There’s ‘disruption’… and then there’s climate disruption
Fig. 1 – Floods: something a bit worse than orange confetti, maybe?!
To misquote Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
“Water, water, every where,
Nor any… orange confetti to see!”
The Climate Crisis hits Europe
Leaving Coleridge’s sublime poetry aside, there was certainly no orange confetti on display in the recent floods which have hit – to mention but 2 places in Europe – the Midlands and Zaragosa (Spain). These floods – coming after recent ‘record-breaking’ heatwaves, prolonged droughts and crop failures in several places in Europe – show that everyone (not just those in the Global South) is now on the Climate Crisis frontline.
The first week of July has provided plenty of evidence of that – at least for those “looking up.” For those who still doubt we’re heading towards a Climate-Breakdown precipice, here are some recent news reports to read – and some short videos to watch:
For the Midlands: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-66146820
As a result of the floods in the Midlands, the ‘Mostly Jazz, Funk & Soul Festival’ at Moseley Hall had to be cancelled – along with Severn Trent’s ‘Big Boost for Brum’ jobs’ fair. And a word of warning: no orange confetti was involved!
For Spain: Here are some reports about the floods in Zaragosa: https://news.sky.com/video/intense-rainfall-causes-flash-flooding-in-zaragoza-spain-with-dozens-of-vehicles-swept-away-12916998?trk=public_post_comment-text
Yet again – not a single petal of orange confetti on view!
Fig. 2 – Damn those Just Stop Oil activists: they must have been throwing confetti again!
Rightwing ‘snowflakes’?
Bizarrely – or maybe not! – many of the UK’s news media outlets seem to have been more concerned with covering the temporary ‘disruption’ caused by Just Stop Oil climate activists paying brief visits to sporting events, rather than these climate news items. This is particularly true of rightwing ‘news’ outlets – in particular, GB News: the mouthpiece for, and promoter of, ‘creeping fascism’. This organisation seemed to have been particularly outraged by one person throwing…HEALTH-ALERT: the rest of this sentence may cause distress! – confetti at, shock-horror,… a wedding! And this wedding, we should remember, was of a man who was considerably responsible for imposing austerity which – leaving aside foodbanks and rough-sleeping – resulted in 120,000+ austerity-related deaths
Fig. 3 – If the photo on the L. disturbs you, & the one on the R. doesn’t…
This may seem unlikely, but have their constant waging of a ‘Culture War’ – against the ‘evils’ of ‘wokism’ and leftwing ‘snowflakes’ – actually rubbed off on the right? Has even Farage become a rightwing ‘snowflake’, trembling at the ‘disruptive’ sight of confetti at a wedding? Or… was it all faux outrage, based on the principle of ‘throwing a dead cat on the table’, designed to distract us from the really serious disruption being caused by their capitalist mates?
Capitalism’s metabolic rift
Certainly, a lot of distraction is going to be increasingly needed, as the capitalist ‘System’ – in its relentless pursuit of short-term profits -drives the planet to irreversible tipping points in the Earth System. Apart from the risk of the current and undeniable Climate Crisis turning into Climate Breakdown, because of the global heating caused by CO2 emissions, there’s also growing evidence of a real Ecological Crisis. This is graphically shown by the chart below: