We receive and publish an intervention by Pippo Tadolini after the mobilization on Saturday 11 May
If we look at the world and history from the point of view of energy, we can say that from the Industrial Revolution onwards, humanity has found itself, in its relationship with nature, in a state of perpetual transition.
On several occasions, great thinkers have tried to put life, not inanimate matter, back at the centre, even in the midst of the most recent scientific revolutions. Even when physics detached itself from biology and committed itself to expanding the destructive power of atomic fission, losing sight of the connection between the energy useful for destruction and the much more crucial energy indispensable for survival.
At least from the First World War onwards, armed conflicts, the growth of social injustice, the retreat of democracy, the underestimation of public spending to stem the environmental damage of that set of epochal events that have been called “progress”, and today the evidence of the climate crisis have made us inherit the dangerous legacy of an exclusively geopolitical logic, in which power competition overrides every other way of seeing existence.
To this day, unfortunately, thermonuclear proliferation and – quite recently – the accelerated spread of Artificial Intelligence (AI) place us in an era in which the biological survival of living things and the possibility of choice on the part of human beings are radically put at risk by the availability of enormous energy densities, artificially created, as if there had never been Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the nuclear power plant accidents. And as if the consequence of the destruction of the natural world (a system that slowly reproduces itself and has been preserved, generation after generation for millions of years) was something negligible.
A very perceptive scientific communicator, Benjamin Labatut, had the opportunity to state that we must “pay attention to how a boundary has been crossed since the end of the last century: as if a genius had nestled in the sciences and future generations were no longer able to put it back in.” Alarmism? Perhaps. However, it is undeniable that political, economic and military turbulence has returned to tear Europe, the Middle East and many other parts of the world apart, the logic of the opposing blocs has forcefully re-emerged, once again entrusting the fate of very high energy intensity technologies of all humanity. Many countries are starting to look at renewable sources, but in the meantime wars, injustice, inequality and catastrophes induced by human behavior continue and intensify. Procrastination sine die of the time of fossils (and nuclear power) seem to be the preferential choice of the majority of governments, obscuring the prospect of peace and a more liveable daily reality for all, seasoned with the social democracy that it had found in the UN and in the constitutions its fundamentals are anti-fascist.
According to Global Carbon Budget 2023, developed by the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, this year CO2 emissions increased by 1.1% compared to 2022 and by 1.4% compared to 2019, the pre-pandemic year. Even in the face of this factual reality, and almost ten years after COP 21 in Paris (2015), we are still unable to significantly cut the pollution linked to the consumption of fossil fuels.
After the long period that will be remembered as “the Covid years”, a severe extended drought and the thunderous emergence of wars have unfortunately slowed down both a wider diffusion of renewable energy and the path away from coal and gas. And indeed, the “energy crisis” has been invoked to press on the accelerator of many new achievements in the field of fossil energy. If we add to this other important phenomena, such as the trend of deforestation in different areas of the planet, we have the account of how in 2023 a total quantity of CO2 equal to 42 billion tonnes was released into the atmosphere, a figure which has resulted in the achievement of 419.3 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere, i.e. doubling compared to the levels from which it began to be evaluated.
We can say that, with the balance of the year just ended, the Earth is certainly destined to exceed the 1.5 °C threshold at the beginning of 2030, rather than at the end of the century. Decades behind in the awareness and choices to be made, we are decades ahead of the most disastrous results of the development model that we have built so far and suffered.
The more temperatures rise, the more abrupt the impacts of climate change will be and the higher the risk of irreversible consequences on ecosystems, and therefore also on people’s lives and livelihoods.
Unfortunately we have to note how, at all levels, denialism, underestimation and selfishness dictated by the law of profit die hard, and indeed in many quarters the – albeit mild – measures hoped for at European level are labeled as “ecological madness”, to be contrasted vigorously.
We should examine several converging aspects, for example the controversial and underestimated issue of the impact of agriculture on the climate, and many other issues, on which the timid European green deal seemed to indicate a direction of travel, but has recently been completely overturned in favor of a return to the old and destructive conception of the relationship between human beings and the environment.
However, the complaints and appeals from science remain unchanged, and indeed increase in intensity every day, which reiterates how the emissions linked to the use of fossil energy sources are the main element responsible for the current catastrophe and the – worse – one that will come.
And then, in the indolence – if not in the open complicity – of the institutions and politics with the choices that are only in the interest of the profit of the fossil fuel giants, all that remains is to count on the initiative of civil society and public opinions.
Every day, at the same time and in different places in our country and around the world, the streets and squares (but also the courtrooms) come alive with events built from below, which demand a turning point that can no longer be postponed. A panorama of mobilizations that was not even conceivable even just a few years ago
The Campaign for the Climate – Out of the Fossil, which is one of the main animators of this panorama, has organized in the past months, and is organizing for the immediate future, a host of events which see Ravenna as one of the central places.
Among these, on Saturday 11 May, throughout the day, awareness-raising, in-depth and denunciation events were held on the topic of gas, which is increasingly pervading our lives.
As everyone knows, the floating regasification terminal is on the way which will bring dangers, a clear worsening of the already compromised air quality of Ravenna and beyond and certain damage to the marine environment. But still not everyone knows that the Adriatic Line gas pipeline is also on the way, a sort of gas super-highway, which coming from the south will cross Marche, Tuscany, Umbria and Romagna, with the felling of millions of trees, expropriations of areas agricultural, risk linked to the seismic characteristics of the territories. And new drillings are planned, as well as other constructions always at the service of the fossil dictatorship.
The problem is that the greenwashing carried out on a daily basis by businesses and national and local governments cleverly hides the substantial absence of an alternative choice, which is indispensable if we do not want to quickly find ourselves in an alley with no way out.
This is why we would like more and more people and more and more members of civil society to join us in calling for a moratorium on all projects linked to fossil fuels, and the decisive launch of a renewables policy, based above all on widespread and decentralized production and on democratic control.
The energy sector must be quickly removed from the sphere of profit and progressively brought into the sphere of common goods. In particular, a reform of the electricity market is necessary if we want to build a social model in which we progressively free ourselves from the domination of extractivism.
Pippo Tadolini – “For the Climate – Out of the Fossil” campaign
