With each day that passes, I grow less optimistic about any meaningful future for mankind. I'm loath to say so, because it sounds a lot like the sort of "sky is falling" prognostication that can be traced back to every generation since ancient Greece, but probably before then with people whose records haven't survived as well.
But the thing is...I'm hot. It's late August and I'm impossibly hot. It's been unbearably hot since April, and it probably will be until October. Every year is a record-smashing hottest year on record. I remember ten, fifteen years ago, back when we still had four seasons in this part of the world, when I had the luxury of enduring debates over climate change with who people who I should probably be charitable and describe as "skeptics" but who would more accurately be described as "morons."
There's never been any doubt about anthropogenic climate change. Not with anyone who knew anything about the subject. There were vested interests who wanted to deny it, the same way there were vested interests who wanted to deny the dangers of tobacco twenty or thirty years ago. Nowadays if someone says there are no proven dangers to cigarette smoke, they barely warrant an eyeroll. They're known to be deceiving themselves. It seems to me we've reached the same juncture with climate change. At this point you'd have to be a moron to deny it. At least fifteen years ago you had to actually pore over the data, look at satellite photos. I could at least believe in the good faith of people who debated it, if not agree with them. Now all you have to do is step outside the house any day of the year.
Famine is coming next, I expect. I suppose as a wealthy American I'll be okay for a while. I'll probably start to wonder why the price of strawberries is so high. Then I'll start to notice that cashews or something are just no longer available on store shelves. I won't starve at first. Millions upon millions of people in the developing world will do that on my behalf first.
Then I'll probably start to feel the pinch. That is, if I'm not beset by catastrophic weather. The Jersey shore will probably move a few miles inland. Hundreds of thousands will be left homeless, and people in the wealthiest country in the world will start to die. There'll be tornadoes, hurricanes, monsoons, weather we don't even get in this part of the country will suddenly start wiping out towns.
My expectation for the turnaround on climate change is one of two things:
1.) either technology will finally deliver us some kind of savior in the form of an energy source so cheap and plentiful that it won't make any economic sense not to implement it, or
2.) so many people will die from famine, war, plague, and death that we'll stop having an impact on the environment
You can probably tell I'm not holding out much hope for option 1. We certainly seem to be beyond the point of having the political will to just be better. I don't have a whole ton of hope for the future of our society based on political will, either.
Then again, I have seen astonishing changes in our nation's political will in just the twentyish years of my majority. There was a time when socialism was a third rail. Then again, there was also a time when actively supporting Nazis was, too.
I suppose the explanation for my current pessimism isn't anything particularly amazing. I doubt the world was an amazing, awesome place when I was a kid and it seemed so. Likely I was just ignorant to how fucked up things were. And not just ignorant, but probably left impossibly in the dark due to the limitations of knowledge access. I might have been able to reach my present state of knowledgeable pessimism by spending a month plowing through the library, had I been looking for it, which I likely wouldn't have. Now, with the internet, we are all aware every day of the multiple outrages to justice and peace and responsibility that take place every second of every day.
What do you think? Can you change my mind? Do you have a better hope for the future? Or is all as lost as it seems?
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