Climate emergency in times of confrontation

The response to the climate emergency is the decisive moral and political struggle of our time, one that will define our generation as the response to totalitarianism defined the 20th century (Toni Judt). It belongs to the lineage of the great political and social mobilizations that have taken place over the last three centuries, such as the banning of slavery, the conquest of freedoms and democracy, the disappearance of colonial empires, the charter of human rights, the fight against racism and for civil rights, the construction of the European social state, the historic achievements of gender equality.... These transformations were fought and largely won in much of the world because they were able to generate a moral response among broad social majorities, as they felt it touched their basic sense of justice and equality. Those who try to confine, to limit, the response to the climate crisis to the instrumental realm of technology and/or economics are therefore mistaken.

We will be judged in the future by the attitude with which we face this existential threat. If the international community is not able to address the climate crisis, the future we will hand over to our young people, our children and the generations to come will be "a world in flames". If the climate crisis is not addressed, billions of people who have been born and will be born in
the 21st century will grow up very negatively conditioned by it. We cannot accept this. This is the decisive struggle of our time.

The collision with the planetary ecological limits, of which the climate crisis is the most urgent expression, forces us to look further ahead, to take a wider spacial-temporal view of the driving forces we have unleashed. Eight billion human beings and a global economy that has grown unstoppably since the industrial revolution are formidable driving forces that have reshaped our planet. The pressures and impacts of this transformation have begun to unravel the ecological seams of the Earth System. Understanding this properly is the cognitive prerequisite for finding a way out of the labyrinth we have entered. A humanity that is heading towards 9.6 billion people in 2050 must inexorably move towards a reformulation of its relationship with the Earth, otherwise it will become entangled in a self-destructive process.