This is not a drill, baby!

A screening of the People’s Emergency Briefing offers a sobering account of ecological collapse — and a reminder that collective resistance remains possible, says MIKE COWLEY

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HAVE we become inured to crisis? Whether the cost of living, mental health or the climate, activists and experts raise the spectre of existential times, only for the daily demands of life and the stealth ideologies of online algorithms and corporate lobbyists to distract and dispirit us.

But crises have consequences. Our hyperpolitical age sees campaigns flare up and fizzle out before change can be consolidated. In contrast, crises cohere and find traction, leaving contradictions unchecked.

Our shared ecology is reeling from just such a series of events. As I arrived at Gilmerton Community Centre on the outskirts of Edinburgh for a screening of the People’s Emergency Briefing, I hoped to find insights from scientists, economists and food security experts on how close we are to the point of no return.

Hosted by Edinburgh Climate Coalition Council, the room was filled with activists and curious locals. The left talk a good game of returning to grassroots politics. Founded via Edinburgh Trades Council, the coalition is putting that vision into practice, co-ordinating campaigns and intervening in a political economy hollowed out by neoliberalism’s decades long assault on community.

In a few short centuries, capitalism has disgorged so many carcinogens into the air and the soil that the Earth’s life systems will soon become incapable of sustaining us. It took hundreds of thousands of years of ecological stability for the planet to develop bounties that were always vulnerable to systemic abuse.

In its relentless drive for extractive profit, capitalism is on course to destroy the viability of human life, knowingly and with premeditation. Meanwhile, cult-like media and political cheerleaders insist on the hegemony of an economic model for which, apparently, there is still “no alternative.”

Scottish Labour leader Michael Marra’s endorsement of Jackdaw/Rosebank is an exemplar of a dangerous failure of political imagination. The neoliberals didn’t just set out to shatter decades of class solidarity. They sought to erase from the political classes all ideological difference, reducing democracy to a staged spectacle where polluters get to be gatekeepers of the just transition. On this analysis, living standards can only be improved by a headlong rush into catastrophe.

The Emergency Briefing juxtaposes expert opinion with footage of Chris Packham interviewing members of the public (and a few celebrities) as they listen to speeches from experts in the field. On every face, the enormity of a dystopian future begins to register.

A startling array of evidence is presented; in the Global South, some heatwaves can now kill even a healthy person resting in the shade; British winter rainfall has increased by nearly 10 per cent since 1980 — equivalent to three million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Yet millenarian mad-men see in our collapsing ecosystem not an emergency requiring of radical and urgent transitioning, but a market opportunity.

As reported by Oxfam, the richest 0.1 per cent of the world’s population are heavily invested in disaster preparedness, recovery and reconstruction — a market that is projected to grow from $70 billion to $92bn a year by 2029.

The very corporations responsible for dragging us to the precipice are simultaneously designing bespoke opportunities for the few to escape the consequences of their actions — climate disaster capitalism.

In everyday conflict, we find microcosms of the wider crisis. At Glasgow College, a welders’ dispute over toxic working areas has been running for almost a year, with senior management refusing to provide suitable protective equipment for lecturers.

As Educational Institute of Scotland general secretary Andrea Bradley points out, staff and students should not have to risk their health by going into work or their place of education.

The coarsening effect of the neoliberal project has made the previously unthinkable an everyday occurrence. Bradley’s words could just as easily be applied on a planetary scale. We are led by a billionaire elite who appear to hate the world they live in.

Capitalism poisons everything it touches, a reverse Midas-touch where “all that is solid melts into air.”

Nation states, social bonds of all types and now the very ecologies that nourish us are all disposable.

Meanwhile, AI centres are fetishised as a panacea for humanity’s ills, ravenous deities demanding unlimited land, power and water. This is a social madness many retreat into social media, fascism, consumer fixations and addictions to escape.

The People’s Emergency Briefing closes with an appeal to audiences to raise the alarm. Arrange screenings in your workplaces, schools, colleges and community centres. As their systems shake, the forces of reaction lash out in defence of zombie economies.

The clock is close to midnight. In defiance, French youth declare: “You destroy our future, we block your present.”

As students and workers in Italy and Serbia have thrillingly demonstrated, we can still be the authors of a more just world.

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