Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the urgent need to address climate change and resource depletion, as these issues will reshape political dynamics and threaten human survival and ecosystems.
Richard Heinberg highlights the profound impact that oil depletion and climate change will have on the political landscape, suggesting that these environmental crises extend beyond traditional issues like freedom and democracy. Instead, they pose existential threats that could endanger the survival of millions of people and entire ecosystems, thus transforming the nature of political struggles in a world increasingly marked by resource scarcity and ecological challenges.
In practice
During a speech on environmental policy, one might use this quote to underscore the importance of proactive measures in addressing climate change.
If we do nothing, we still get to a post-carbon future, but it will be bleak. However, if we plan the transition, we can have a world that supports robust communities of healthy, creative people and ecosystems with millions of other species.
The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.
Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something's time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings.
You invite things to happen. You open the door. You inhale. And if you inhale the chaos, you give the chaos, the chaos gives back.
World military spending has now risen to over $1.2 trillion. This incredible sum represents 2.5 per cent of GDP (global gross domestic product). Even if 1 per cent of it were redirected towards development, the world would be much closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
'Middle class' used to be synonymous with secure, with steady, with boring, because middle-class people were people who were pretty much safe from the time they first started work on through retirement and until their deaths. No longer.
There is a curious thing that happens with the passage of time: a calcification of character... Change isn't always for the worst; the shell that forms around a piece of sand looks to some people like an irritation, and to others, like a pearl.
Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.
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