For years, environmentalists and activists alike have urged countries around the world to fight for climate change and zero emissions. Of course, it’s not completely impossible - there have been numerous plans for action,the most notable so far being Bernie Sander’s Green New Deal, however so far, little to none of these plans have come to fruition.
Humanity has dreaded a variety of things: killer clowns, the supernatural, Mondays, dreadful news, and the like. Perhaps the one that would affect people the most is quite mundane but very symbolic; a ticking clock.
“When the pressure's on, people produce--so the conventional wisdom goes. That may be true for making widgets, but it's not the recipe for producing creative ideas,” says Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
Moreover, another study conducted by professor Jeffrey Pfeffer and assistant professor Dana R. Carney concluded that “people who are keenly aware of the economic value of their time — people who think of time as money — generally are more psychologically stressed and exhibit higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol that do people for whom the economic value of time is less salient”.
From this, it is easy to conclude that clocks have quite an effect on the human mind and body; however, what if such a phenomenon was used to its advantage?
This is where the Climate Clock, created by artists Andrew Boyd and Gan Golan, comes in.
The Climate Clock is simply meant to display the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until it is far too late to return from the effects of climate change that have been caused as a result of human-induced carbon emissions. Quite morbid, isn’t it? “This is arguably the most important number in the world,” Boyd said in an article for the New York Times.
“And a monument is often how a society shows what’s important, what it elevates, what is at center stage.”
The truth is, he isn’t wrong. The monuments created throughout civilizations in history - the ancient Egyptian pyramids, the Colosseum, the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal - they all represent what people at that time considered an important facet of their society. This clock does the same.
The artists have created a website, https://climateclock.world, to give important details on the clock, such as what the numbers represent, and includes sections that ask the viewer to make their own clock or ask for one to be installed in their local vicinity. There are two clocks that reside at the top of the page: one in red, that counts down towards its deadline of zero emissions, and one in green, that counts up towards the percentage of world energy in renewables. At the time that the author wrote this, the clock reads that the deadline will be achieved in roughly seven years and two months. The percentage of world energy is approximately around twenty-seven percent. The author hopes that in the future, these goals will be reached far earlier than when the countdown is over.
The Climate Clock was displayed from September 20th to September 27th: the duration of Climate Week, on the 14th Street building, One Union Square South. There are plans, as listed on the site, to have the clock shown once again in Paris 2021.
But it is not wise to wait until the clock is shown again to remind us once again of humanity’s error when it comes to climate change. This clock continues to tick down, and while people may have consciously forgotten about it, their subconscious has not. It will continue to ravage in the mind until the deadline is reached or the goal is achieved; there is no middle ground. While this goal seems far-fetched, that doesn’t mean the battle is completely over, though. In fact, there is still a path for humans to recover from the damage that they, as a civilization, have wrought.
Written by volunteer Kapila Mane
Date published: 11/11/2020
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SOURCES:
Golan, Gan, and Andrew Boyd. “The Climate Clock.” ClimateClock.World, 2019, climateclock.world. Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.
Moynihan, Colin. “A New York Clock That Told Time Now Tells the Time Remaining.” The New York Times, 20 Sept. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/arts/design/climate-clock-metronome-nyc.html.
Murray, Bridget. “A Ticking Clock Means a Creativity Drop.” Apa.Org, 2020, www.apa.org/monitor/nov02/tickingclock. Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.
Smith, Martin J. “How the Ticking Clock Kills.” Stanford Graduate School of Business, 8 Apr. 2017, www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-ticking-clock-kills. Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.
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