2021-12-02

Hollywood World Rescue

I've watched a lot of catastrophe movies lately. I like them, apparently. It's partly because of cool special effects (well... maybe not all of them), and partly because it's not about humans fighting each other but side by side.

The Hollywood idea of a large scale catastrophe is also very simplistic. An asteroid will hit the Earth, but that's cool because a bunch of oil-drillers can fix it. A volcano erupts in Los Angeles, but two people take initiative and fix everything. The Earth's core has stopped rotating, but we'll just send a handful people down there with a bunch of nukes and all will be well. Independence Day; a handful of people save the entire world. World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles; same thing.

I love seeing that drive, initiative, action, and the happy ending. But I leave the movie behind me with a sense of sadness, because no small group of heroes will be able to save us from the catastrophes we're facing. No handful of scientists will invent a device that magically fixes climate change just in the nick of time. No small group of soldiers will slay an evil-doer and save the free world.

Do you know what you and I can do to help save the world? Try searching for that. Here's some examples:

Use LED lights instead of incandescent (never mind that LED lights have a significant embodied energy and rare earth metals).
Take the bus or bike instead of driving.
Have less children (who are we saving the planet for anyway?).
Write to your representative to tell them you care about the climate.
Turn off your devices.
Set the thermostat a couple of degrees colder.
Buy less stuff.

Do you see what I see? Because when I look at that list, I just see a handful of things that I can do until I die that still won't change a thing. We need billions of people to do this. Or at the very least hundreds of millions in the richest parts of the world. Not a handful of Hollywood heroes.

Meanwhile 400 public figures flew to the COP26 meeting in Glasgow with private jets. These are the people with the influence and power to effect real change.

The peril that the world is in right now scares me, especially knowing what my kids will face. It doesn't look good, and I as many others feel powerless to do anything about it. "Get organised! Spread the word!" The word is out. All of our leaders know that this is a gargantuan threat to civilisation as we know it. They know that it's at the top three of priorities in their electorate (at least here in Sweden). But the solutions don't sell well. We all just want a Hollywood script for it.

The Oscar goes to whoever survives it all.

-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal