Climate Terror and COP26

“There’s Only Room for Doom and Gloom”

There was a moment, about a week ago or so, where I was sitting on the couch at my partner’s parents’ house and I felt as if I had glimpsed the end of the world. I wasn’t doing anything particularly exciting, nor was anyone else. I was just reading emails, catching up on the daily newsletters that I get. But I got to one particular email, skimmed over it, stopped, read it again, stopped, and suddenly felt very hollow inside. It wasn’t an email telling me a family member had died, or that my hometown had been bombed, or that there was a new, deadlier version of COVID going around. No, it was just a weekly climate newsletter from the New York Times. The November 10th, 2021 edition, actually. I’d say you could read it for yourself, but good luck getting through the paywall on their site. But I’ll do my best to summarize it for you instead, specifically with the two quotes that made me stop. (Also, brief content warning for suicidal ideation and existential dread. Can’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The first one appears in the opening story, by Friedman and Plumer, talking about the results of the Conference of the Parties 26th Summit, or COP26. “One of the main goals at the climate conference is a global pact to keep the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with preindustrial levels. Beyond that threshold, scientists say, the likelihood of deadly heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods and biodiversity collapse rises sharply. The planet has already warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius.” The second came later, only as a blurb to link to a longer article by Somini Sengupta about the gender and generation gap at the COP26 summit, but it’s really all I needed. It’s actually a quote from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and it’s a statement that’s surprisingly prescient and self-aware for a man who reads like a British version of Donald Trump. He said future generations “will judge us with bitterness and with a resentment that eclipses any of the climate activists of today.” Not exactly a winning sentiment.

I don’t know what it was about those particular quotes, those particular things, echoing ideas that I’ve read before a thousand times, in class, in research, in my own activism. This is nothing new to me. But yet, something hit different this time around. And all of a sudden I glimpsed a very different future than I’d always imagined for myself. A very different future than I’d always imagined for my children. A very different future than I’d always imagined for my planet. It’s a future where there are no more coral reefs, where intense, devastating storms are a dime-a-dozen, where heat waves kill tens of thousands of people every year, where coastal cities are flooded beyond habitation. For the rest of the evening, my thoughts were enveloped with hopelessness, despair, and a growing sensation that there was nothing I or anyone else could do, no matter how hard we tried, to stop the climate apocalypse.

This line of thinking is new to me, actually. I consider myself an optimist on most things. I’ll tell people I’m a pragmatist or an opportunist or a rationalist, but in reality, I am most of all an idealist. I always whole-heartedly believe things will turn out for the best, that nothing really bad will actually happen, and everything will be fine if we all try our hardest and do our parts. This is how I’ve gotten through life so far. Even in my darkest times, when I was actively pursuing my own self-destruction, it was that hope that brought me out of the caves of my mind. And I think this kind of optimism reflects in my writing; most everything in the scant posts I’ve written about climate change has been more or less as optimistic as you can get for the subject matter. But at this moment, reading those simple words, I felt scared. Not just scared, I was terrified. All of that hope drained out of me and left me feeling resigned to my fate. To our fate. The world is ending, and there’s nothing we can do. And this feeling has stuck with me, in one way or another, since then.

Our world is hurtling towards complete ecological collapse. We are on the edge of a mass extinction in the most literal sense of the world. I don’t know how many millions of acres of habitat have been converted to farmland or city or roadway in the course of human history, but it’s a lot. And I don’t know how many species have gone extinct before we’ve ever had a chance to discover them, but there’s probably a solid handful. And there’s going to be a solid handful more, possibly the majority of all species, in the next one hundred years. 80% or more of all biodiversity on earth has been lost in previous mass extinctions. We could see something of that same magnitude within our lifetimes. No, excuse me, within my lifetime. If you’re reading this and are over the age of forty, chances are good you won’t see the worst of it. Lucky you. Coming in at the tail end of what could be the last good time to be a human.

