Why?

 

While doom scrolling Twitter today I came across the findings from the new IPCC report. For those of you not familiar with this report, it's a scientific research document which details the current state of the climate crisis and models humanity's trajectory to avoid a 2 degree celsius rise in temperature. Now, it doesn't take an official scientific report to tell us that the outlook is worse than grim. We're projected to overshoot 2 degrees by a large margin. To avoid this would require an immediate halt of fossil fuel consumption across a variety of sectors across the globe - a thing which our dominant economic model will not permit. There is too much money to be made in squeezing out the last drops of cash from coal, oil and the like. 

So what are we to do? World governments and news organizations are complicit in downplaying this emergency. If severity and urgency were any qualifiers for what makes a thing newsworthy, this story should be plastered all over every TV in every home in every country. Instead it doesn't rank in the top three stories being broadcast at the moment. How can a situation be meaningfully addressed if it isn't honestly communicated? Imagine a doctor not listing pancreatic cancer as one of her patient's top concerns, instead encouraging her to get better sleep and more regular exercise. The patient would go on thinking nothing is seriously wrong. No prompt action would be taken. This would be a death sentence.

Sadly, environmentalists and climate scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades and nothing aggressive enough has been done. Sure, the hole in the ozone layer was repaired, but that issue seems pretty inconsequential compared to what's in store. A multitude of tipping points have been identified. A number of them may have already been crossed. We will see cascading failures resulting in mass migrations, increased land and marine extinctions, warm acidified oceans, more wildfires and natural disasters, food supply chain instability and water scarcity to name a few. These increased pressures will result in more disputes over resources, lead to more war. Life is going to get a lot harder. We'll look back on these years with an incredulous fondness, wondering if it was real. Children will ask their grandparents questions like:

"Did you really have unlimited water on tap?"

"You were able to play outside in the middle of summer?"

"There used to be large sheets of ice keeping the earth cool?"

"Tell us about the Amazon rainforest."

"What happened to it?"

But the worst question of all will be: "Why didn't everybody try to stop it?"

Some people did try. They were ignored, ridiculed, threatened, discredited, killed. Rich and powerful companies and small groups of people with a lot of money used their influence to spread lies and confuse average citizens. They paid politicians to prevent governments from regulating them, and from taking any actions that would curb production and consumption because this would hurt their profits. You see, for some reason, people valued small rectangular pieces of paper more than the planet which give them a home.

"Why?"