What is stopping us from pulling the emergency brake?
Climate derails (since 2023) quite abruptly. The speed at which this is happening surprises friend and foe. For example, Brian MacNoldy said after superstorm Beryl: “Obviously we have climate change acting on everything, it’s got its finger on this for sure. But it doesn’t totally explain the abrupt jump we saw in the spring of 2023 that hasn’t ended. There are other things going on". But opinions about the causes of this acceleration remain divided and foggy.
What's striking is that nowhere – neither among politicians nor among scientists – the emergency bell is being sounded. No one is sounding the alarm. There is general astonishment about what is going on, and specialists reluctantly admit that climate change has been underestimated in many aspects, but no one is currently suggesting (or demanding) an emergency brake on fossil fuel use. Yet this has often been hinted at in recent years. Every scientific article that analyzed a disastrous long-term climate event – such as sea level rise or climate derailments in Antarctica, Amoc and Amazone – ended with the assessment that only rapid emission reduction could curb this dynamic, and in every climate demonstration the stop-fossil-fuels slogan played a leading role.
In the following, I want to explore on why no one is currently openly trying to get near an emergency brake.
Awareness of danger is growing. It is. Logical too: Our ship is starting to tilt. Some scientists express it this way: ‘World enters uncharted climate territory’. Christopher Wolf describes the danger: “.......we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.” But basically everyone by now feels a shift in metereological conditions taking place, and adopts a different stance to maintain balance.
Worldwide, one can spot about five types of reaction:
- Policy adjustment. Many climate scientists are beginning to realize that the current way of mitigating (soft mitigation) is failing, because climate is running wild. According to them, this requires a strong adjustment of the current approach. Both harder (more restrictive regarding emissions) and tighter (regarding control/steering). Some are trying to give this new content, but still within the current rules of the game (via the UN and the capitalist market system). Degrowth proposals also insist on adjustment but are much more unmerciful with regard to still realisable production and consumption volumes.
- Shutting down and walling off. Among citizens, farmers and country people, we see an increasingly large fraction clinging more fiercely to (diving away into) their familiar world. They put heir heads deeper under the blanket of everything they grew up with and have grown attached to – i.e. their father's garden fence, the petrol pump on the corner, a decent livelihood, a fairly affluent lifestyle – so as not to have to hear and see anything more about climate threats, and cast their vote for politicians who promise to silence all those who continue to voice global warming as an idea or harm.
- Rushing forward. The pragmatists (engineers) among scientists and politicians are starting to leap to the next lifeline in the swelling climate misery namely megalomaniacal technology such as large-scale CO2 removal factories (see this debacle), and nuclear fusion. See the consternation around Tony Blair's recent leap to carbon capture and nuclear (fission) reactors. The revival of the desire (and huge investment in) for extraterrestrial existence also falls under this rush into illusions.
- Confrontation. Some groups of scientists choose to sharpen the social conflict through a more militant scientific stance. They come up with more incisive analyses and wording – see how Mengaldo and Faranda express themselves in this article – around “who's is to blame” for any disaster that occurs or is imminent. See the attribution refinement of Otto's team, and the drives behind Faranda's ClimaMeter team.
- Joining forces. Spontaneously and enthusiastically reaching out to each other, comforting each other, helping each other to face the new reality and deal with it; especially also through climate activism and political resistance. See this article about ‘extreme survivors networks’ that emerged after extreme fires and floods.
Yes, there is a new awareness dawning everywhere that we have entered dangerous waters.
What is it that keeps us away from the emergency brake?
Such an emergency brake could be: Collectively enforce a state of emergency with the legitimacy to implement rationed distribution of basic livelihoods (food, energy, shelter, care) and nothing more.
I see some main reasons why facing (acknowledging) the current rapid change in the climate state is a super-heavy birth. At least two lead-heavy obstructions (stumbling blocks) are hampering us from making that mental turn, reorienting ourselves.
The first obstruction
The first is that we need to crush the basic assumption (belief) that has been at the heart of our approach to climate change up until now. That is, declare it invalid.
Explained from what happened on the Titanic the moment chief engineer Andrews concluded: this ship is going to sink in two hours. Nobody wanted to swallow that. Such a huge change of state that did not match their rock-solid belief (basic assumption) that this ship was unsinkable because of double bottom and sixteen remotely lockable compartments, was too shocking to be faced i.e. could not be grasped. Result: ‘Few passengers at first were willing to board the lifeboats and the officers in charge of the evacuation found it difficult to persuade them’. Only with great difficulty did the helmsmen get the first lifeboats less than half full. Most of the passengers crawled away.
In our case, the basic assumption to be cracked is something like: Climate change is an outside affair, out there somewhere in the atmosphere; it is separate from us; is a storm we can ride out and get down. We are gonna wrap this up.
