Reading David Wallace-Wells seems always to be a downer. But that's because he's a thorough, detailed reporter of the awful truth. In this article, he informs us about air pollution, which is skimming away (and in some instances, ripping away) years of life and well-being from all of us. Most of the air pollution comes from burning fossil fuels and increasingly from burning forests. It's horrible in India and China (as I can personally attest); but only bad here in the U.S. and Europe. So "bad" is good enough for Americans? But then when it comes to our habits of consumption, as a people, we're often little better than a collection of addicts.
Here's a sample of what Wallace-Wells writes:
Perhaps, like me, you have spent the last five years in a state of panic about climate change. Perhaps it has inflamed your politics, and your sense of self. It should. The world is already warmer than it has ever been in the history of human civilisation. We have already exceeded the narrow temperature window which gave rise to everything we know as agriculture and society and politics and culture. The last time there was as much carbon in the atmosphere as there is today, temperatures weren’t 1.2°C warmer than the pre-industrial base level, as they are now, but about 3°C, with forests growing in the Antarctic and sea levels twenty metres higher.The climate is changing ten times faster than ever before in a planetary history that includes mass extinctions which wiped out more than 90 per cent of life on Earth. Half of that damage has been done in the last 25 years, since the publication of Al Gore’s first book on global warming and the formation of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – in other words, with the full knowledge of the scientific community and the effective consent of global political leaders. A quarter of the change has taken place since Barack Obama was elected president, having hubristically proclaimed that ‘this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.’ Just a few years later, he bragged to an audience in Texas that ‘suddenly, America is the biggest oil producer. That was me, people.’"
And you thought climate change was our only & biggest threat.
Of course, we could get two birds with one stone by moving quickly away from fossil fuels. But do we have the wisdom & foresight to do so?
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