I believe this is a demand for the top polluters (just 100 companies, almost entirely comprised of the fossil fuel industry, are responsible for 70% of all emissions) to stop destroying habitat for profit and committing ecocide, which is going to eventually make this planet uninhabitable for our species.
However I do think it is worth pointing out that this isn’t our planet. We just live on it. It wasn’t built for us, we evolved around it and as we alter the atmosphere, it will soon become far less compatible to the human race. Truth is, if any species is going to claim this spinning ball it should be the jellyfish. They have been here for over 700 million years and as the waters warm, their populations are booming. They are also (fairly scarily) getting bigger. This pic below, which you may have seen, was not taken in some far flung tropical place but off the coast of Cornwall. Eek.
So I think we need to accept that, despite having spread across every corner of its surface, this living organism that we live on was not designed with us in mind and we are altering it to such a degree that, in this rapidly approaching feedback loop fuelled future, we will need to drastically adapt to survive on it.
But let’s be honest, we have been utterly shit tenants until now. We’ve made the mutha of all messes and if we had been in an Airbnb we would get the worst rating of all time and be barred from ever renting anywhere ever again in the entire known universe. And rightly so.
And in the scheme of things we are relatively new residents and the changing conditions are now actually becoming favourable to previous rulers and occupants. Not only are the jellyfish back in abundance but the lizards , the descendants of the dinosaurs, must be licking their lips (if they had any) because they will also thrive in a warmer climate. But we won’t. And all because the fossil fuel industry has deliberately suppressed information about global warming for decades and lent on governments to continue with their oil dependant economies.
I watched ‘Vice’, the biopic about Dick Cheney last night and there was this chilling scene when the first act of Ronald Regan as president was to tear down and destroy the solar panels on top of the white house that Jimmy Carter had erected when he came to power. That was when oil officially moved into the White House and it has been dictating policy ever since. And it made me realise that it could all have been very different and if common sense had prevailed instead of greed, we might now not be staring extinction in the face.
The U.K gov and investment banks are still pumping billions of subsidies into the fossil fuel industry. We have to continue to put pressure on them to stop. It is most definitely in our interest.