A Reflection on Vox’s, “The decisions we make about climate change today will reverberate for millennia. No pressure.”
In the Vox article “The decisions we make about climate change today will reverberate for millennia. No pressure.”, David Roberts stresses the idea that the decisions we make this year, who to elect to office and who will be appointed to replace Justice Scalia, will have impacts lasting 10,000 years because of their decisions on climate policy while in office. He makes a moral argument in the end of the article that we have to start changing our ways now in order to protect the next 100 generations of humans from an uncertain future of climatic instability, which didn’t land well with me, but I wasn’t totally sure why.
I was later discussing this article with my fellow student, Tessa Yip, and she made the point that we, especially as a wealthy society, don’t really talk about how the world is already feeling the effects of climate change right now, and we don’t really talk about how to mitigate those effects or provide relief from them. As soon as she said this things started clicking into place, the uneasy feeling I had about the argument about protecting future generations of people began to make sense.
How can we radically change our ways in order to protect imaginary people that have yet to even be conceived, but we can’t protect our own neighbors and families that exist on Earth right now, and are already in real danger from our destabilization of the climate? What does this say about humanity and how we dole out our sympathy? Is it possible that we view these ghosts of future generations as innocents that have nothing to do with the climate disaster we face, but we consider everyone on the Earth currently and previously as complicit in the act of climate change? Perhaps thats why many Westerners are comfortable with the phrase “Anthropocene”, we don’t differentiate between the heavy carbon polluters of the world and the people living virtually carbon neutral lives or just happened to be born into a system that casts a long environmental shadow and are forced to operate within it to continue to exist. Does the generation that precedes my own consider us all a lost cause? Have they written us off in order to save a potential existence in the far future? Are we going to force the vulnerable nations of the world, the low elevation island nations, the equatorial nations — our neighbors and fellow Earthlings — to fend for themselves in this mess we made? Are we saving all of our empathy for the future? When is your compassion?
A Prediction of World Events in My Lifetime
Today, I went to see my physician (also named Karen) for a check up and was told that I’m a healthy gal with “great cholesterol!”, which I will take as a sign that I very well may live to see 2100, barring something catastrophic — like a global destabilization of the climate or something. Something that I routinely think to myself is, “what will realistically happen to the world in my lifetime if things continue at the pace they currently are?”. Unfortunately, I have a good imagination, and the future I envision for the Earth is bleak to say the least. There are two major aspects of the future that worry me: what will happen to the planet, and what will happen to the people as a result of what will happen to the planet.
If the world, specifically the US, continues to address climate change as we currently are, especially as slowly as we are, the climate is going to further destabilize, and the magnitude will likely be on the more severe side of the predictions made by the IPCC and other climate scientists. There are just too many dynamic aspects of our climate system that we don’t yet fully understand, too many positive feedback loops and incalculable variables that will likely have major impacts on life as we know it. There will be more droughts (wet begets wet, the dry will become dryer), more flash floods, more storms, landslides, hurricanes, monsoons, wildfires, tornados. Forests will burn, the oceans will rise, warm, and acidify, deserts will sprawl and encroach further and further, animals will go extinct even faster than they are currently, the ice sheets will melt and calve into the sea.
The result of all of these environmental changes, each a disaster in their own right, will be felt everywhere, especially in the global south. The nations that lack the necessary infrastructure will feel the brunt of the damage. Crops will fail, wells and rivers will run dry, people will die. The sea will rise and entire island nations will drown. Disease will spread, there will be famine, people will need supplies that they can’t access anymore, and this will happen to billions of people. There will be struggles for resources that turn to civil unrest and the destabilization of political regimes, which will create power vacuums and changes in the dynamics of current geopolitics. The political climate as we know it will totally change, and while the privileged citizens of the US and other heavily industrialized nations will probably be fine from a lot of the major environmental struggles, they will face global resentment for their leading role in causing this problem and their relative comfort. This will likely lead to acts of terrorism, reactionary aggression, isolationism, and fierce nationalism. Instead of coming together as a planet, we will divide and absolve ourselves of the cleanup.
In my lifetime, I fear that I will live in a version of America that would make Donald Trump wish he’d thought of it. However, despite the incredibly grim outlook that I imagine our Earth’s future to be over the next 80 or so years, there is a small reservoir of hope that we will begin to recognize ourselves as more than just citizens of our respective nations, but as members of a collective species on a shared planet — and despite what we’ve been led to believe, we can work with together, and give each other a hand up as we all prepare for a turbulent ride through the Anthropocene.