Has Earth had its day? More polar ice melts, more carbon hits the atmosphere, and what are we doing about it? The same as always
- Global warming is treated as someone’s else’s problem in a world where profit, politics and short-term thinking override common sense
- We don’t hold our national and industrial leaders accountable, and we are as much to blame as they are
And what did YOU do for Earth Day, the recent annual celebration of our planet’s beauty? What did any of us do? Whatever it was (if anything), it wasn’t enough. Global warming, eh? And what’s all that stuff about climate change anyway?
Every news topic suffers from what might be called fading-headline syndrome. Unlikely as it may seem, the pandemic will disappear from the front pages; so, too, will Russian atrocities in Ukraine. And like echoes in an empty room, repeated warnings of planetary doom bounce around for a time, dissolve into background noise, then vanish. Much like ice in the Antarctic, another large chunk of which, the Conger ice shelf, recently fell off.
Global warming doesn’t bother “us”; it’s just something that happens to other people in other places. Translation: we’re sleepwalking to our demise and we’re all complicit, because we don’t hold accountable “leaders” who show no political will to change the lethal status quo. As United States climate envoy John Kerry said recently, friction in American-Chinese relations concerning all manner of other problems diminishes the climate emergency. “We’re cooked, we’re in serious trouble,” Kerry appropriately implied.
Pledges and protocols won’t mean much when Hong Kong, Miami and Shanghai are somewhere out at sea. Not that they mean much anyway: China and the US remain respectively first and second in the world league of carbon dioxide-emitting shame; and does anybody care that China continues to build coal plants?
Beyond politics, industry, in all its guises, is the other murderous villain of the piece. It’s fine and dandy virtuously filling recycling bins with household detritus and refusing to buy anything in plastic containers, but unless industry cleans up its act, the planet will die of short-termism – because there’s too much money to be made, too much consumerist greed to be satisfied.
With no one to police anybody else, no one at whom to point the finger, we’ll just haplessly carry on missing temperature-limiting targets until we fry.
Perhaps our time here is done. We don’t deserve the place, after all. We go grubbing about in the Earth’s crust, scraping up scarce minerals, dirty rocks and viscous fluid to help us torch the atmosphere. Every year, we obliterate 15 billion trees, largely in the course of creating arable land to feed ourselves. And right there is the rub that will rub us out.
Show me a “leader” who has confronted the real problem at the root of the planetary crisis: human overpopulation. We have long since hit unsustainable numbers, yet we will not stop. We are literally screwing up the planet.
