Looking At Ourselves In The Mirror

If you have access to the New York Times, there is a piece well-worth reading by Michael Benson. Entitled Watching Earth Burn. it includes photos of our planet taken from three weather satellites in geostationary orbit high above the Equator. These photos attest to the ravages of climate-change induced wild fires plaguing the world, although Benson does not ignore human-caused destruction, as in the ravages of the Amazonian rainforest where, thanks to 

the rapacious policies of President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, predatory agricultural, logging and mining interests had set his country ablaze. By late September the already hellish 2019 escalation in deliberately set forest fires had been exceeded by 28 percent, with more than 44,000 outbreaks recorded in the Amazon and Pantanal this year.

The entire article makes for grim reading, and is a cogent reminder of just how late in the day it is for mitigating the worst of  the damage threatening the very existence of our species and countless others with whom we share the earth.

Yet the piece ends on a cautiously optimistic note:

If the war has started and we’re losing, what can we do about it? Or to put it another way, what would I like to see happen over the next year, even if I won’t yet be able to observe it directly from my Olympian perch among the satellites?

Actually, our response to the pandemic already suggests the way forward. Faced with an existential crisis of a scale not seen in living memory, we deployed the planet’s best minds, funded them well and turned them loose on the problem. They in turn were able to draw on a wealth of prior knowledge about how viruses infiltrate our bodies, and three decades of hard-won experience in learning about and finally creating RNA — purpose-built synthetic copies of a natural molecule integral to our genes — devised to prompt an immune response within our cells. This paid off spectacularly. And all this was accomplished in record time — months instead of the previous standard of a decade or more.

We need to follow this immediately with another sustained global effort. Imagine what human ingenuity could produce if unleashed in comparably coordinated, well-funded fashion on the climate crisis. The good news is that, as with the new RNA vaccines, we have significant prior research to draw on. It covers carbon-neutral power production, energy conservation strategies, carbon capture and sequestration, global reforestation and an intercontinental effort to build a high voltage, DC power network 40 percent more efficient than AC and thus able to compensate for the daily fluctuations in wind and solar power systems.

In short, we need an all-hands-on-deck fusion of the Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan, only this time funded by all of the world’s major economies and led by the largest: the United States, the European Union and China.

Time is obviously short, but as I commented on Marie's blog entry about the existential threats we face, human beings seem much more able to respond to acute threats than long-term ones. If we cannoit change that propensity, there really is little basis for hope.