Extinction Rebellion

Can we rebel against ourselves?

On the hottest day (42 degrees Celsius in my home town of Tel Aviv) of the hottest year of the hottest decade in the recorded history of the human race, I saw an article with the headline “All of Israel will become a desert by 2100”.

I remember the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006, with Al Gore as its spokesman. It brought the global warming phenomenon to mass awareness. It also presented compelling evidence that this is certainly not an accidental process, but rather a by-product of the collective human behavior (greenhouse gas emissions and more). In the words of the scientists, “It’s all us, it all comes from us. The extreme rate of increase is unexplained, this steep rise may not be caused by natural processes.”

The impending devastating and fatal consequences are clear: the melting of glaciers, rising oceans and flooding of many cities, eruption of epidemics, lack of water for drinking and irrigation, hunger and more. Penguins can’t live in the desert, and neither can people.

But the most intriguing and important question is: Why? Why are we humans, seemingly so developed and smart and knowledgeable, unable to stop ourselves, unable to cooperate even in order to save ourselves and our children, and in short, unable to change?

At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, almost 200 countries signed a “historic, legally binding pledge to hold global temperatures to a maximum rise of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” According to the agreement “the first universal climate deal will see an accelerated phase-out of fossil fuels, the growth of renewable energy streams and powerful new carbon markets to enable countries to trade emissions and protect forests”. World leaders hailed the Paris climate deal as ‘a major leap for mankind’.

The Paris agreement set 2030 as the deadline by which emissions need to be cut by roughly 50% in order to stay below 1.5°C of global warming. This goal was to be achieved via national policies, called nationally determined contributions (NDCs). We are now in mid-2022, halfway between 2015 and 2030. How are we doing?

”The effectiveness of the Paris Agreement to reach its climate goals is under debate, with most experts saying it is insufficient for its more ambitious goal of keeping global temperature rise under 1.5°C. Many of the exact provisions of the Paris Agreement have yet to be straightened out, so that it may be too early to judge effectiveness. According to the 2020 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with the current climate commitments of the Paris Agreement, global mean temperatures will likely rise by more than 3 °C by the end of the 21st century. Newer net-zero commitments were not included in the NDCs, and may bring down temperatures a further 0.5 °C.

With initial pledges by countries inadequate, faster and more expensive future mitigation would be needed to still reach the targets. Furthermore, there is a gap between pledges by countries in their NDCs and implementation of these pledges; one third of the emission gap between the lowest-costs and actual reductions in emissions would be closed by implementing existing pledges. A pair of studies in Nature found that as of 2017 none of the major industrialized nations were implementing the policies they had pledged, and none met their pledged emission reduction targets, and even if they had, the sum of all member pledges (as of 2016) would not keep global temperature rise ‘well below 2 °C’.

Who is XR rebelling against? According to their spokesman Nil Agger, “[We are] working on building a rebellion against our broken democracy which is complicit in the ecological crisis we are facing and which is now a real emergency”. He added, “[The crisis is] a systemic problem rather than something which can be treated through changes in individual consumption.”

XR makes three demands: 1. Tell the truth. Governments must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change. 2. Act now. Governments must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025. 3. Go beyond politics. Governments must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.

While both Greenpeace and XR advocate non-violent campaigning, their activities are often deliberately confrontational and bear titles such as “Forceful Take-Over of Kent Power Plant”, “Disruption of London Fashion Week events”, or “Spraying of Fake Blood on Treasury Building”. XR is calling for “mass civil disobedience as the only remaining alternative to avert the worst of the catastrophe”.

A few days ago a man disguised as an elderly woman in a wheelchair has thrown a cake at the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting at the Louvre museum in Paris. The painting, which was undamaged, was left with white cream smeared across its protective glass. The perpetrator, seen wearing a wig and lipstick, urged people to “think of the Earth. There are people who are destroying the Earth. Think about it. Artists tell you: think of the Earth. That’s why I did this.”.

Such provocative events typically get short term sympathetic media coverage (the audience at the Louvre applauded and took photos). Some politicians may voice concern for our future, and then we all go our way. The global warming clock keeps ticking and our extinction is not averted. If anything, we are all even more divided and angry. Extinction Rebellion accuses Greenpeace of not being aggressive enough. But aggression is one resource we are have no shortage off.

We all live in a system, called Nature. We can’t make “deals” with it, and even if we try, clearly we won’t keep our end of the deal. Rebelling against it is as futile as rebelling against gravity. Throwing cakes at it or spraying it or each other with paint doesn’t help either. We can blame our political leaders and representatives, but they behave just as we do — egoistically. In fact isn’t this why we chose them? According to how much we believe they will benefit us, at the expense of, and in competition with, everyone else: other countries, other neighborhoods in my city or other sectors in the population?

So what are we to do?

It’s straightforward, though not easy. We should realize we don’t need to change the world. We can’t. We need to change mankind. Ourselves. Each one of us. And this is done by education. Learning where we are, who we are, and how we can change. Until we realize this and start implementing it, all our agreements and protests will only produce more hot air.

Learning how to change internally doesn’t have to be laborious or painful. If we create a social environment and atmosphere that enables and encourages such a deep transformation, the critical mass will grow, the media and political systems will gradually join the movement (after all, they are tuned to detect and cater to our needs), and the momentum will accelerate and pull mankind out of our egoistic black hole into a new era of collective contentiousness, collaboration, and coexistence with each other and with everything around us.

But what about global warming? Will the problem just go away? Yes! Why? The simple answer is that as we “reprogram” ourselves, we are reprioritizing our desires, our needs and wants, the strings that pull us and make us act. So the destructive consumer society and non-sustainable capitalism will naturally become extinct, and will be replaced by new altruistic and “green” social and economic structures, friendly to each other and to our environment, that today may seem unimaginable.

The deeper answer is that by correcting the broken relationships between us, we create a collective “network effect” that brings us to harmony with the perfectly balanced ecosystem that is Nature. When we relate to each other and to Nature with a collaborative attitude, we get the same attitude in return, just as “good kids” who play with each other make their mother happy. This is not a lesson in morals. It’s the law of the system.

So we have a choice. Learn, evolve, upgrade. And be cool!

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