No question of waiting for the great transition
Belgium was the second country in the world to invest in the industrial revolution, it has no reason not to join the leading group of the energy revolution.
“At least we had an asteroid.” The offbeat video of a velociraptor lecturing humanity from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly has toured the world this week. Produced by a UN agency, the clip goes straight to the point with a perched but implacable reasoning: to see humanity continue to finance fossil fuels is as absurd as to imagine the dinosaurs subsidizing the propulsion towards the Earth of a giant time.
The message may be wrapped in humor, it is as anxiety-provoking as the situation we are in. There is no need to complete the table here by making an inventory of the calamities linked to the warming to + 1.1 ° C of our atmosphere.
Despite this, the government continues to fuel the fossil fuel business at a rate of $ 11 million in subsidies per minute, according to a study by the International Monetary Fund. And in this art of pouring oil on the forest fire, Belgium is not left out., even if it is part of a decarbonisation trajectory. This type of cognitive dissonance remains a marker of this early decade.
A desirable future
The situation can elicit many reactions, from resignation to anger, but it is constructive and ambitious action that is needed. It requires planning, imagining a desirable, concrete future. Some have started to do it, we try it in this newspaper with a prospective fiction, “24 hours in the life of a Belgian in 2050”. Profound changes are necessary, which affect our lifestyles: we have to project ourselves into them, to desire them and therefore to make them possible.
Because of course, making the big transition a success remains possible. This will require the mobilization of considerable resources. Public levers have started to be put in place, Europe has taken a first but remarkably insufficient step with its recovery plan. They must be accompanied by a complete system of carrots and sticks to move billions of billions of private capital lost in the fossil world towards emission reduction projects (“Shift the Billions”).
“We need constructive and ambitious action. It requires planning, imagining a desirable, concrete future.”
And there is no question of waiting for the innovations that are sure to emerge to put the gum down: the technologies necessary to achieve this already exist, it is here and now that the emissions tap must be cut. No question either of waiting for other major polluters to declare the way : Belgium was the second country in the world to invest in the industrial revolution, it has no reason not to join the leading pack of the energy revolution of the 21st century.