The sleeping giant

11 hours ago
5 min read

Silence cannot be the response to climate change

The warnings are blatant: in Africa and South Asia, intense, unseasonal rainfall and massive flooding; in the Pacific, a 290 mile-an-hour mega storm; wide-ranging wildfires in Central America and Asia; growing displacement and migration in Africa; record melting in the Arctic. In Europe, heatwaves, and in France, Spain, Norway, and Italy, fires are raging out of control. In prosperous Sweden, water shortages; in the Global North, ticks carrying TBE (tick-borne encephalitis) surge. In the midst of all this destruction, the figure “89 percent” has surfaced. In a survey of 130 000 people in 125 countries, 89 percent demanded intensified political action to reduce the climate-damaging emissions.[1]

The 89 percent faction has a valid demand, but its commitment to go to the root of the matter, fossil fuel elimination, has been undermined by fossil fuel-friendly interests who downplay the urgency of emissions reductions. Climate activists’ commitment to heal the planet has oddly wavered, spurring compromises. The 89 percent have been cleverly sucked into a mental fog.

Albert Einstein said: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Actually it is the reverse case, humans are not stupid, they are being made to feel stupid and driven away from what they already are on to. If you ask people where they demand intensified political action–on war, crime, drugs, inequality, carbon emissions, or the heating climate–the first four would prevail over carbon emissions. What happened to the demands of the 89 percent? But what is behind these positions is more revealing.

The 89 percent are being deprived of accurate information. Many incidents and “breaking news” not attributed to climate change are intended to distract, play down the urgency to act, or increase tolerance to do nothing. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a non-profit based in the UK which conducts independent research and analysis on energy and climate, reported this recent chilling confirmation: Almost three quarters (72%) of articles in national UK newspapers that referred to “heatwave” or “extreme heat” during last month’s (July 2026) record high temperatures made no reference to climate change.[2] In the US, in 2025, as a heat dome broke temperature records, the group Media Matters found that only 4% of national TV news mentioned the words “climate change”.[3] Listen to many meteorologists as they report weather extremes, floods, heat, drought—the word “climate” is rarely mentioned and CO2 emissions even less.

The public has been deprived of information into thinking climate change is not a matter for political action but can be fixed through personal actions like recycling!

The 89 percent are being made to feel that climate change is questionable. Asking if you “believe” in climate change shifts the topic away from its rock-solid scientific moorings to a value choice.

British scientist Professor Sir Jim Skea, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put it this way: “It’s chemistry and physics, that if you want to stop global warming, you have to achieve net zero emissions.”[4]

Many in the 89 percent feel that they are being lured to think that devastating climate breakdown is not so bad, a lesser evil. The costs and losses of destruction and migration brought on by climate change in recent years exceeds the loss and cost of war. But we rarely recognize the impacts of this violence as ongoing climate attacks, attributable to an undeniable global warming. On the flipside, the 89 percent are made to feel doomed, that nothing can be done. The result is nothing is done, because it is “not so bad” or "too distant to worry about” or “too late”.

The current devastation in Nepal is telling. The entire event starting with the glacier melt is taken as an accident or tragedy, not as a warning of what more and worse is to come in all corners of the globe!

The source of fossil fuels, derived from beneath the earth, deepens the contrived, artificial powerlessness of the 89 percent. Those fossil energy sources are supranational, regional, imperial, and global issues, and therefore remote: they are made to appear out of reach and concern. Militarism is joining forces with fossil fuel interests and religious, political, or economic allies to control remote coal, gas, or oil sources, under a proclaimed “sphere of interest”, such as the US “protecting” Middle Eastern oilfields. Meanwhile, the small, local company selling rooftop solar systems can barely make it, a local wind turbine is termed “ineffective, selfish, wasteful”, and the average citizen’s rising utility bill is ignored. In short, renewables pluses, its cost effectivenessness, its grid resilience, its energy security, its potential savings, its local job creating appeal–are buried.

At face value, the extraction of fossil energy enriches a specific group of oligarchic stakeholders. Yet a chilling paradox surfaces: the executives and major shareholders of fossil fuel corporations such as Exxon or BP are actively facilitating their own personal demise, the ruin of their own habitats, and the erasure of their own posterity–and they know it. Their own massive wealth might be an illusion that they are able to control nature and the ever-mounting temperatures. In truth, the climate catastrophe is fundamentally classless, even genocidal. The oligarchs suppress the truth about fossil fuel emissions as their vast fortunes are squandered on deceptive political propaganda, at the cost of human existence, including their own.

The myths written by the fossil fuel industry, that fossil fuel emissions are not bad and that climate change is a hoax, can seep into our brains if we allow it. We, the 89 percent, are told that we can capture these emissions and store them safely in Carbon Capture Storage. With CCS, they can promote the use of fossil fuel as a perpetual energy machine–the more we extract, the more energy we produce if we can capture emissions to store and reuse.. Additionally, we are told nuclear power is safer, more expedient, and cheaper than renewables. Suppose we ask, what is the cost to store captured carbon for 120 000 years? In contrast, how often do we hear about the advantages of renewable energies? These are the path to local jobs that will last into the future, to grid resilience, to energy security and national security.

We live in an age of apathy, receptive to insidious messages to “ah, relax, we’ll deal eventually with these emissions”. Ignore those downpours and fires and extreme heatwaves. Ignore science. Ignore our future.

We, the 89 percent, must persist in exposing and resisting this false but alluring propaganda. We, activists, must talk to others in the 89 percent, our neighbors and strangers alike, about what is happening right now. We must ask, what will climate loss and damage be? What is here now and what is coming? What will be the cost of today’s inaction in 10 years or even 100 years? We must unchain ourselves and others from the defining spirit or mood of our current period. This Zeitgeist (defining spirit) is holding back our positive momentum. In the words of Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, we must not only be ready, but we must spread the

“cry of alarm,... a cry of defiance, and not of fear,

a voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,

And a word that shall echo forevermore!”

Wake up! Ask questions and speak up! Assert your demand for intensified political action to reduce the climate-damaging emissions.