Scientists estimate 99% of all coral reefs will be lost by 2100. Let that sink in. Ninety-nine percent. And knowing scientists, that’s likely a conservative estimate. I have been lucky enough to see one coral reef in my life, back in 2015 on a Boy Scout trip. I had thought I would be able to see many more of them before I died, but for all I know, that may be my one and only time to take it in. And the worse part is that it doesn’t matter what we do now to try and stop it. This isn’t some sort of hypothetical worst-case-scenario kind of thing. This is the most likely case. You could bet money on the fact that corals, as a class of living thing, will largely cease to exist. It’s almost guaranteed to happen. And you know the only thing that could stop it? Immediate, rapid decarbonization of every major economy on Earth. So, actually, it’s entirely guaranteed to happen. Because not one goddamn piece of shit politician is going to do a fucking thing to stop it.

Let’s be honest here; the COP26 was an abject failure. To borrow some thoughts from Greta Thunberg, the whole thing is more of a PR event than anything else. It’s all political posturing and doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. None of these countries, not the US, not the UK, not any nation in the EU, not Australia, not China, not India, not Russia, not any of the world’s biggest polluters are going to actually follow through on this. Because they don’t care. The people in power fundamentally do not care to put in the effort to avert what will be humanity’s largest disaster of our own making. You can talk about trade agreements, or national sovereignty, or globalism, or free-market solutions, or future fossil fuel resources, or new technologies, or infrastructure decay, or the amount of time it takes, or how their hands are tied, or anything else. But it doesn’t matter. It’s just different labels for the same thing; greed. Doesn’t matter if they’re left or right, liberal or conservative, here or there, it’s all the same thing. These politicians and their corporate buddies are going to do as much as they can to do as little as possible about climate change, so they can uphold the same social and economic system that got us into this mess in the first place because that’s what makes them money. That’s what it’s all about at the end of the day. They’ll destroy the future for the status quo and the almighty dollar.

Now, the blame here is almost solely on developed countries, those rich nations that belch methane and toss out plastic bottles like there’s no tomorrow. But countries in the developing world have it roughest for a ton of reasons, though. The ones who have done the least to contribute to climate change are going to be hit the hardest, generally speaking, and they need money to prepare for that. Where do you get the money to prep for disaster? Well, maybe the fossil fuel industry? What the hell else are they gonna do, let their cities flood? “Why don’t we just pay them to keep the oil in the ground?” Yes, why don’t we do that? Because we don’t want to. You can’t get Uncle Sam to pry a damn cent out of his wallet for another country if it ain’t gonna give him a kickback down the road. So, what, we leave the developing world to languish in poverty while we ride big oil all the way to the top? Doesn’t seem very humanitarian to me.

The talk of who shoulders the burden for climate change and the rights to quality of life and who’s going to pay for developing countries and so on and so forth is such a huge conversation in and of itself, but at the end of the day, it’s just distracting us from getting anything done. Because India’s still gonna use coal. So is China. So is the US. So is the UK. Sure, we got some reforestations agreements out of the COP26, but they aren’t binding. I’d be real surprised if Bolsonaro gives a rat’s ass about the Amazon rainforest. Or if anyone in power does, for that matter. None of this is binding. Again, it doesn’t mean anything. The agreements aren’t doing enough. And that’s the problem; even if these things somehow made countries contractually obligated to meet the outlined requirements, it’s still not enough. The world is still going to end. We’re gonna blow past that 1.5 degree Celsius mark before you know it. They aren’t listening to the scientists, the Indigenous peoples, the thousands of protestors, the young people who are going to have to live with the consequences of their actions. It’s just not enough. And this is really kind of the last-ditch effort anyway. The world is doomed, and we’re all fucked. No amount of protesting can do anything to change it. We’re just as powerless as the day we were brought into this world.

We’re running towards a future that’s as bleak as any dystopian novel, maybe worse if some estimates of future impacts end up being accurate. We got commitments out of COP26 that aren’t going to take effect for thirty, or sixty years, long after it’s too late to do anything. And that’s horrifying. I feel like I’m looking down the barrel of a gun because I know that, someday, if I survive long enough, I’m going to wake up as an old man and realize that I’m living in a world that’s definitively worse off than the one I was born into. And I can basically guarantee you that. The forests of my youth will be long gone. My children and my children’s children, if they exist, will wonder how we ever got to go camping, because there’s nowhere left to camp. The only animals will be deer and pigeons. We will never have a chance to build a better world because we fucked it up so badly. All those cultures, all this art, all the things we’ve made and done as a species, none of it will matter in the face of an actual collapse scenario, worldwide.