With that mind-set, we also handled it fearlessly, somewhat casually. We ourselves were not at stake. No big deal guys, just another kind of ozone hole, we said to ourselves.
The second obstruction
The second severe obstacle on the mental road to the emergency brake is that just after (or just before already) the basic assumption starts to crack, the big question must be faced of what life options then are still available. In the case of the Titanic, these were (a) jumping into the sea yourself or (b) into the lifeboat. Both without much future perspective.
I consider this second obstruction to be the toughest in our case. Why?
We greatly avoided looking at that perspective. Just as it was on the Titanic: "The crew was unprepared for the emergency, as lifeboat training had been minimal." Only rarely has anyone publicly anticipated what kind of life we could still lead if the climate turbulence were to really start to unleash itself quickly, and hell would break loose on earth. It was visualised (and internalised) as a gradual adaptation that didn't have to last long thanks to mitigation. Everyone thought, ‘Well, 2100, that's going to take a nice long time’. However, what is now unfolding (coming at us) – i.e. a super-fast deterioration of essential climate conditions and a dead-end mitigation also in the long term – is almost impossible to watch, nor to fill in in terms of life options. Because?
Because for anyone who really looks at it, immediately the awareness pops up – perhaps most clearly observable in the speed and extent to which people lately want to bury their heads in the sand and turn climate-aggressive – that it is entirely questionable whether we can mentally endure such an instability of our primary living conditions. After all, it already causes us to confront much more directly and much more persistently the absurdly brutal forces that are at work in the universe, plus we lose everything we are connected to (fused with).
Didn't we always just need that soft blanket of stable weather conditions and a nature dancing and flourishing around us on the rhythm of reliable seasons (i.e. alternating temperature and precipitation patterns) to avoid losing our zest for life (nowhere to be bought nor intellectually determinable)?
For centuries and centuries we could count on it. It was like a mother to us who would take us in an embrace on her lap when we sometimes felt afraid, to keep our balance – by filling our bellies and then feeling safe and satisfied – reconciling us with what is already a strange adventure namely to reside as a body on a globe in an unprecedentedly complex and unprecedentedly wide universe full of secrets around origins and intentions.
If (now) that blanket is torn to shreds, we will be much more cruelly exposed to that rootlessness. How to process mentally on a daily basis all the immense amount of weirdness and horrifying mercilessness of the forces that are active in the universe and are going to start housekeeping on earth, and meanwhile keep a daily desire for existence? Realizing more and more deeply and more often that we cannot offer children and all living things anything but chaos, danger, violence, cruelty from all living things that will no longer automatically thrive but instead, under harsh and turbulent conditions of growth, fight their way to survival among themselves, against each other, over each other's death, searching for air, water, food and survival.
A desperate fear will increasingly darken daily life. More and more situations that induce fear. Result: a cornered human being who hardly wants to continue to exist; who stumbles forward and hardly wants to move on because nothing really attracts anymore.
Looking that future straight in the eye – i.e. rolling this stumbling block out of the way in order to reorient ourselves – is a shit job. For it is hardly conceivable that we have now rendered forever defective the precisely working incubator of terrestrial paradise in which all living species synchronised amongst each other, and to the beat of a gently fluctuating climate, bring about the success of each other's reproduction. Unimaginable, then. But a fact.
Obstructions that strengthen each other
It is also to be feared that the two stumbling blocks, which make it difficult to face the current situation clearly, underpin and reinforce each other. Dodging away from a hideous future perspective (i.e. the second one) makes people cling more strongly to the analytical and innovative potentials of the human mind. Those potentials (instincts actually) are already resisting the invalidation (and abandonment) of the basic assumption that we could rock this bitch. Why? It undermines their (and all those who specialise in it) raison d'être and honour.
This strengthening manifests itself, for instance, in the fact that nuclear fusion (oh delicious perpetuum mobile: Powering the next age of civilization) is again being declared feasible here and there, and in the exaggerated expectations (see the absurd investments) regarding AI. It is very questionable whether such an automated oracle can help us achieve the massive global cohesion required to still neutralise the climate threat in time via rapid global disarmament plus a fossil emergency stop. AI technology is nothing more than the next weapon to trump each other to win, and will cause more divergence than convergence. Plus a new plug that eats tons of power. But yes, wonderful: in the meantime we don't have to stare the second obstruction in the eye.
And so man shuffles with a mind full of false hope – clinging until the last moment to the illusive brainchilds of the miracle doctors of venture capitalists – into the grave.
And the Titanic? Only those in the lifeboats (32% of 2227 passengers) were saved. Of the first-class passengers, 60% were saved.
Jac Nijssen, 2025
This article has been written Mai 2025.
A Dutch version is published on duurzaamnieuws.nl since 20 Mai 2025.
French version here.
English version also available as a PDF