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I think of it as “The Myth of the Starting Gun and the Flat Track Fallacy.”
There are two parts here:
The Starting Gun: the idea that climate action and response will have a definable moment of acceleration, where delay drops away and rapid progress begins.
and
The Flat Track: the notion that when that moment of acceleration comes, our task will be deploying the kinds of policies, technologies and culture changes that advocates have been demanding for decades — that future action looks more or less like what we’ve been working towards, just arriving a little later than we hoped.
I think both parts are wrong. No moment of political transformation is coming, only the acceleration of capacities with unevenly distributed and partial successes. And as action does increase, we will increasingly find that our past plans simply no longer match the scale of discontinuity in front of us. No Orderly Transition is coming, and the broader climate debate is unprepared for what’s coming now.
I explore this idea in this episode of When We Are.
Alex
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