Where We’ll Be When the Fire Strikes

On U.S. President Donald Trump’s first day back in office, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords again, halted leasing and permitting for offshore wind energy projects, and signed executive orders promoting fossil fuel development. The previous Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations. It seems likely he’ll now continue this process with even more vehemence.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report in 2018, which found that “global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.” A 1.5°C rise in temperature will render the Earth virtually uninhabitable.

We are already somewhere between 0.8°C and 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels and trending in the wrong direction. 2024 was the warmest year on record, surpassing 2023, the previous record holder.

Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres (writing with co-author Tom Rivett-Carnac) once predicted how the world might look in 2050:

In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy, and depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be. Everything might look fine—sunny and clear—but you know better. When storms and heatwaves overlap and cluster, the air pollution and intensified surface ozone levels can make it dangerous to go outside without a specially designed face mask (which only some can afford).

Current government policy is to accelerate this threat.

Partisan rhetoric can give the impression that scientists are divided on this issue. The debate around climate change is usually a debate about whether climate change exists. Not what to do about it.

According to a 2021 study by Cornell University, there’s 99.9% agreement among scientists that climate change is caused by humans. You won’t find that level of consensus among scientists about gravity.

The right wing knows this perfectly well. Donald Trump, for instance, applied for a permit in 2016 to build a coastal protection wall to prevent erosion due to rising seas levels at one of his seaside golf courses. The permit application explicitly mentioned global warming.

There used to be a right-wing opposition to climate change. In the early 2000s, Newt Gingrich was proposing measures to deal with climate change. Then, the fossil fuel industry came in and essentially remade the Republican Party in their image.

A famous study from 2013 by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University documented how David and Charles Koch, through their think tank Americans for Prosperity, got members of Congress to sign a pledge to vote against virtually any climate legislation which would regulate businesses. In 2013, more than 400 current officeholders had signed this pledge.

This was a major turning point in the fight against climate change. From 2003 to 2021, the number of Republicans who believed global warming was caused by human activity dropped from 65% to 32%.

According to the U.N., between 3.3 and 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change. As ecological catastrophes become more and more common and large areas of the globe become uninhabitable, there’s going to be greater mass migration to the First World than we’ve ever seen. The instruments of separation (walls, cages, border patrols) have already been erected, but they won’t be able to stop it. People will find a way.

Failure to curb the use of fossil fuels and halt carbon emissions will mean crop shortages, heatwaves, droughts and floods, even more devastating hurricanes, rising sea levels, and wildfires. There is growing concern among experts that thawing permafrost could release viruses which have been dormant for thousands of years, potentially causing pandemics worse than Covid-19.

Are we in the final century of human civilization? It’s very possible. This is the generation that will decide whether humankind continues. If the world continues on its current trends, it will mean species suicide. It’s imperative that we take the blinders off and face these crises openly and honestly. By the time they become too severe to ignore, it will be too late to do anything.