I think this piece has the right instincts – “global heating” is sharper than “warming,” and the reminder about feedback loops is useful – but it too quickly slides into misdirection. The whole “we are the enemy” line flattens responsibility in ways that are both ethically and politically troubling. Who is “we” anyway? Not the Arctic and subarctic Indigenous peoples watching their ways of life vanish with the disappearing sea ice, and for sure it’s not the Bangladeshi farmer whose fields are poisoned by saltwater pushed inland by rising sea levels… The real culprits are obvious: fossil fuel conglomerates, the hyper-wealthy, industrialized states. Those high-income, high-emitting actors drive the crisis, while the poorest – millions with almost zero economic or political protections – bear much of the harms. A spectacular exercise in carbon-driven moral hazard. To fold that into a planetary “we” is not just wrong, it’s dangerous.
But there’s a deeper problem – the planetary scale also demands a “we” of some kind, because, well, greenhouse gasses. But justice demands differentiation. If we collapse into “we,” we risk erasing responsibility; but if we fragment too far, we lose sight of the broader ecological predicament. It strikes me that this tension – planetary collectivity versus political (and ethical, and legal) accountability – is the actual conflicted terrain.
I worry that the doom framing in de Chazal’s text does its own kind of harm. To claim that feedbacks “no longer need our input” is to imply inevitability, paralysis. Positive feedbacks amplify, yes, but outcomes are still shaped by the speed and scale of our emissions. Right? To say otherwise is (another) invitation to despair. What moves the needle here is not another “ARGH” metaphor but the nut-and-bolts, concrete stuff: rapid fossil phase-out, methane abatement, protecting and expanding real sinks, electrification, efficiency, legal standards, finance, adaptation, and so on.
As the piece puts it: “Net Zero is only a point we visit in passing. It is an illusion to think of it as anything approaching a solution.” I think this gets it wrong. Maybe Net zero itself isn’t the illusion – maybe the illusion is in how it is practiced, through carbon-offset Ponzi schemes and creative accounting that slow-walks real cuts into oblivion. Balance, on its own, isn’t the problem. I think the problem is how “net zero” has been hollowed out, retooled as earnest political theatre providing just a thin veneer of cover for business as usual.
So what’s left here is anxious, guilt-ridden alarmism: right in wanting sharper language, wrong in suggesting the system has already slipped beyond human agency. So, maybe tone down the doom, drop the bear, name the culprits, and ground the argument in equity, justice and specificity?
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Peter C. van Wyck, PhD, Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, is a SCAN! member.