"We are living in this planet as if we have another one to go to."

Climate change is the big threat looming over us all. Every year things get a little worse, but the people in power don’t seem to be doing anything about it. Why is that? People like us who recognize the threat of climate change for our future, are surely scratching our heads wondering why our leaders seem to refuse to do anything about it. But that’s because the problem doesn’t lie with any single individuals, corporations or even nations. The problem lies in the system we all live in. No person controls the system, and yet we are all bound to it, and no one can escape it, not you or me, neither can the country we live in. It is an intricate global web of incentives and punishments that create and maintain the status quo, inadvertently accelerating our misguided path to climate destruction. 

There’s an economic term called “The Tragedy of the Commons”, it illustrates how when different individuals are presented with unrestricted access to a public resource (also known as a “common”), they will act in their own self interest and try to take as much of it as they can, because they think the others will surely do the same. This leads to the resource’s quick depletion. This is happening on a much larger scale, with our planet as the resource, and all of the world’s nations as the greedy individuals exploiting it until nothing is left. 

Say a country makes a pledge to massively reduce emissions in an effort to combat climate change. But there’s no guarantee that other countries will do the same. Hell, there’s even a good chance that a rival country will increase their emissions and energy consumption to gain an economic or military advantage. That’s why the most we see out of our leaders is an empty promise that we’ll start being sustainable “somewhere” in the future.

They all take advantage of the situation because everyone else is. 

This is because everyone still sees life as competition. That in order to win, everyone else must lose… In order to prosper, everyone else must suffer. A notion further compounded and perpetuated by our current economic system. This is why there can be no solution to climate change under capitalism. In the world we live in now, to do the morally right thing, doing a selfless act to better the future lives of our children, is not only discouraged, but often punished. All that seems to matter is profits, efficiency, an increase in company growth to be celebrated in the quarterly reports.

The people who are in charge, every single world leader, corporate head, and billionaire absolutely know that climate change is real, and that we are the one causing it. But no one is willing to do anything. No leader wants to disturb the status quo. Our leaders are paralized, because any actions they take to reduce waste and consumption will be met with swift resistance not only by companies that profit from it, but also by their own society who’s addicted to a lifestyle that is inherently unsustainable. The corporations and billionaires who are blinded by short term profits, try to convince everyone that there is no problem, that we should keep buying and consuming mindlessly, forever. 

Objectively speaking, our way of life, this standard of living in developed nations is the highest humanity’s ever had. Every opulent comfort is available to us, every delicacy, every advanced piece of technology… Everything is just a push of a button away. Cheap beef from the terrible greenhouse-gas emitting cattle industry, cheap fish from our overfished, dying oceans, fast fashion clothing that will be disposed of within months, cheap phones that become toxic bricks in a couple of years, cruises on luxury ocean liners that produce more pollution than every car in the world combined. This convenience did not come without a price. To reach and stubbornly hold on to this unsustainable consumerist lifestyle, we are paying for it with the blood of our children. For they will be the ones negatively affected by our selfish actions. 

The adults who are alive right now, will most likely still be able to live a relatively comfortable life with a high standard of living until they die. But what about our children? Things will start to truly get bad within their time. The disappearance of coastal areas under the sea, the inescapable deadly heatwaves, unavailability of fresh water, and terribly accelerated cases of  “natural” disasters on an unheard of scale. This will lead to a mass exodus of a massive portion of humanity, escaping their soon-to-be uninhabitable homelands. The global economic supply lines will be severely affected, supplies will become scarce, even wars might break out, broken nations scrambling to fight for whatever is left. And what about our children’s children? Will there even be anyone left? Let’s not sacrifice their future for temporary pleasures and conveniences. 

That’s the scary thing about all this. That the more “real” the threat of climate change becomes to everyone, the less likely it is for them to abandon their last chance at a “normal” life. “Why should I stop consuming meat everyday? Why should I stop using disposable plastic bags? Why shouldn’t I keep driving my own personal car? Or stop traveling on planes and luxury cruises? This isn’t my fault to begin with, why should I sacrifice my personal comfort for something that won’t make a difference anyway? At least let me enjoy the luxuries in the time we have left…” 

On a strictly individual scale, this might be somewhat true, what an individual does won’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. But what if everyone is thinking this? Thousands, millions, even billions of humans? Then the aggregate amount of bad things everyone is doing adds up into a whole lot of bad. And this is at the individual level, which has the least effect overall. Corporations and nations consume, exploit and pollute hundreds of times more than everyone on Earth combined. All this means that the worse climate change gets, the more the world will react in ways further preventing us from taking actions to mitigate it.

Something that makes caring about climate change difficult for humanity at large, is that it’s a gradual threat. Slowly getting worse each year, sure,  but at an incremental pace where we can still get used to the slight inconveniences it causes. “Oh, this summer is 2 degrees warmer than last year’s, oh well.” “Man, aren't the seasons inconsistent nowadays? It should already be winter right now.” These little remarks will become more serious over time, but day to day, you won’t notice a thing. Like a frog sitting inside a pot of slowly boiling water, not jumping out because the water is heating up ever so gradually, that when it finally realizes it’s in danger, it’s already too late. 

Sadly, it seems that the only times humanity truly unites together to achieve something is when we’re faced with an immediate, dramatic, global threat that can’t be ignored. Take a look at the last couple of years. It took the global Covid-19 pandemic to make us realize how fragile we really are. It took the threat of war for the European nations to finally band together and support each other like they should have done a long time ago. 

If suddenly tomorrow, a massive meteor is found to be in direct collision course with Earth in two months, threatening the extinction of our species, then the world will no doubt immediately unite, every nation working together to find a solution without the geopolitical bureaucratic red tape that asphyxiates us all. But climate change doesn’t work like that. There’s no scary deadline for the extinction of humanity. And so it gets pushed further and further down the priority list. 

The politician asks, “When will it start to get bad?” 

The scientist answers, “We don’t know, maybe 50 years from now, maybe 100 years from now, but it will happen eventually, we must prevent it by acting now.”  

The politician scoffs, he will be out of office by then, enjoying his retirement on a luxury vacation home. “Let it be someone else’s problem down the line.” he thinks, not knowing that that exact thought was had by his predecessor, and will be had by his successor too. The crucial window of time to act keeps getting ignored, because there’s always something more important to take care of, there is always a later, until there isn’t.

There will be a point when an unlucky future politician will look around his crumbling, dying nation, and ask “Okay, this is getting bad, our people are suffering, how do we get out of this? What can we do now?” 

And looking down, the scientist shakes his head sadly. “There’s nothing we can do, the time for action was fifty years ago, when we still had a chance to avoid this dreadful outcome.”

No one is willing to sacrifice their own personal comfort and do what’s necessary, because no one else is. If this is the mindset everyone keeps running on, it will take a global climate catastrophe on an unheard of scale, before humanity is kicked into action. But by then, it will already be too late. All we can do then is prepare to face the millennia of climate apocalypse that will test our species’ survival. 

Is our doom inevitable? No. There is always hope. It is the hope that our children place on us, you can see it in their eyes. The hope that we might leave this world a better place than we have found it, so that our children will have a chance at a better life. We each have a part to play, we didn’t create this mess, but it falls on us to find a way to solve it. Somehow, we must find a solution, because the only alternative is our eventual extinction.