This all gives me a sickening feeling in my gut. How can I plan for the future if there isn’t going to be one? Aren’t we just moving deck chairs on the Titanic? Why am I bothering to write and try to publish books if, in thirty years, it’ll all be gone anyway? Even books about climate change? Shouldn’t I be out fighting? Learning survival skills? Should I just crawl into a ball and die? Should we all do that? I don’t know. Why even bother? I guess because there’s nothing else to do. I’ve mentioned this before, I haven’t been afraid of death since high school. Dying is not something that frightens me, even now. But this? This scares the shit out of me. I used to believe that the world would be a better place at my end than it was at my beginning. But I don’t think so anymore. Knowing, even right now, that I will die an old man in a very unhappy world is heartbreaking. I’ll never see it through. I can trace the path of our days, and they are numbered. And while on a geologic timescale this will be just a blip on the earth’s long record, with no mass extinction being permanent and all this warming being smoothed over in a million years or so, we don’t get the luxury of that. We will die just a blip in that record. And it’ll be at our own hands.

If you think this is a load of horeshit, trust me, I would be so happy to find out that things aren’t as dire as they seem. I’d love to be wrong about this. But I don’t think I am. And I think maybe, deep down, you know it too. Maybe not. Besides, because of my economic and geographic status, I’m not even going to be hit the hardest by all of this, so what have I got to worry about? It takes a lot of privilege and a lot of socially oblivious nerve to worry about this like I’ve been doing, but somehow, that doesn’t make this any better. It doesn’t matter, in the end. What’s the solution, then? Politics has failed. Economics has failed. Both those things tend to make this situation actively worse. What do we do? Individual actions aren’t enough in the face of systemic pollution by governments and corporations. We need to change things from the ground up. What does that look like, though? Campaigns? Marches? Protests? Boycotts? I don’t know. I don’t think so. Maybe, just maybe, if everyone, everywhere, does everything they can, we can fix it in time. But, at least in my mental state now, I doubt it. What’s our other option? Armed revolution? Maybe. I don’t think it’s the right time yet. Maybe when things get really bad and everything really starts to fall apart. But even a revolution would still leave us stranded, living with future disasters. I think a lot of people care about this, but maybe they feel just as powerless as me. Organizing is great, but I think we need something more. Perhaps we do need a revolution. I don’t know. But I would be more than happy to personally guillotine Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos the minute they try to leave in their spaceships, because that’s why they’re building all that stuff. They’re smart enough to see what’s coming, but too prideful or greedy or complacent to try and stop it. It’s an escape hatch for them. And if we’re going down, I say we’re going down together. Eat the rich or die trying, I suppose.

I don’t know, in the end. This has just been something that’s been bugging me for a while now. Maybe this mania of mine will subside and I’ll realize, hey, it won’t be that bad, society won’t entirely collapse and there’s still work I can do to make the world a better place. But maybe it won’t subside, either. I don’t think I’ll ever shake the feeling that things are going to get much, much worse before they get better (if they get better), and that I will not live long enough to see them get better. None of us will. There’s no silver bullet here, no technology or alien race coming to save us. It’s just us, and just our trash heap funeral pyre. But as much as this all makes me want to give up and die, there’s nothing to be done except keep trying and keep fighting. Maybe it’ll get better.

So I hope you’ll forgive me for, just this once, not having an upbeat, optimist end of things. I hope you’ll forgive me for wallowing in this pool of self pity and loathing. I am scared. And I hope you understand why I don’t think I can muster the hope right now to change that. I’m sorry to dump all this on you, in what amounts to 3,000 words of vomit, but I had to say it. It’s been on my mind for a while, and I don’t think it’s going away for a while, either. This is the world we live in. This is climate terror. And it is much, much worse than I ever thought.