You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children,
You must not do it anymore.
-Leonard Cohen
Raising the spectre of sacrifice is the all the vogue in current climate denier and delayer circles: it is representative of our current moment in time. Having comprehensively been routed on the denial of science, the minions of fossil fuel lobbies have moved on to delay the onset and diminish the scope of action. “Sacrifice” is one of their preferred bogeymen: any reduction in the use of fossil fuels is presented as unacceptably curtailing the standards of living of — well — anybody, really. They’re not fussy on that count. Rich people, poor people, people in developing countries or well-beyond-industrialized ones — it’s all much the same to them, as long as combustion of their products is in the supply chain. “Fine, fine, there is a climate crisis, indeed, we totally did lie about that part,” goes their narrative, “but are you really sure you want to sacrifice all the convenience brought to you by burning gas, oil and coal?” By equating action on climate with discomfort, they hope they can buy a few more deadly years for their business model. And they may well be right in this cynical calculation; goodness knows they’ve succeeded in the past.
What the climate delayers are sneakily drawing attention away from are the very real sacrifices of escalating climate breakdown: extreme weather events and damage, monster storms hitting areas never before affected, massive flooding, land lost to the sea, water shortages, extreme and unprecedented deadly heatwaves coupled with air pollution, losses in crop yields leading to hunger for millions, disease spread, ecosystem and biodiversity damaged and lost forever. Somehow, these very real, predicted and already occurring forms of harm caused by the fossil fuel industry’s insistence on producing their deadly products are never portrayed as a sacrifice, despite the fact that they will impoverish, harm or kill hundreds of millions of people around the world.
