I’m writing you from the haze of a 35 degree day (95F) after a muggy night with two hours of sleep. We don’t have any A/C units, but it didn’t help that our fans slowed down and dehumidifier shut off because of the brownouts. Why were there brownouts? Given the heatwave, a lot of homes and businesses had their A/C on full blast and the grid couldn’t handle it. Across the Midwest, the Mississippi Valley, Appalachia, and along much of the East Coast, government agencies issued extreme heat warnings and power grids went down.
Clearly, it’s a sign that global warming is unfolding faster than the major scientific agencies predicted, which also means the overall impacts of the ecological crisis will be worse than they claim.
Hopefully, the implication is just as clear: in North America as in Europe, where a recent heat wave killed thousands, governments do not have the infrastructure to deal with even the early, relatively easy stage of the ecological crisis. And that’s in two of the richest regions on the planet.
We can be even clearer: those in power and those with access to the media and to significant funding have absolutely no feasible plan for getting us through the ecological crisis that they helped cause.
I think it’s a fair assessment that at the moment, only states have the necessary power to halt or meaningfully abate the climate crisis, so pressuring them to do so is likely to have more of an immediate effect than organising an anarchist society. It’s not like it’s a realistic goal to have every anarchist in the world totally reorganise society by 2030 and achieve net zero immediately once they’ve done so, so any plan on that timescale needs to account for states still existing.
Society is diverse. Let other people do their part in their own way. Changing consumption patterns can also be very effective, look at the green energy revolution.