this discussion for the same reason I'm sharing this article with you; it's important to understand that literally 89% of the people on the planet do *not* support going gently into that good night so billionaire nazis can keep doing capitalism. I'm not a mathematician, but I'm pretty confident that 89% of roughly 8 billion people is more than enough people power to overthrow a capitalist order controlled by less than 4,000 billionaires. The question then becomes, how bad does that 89% want to solve this life or death crisis? And how long will they wait before they accept that the ruling class isn't going to do anything to mitigate climate catastrophe, but is rather building out fascist police states, curtailing our civil rights, and hardening borders to stop us, that 89%, from doing anything about the shallow graves they intend to lay billions of us in for the money god?
For all our sake, let's hope the answer isn't "too long."
Edit: I absolutely promised myself to start including archived links to stories because I strongly suspect fascists are going to end or otherwise censor media they don't like eventually. So here's the one I forgot in this post: https://archive.ph/8e3E9
