For several months, I have been traveling into the future. More precisely thirteen hours in the future, in Southeast Asia. Between Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh and Vientiane, the average daily temperature is close to 40 degrees Celsius. Even in Hanoi, where the weather is noticeably milder, the air quality is regularly found at the top of the list of the worst on the planet, just behind Calcutta (a megalopolis with almost ten million more citizens). than the Vietnamese capital).
Of course, it has always been hot at this time of year in this region of the globe, but if we are to believe the heat wave of June 2023, a first in 200 years, and the current oppressive heat which is forcing the Philippines to close their schools, the trend is only accelerating.
It was in Bangkok that the epiphany of climate confinement appeared to me, especially because it ties in with another trend: adaptation to climate change. Even the most progressive Quebec politicians, like Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois and Valérie Plante, do not hesitate to use the expression if they do not wish to “reverse” or “resolve” climate change. We seem to have subtly mourned the great changes, so much so that even François Legault now also uses the expression.
Life in Bangkok is therefore fully adapted: hundreds of thousands, even millions, of air-conditioned square meters in the form of shopping centers, grocery stores, cinemas, dealerships, restaurants, residential complexes adapted to everyday life without the need to get out to (TV) work. And if the misfortune were to absolutely have to move, unlike Vietnam, where we completely cover our bodies to hide from the sun’s rays on a scooter, in the capital of Thailand, we pile up in a traffic jam traffic full of air-conditioned cars.
However, in a megalopolis of more than ten million inhabitants, not everyone can enjoy the privilege of the freshness that warms the air for others. The climate therefore becomes the prerogative of the wealthy social classes, who lounge in the cool of an über-capitalist experience in a shopping center. The fact remains that the environmental cause is more akin to socialism, a common good provided that we also wish to share the responsibilities.
For the moment, adaptation to climate change seems above all to be a neo-bourgeois concept which, like teleworking, offers personal emancipation in confinement, in the comfort of the virtuality of a real world which nevertheless signals its ills the deepest. If the largest cities in the world and their wealthy populations have already decided that adaptation to climate change does not involve a relaxation of economic growth as we know it, but rather the construction of greater infrastructure polluting, what will happen to the most vulnerable populations who cannot (and who already cannot) have the means to survive in a literally toxic environment?
If the housing crisis really concerns us, in a society like ours where the large wealth gaps are not comparable to those of Bangkok, are we really taking note of the climate challenge that will await vulnerable populations who will not have the luxury to confine yourself to natural bad weather? Will our levels of government have to plan for the construction of a new affordable underground Montreal?
Earth Day is fast approaching and, once again, we have the right to expect a panoply of speeches that are optimistic, realistic, catastrophic, pessimistic, conspiratorial; but we will have to admit that we have collectively given up. After all, the author of his lines himself participated in worsening his own carbon footprint to bear witness to the phenomenon he wishes to decry in these pages.
The fight against climate change seems lost, so we still have to adapt. In doing so, we must not forget that this adaptation to climate change will open up a whole new area of social polarization within our communities, that of climate class struggle.
Enough to send shivers down your spine.