And of the future ?
Fears, aye, those we have, yet Hopes also.
For it has come to this, perhaps the last throw in a losing game. Carbon released in the last one hundred and fifty years of industrialization has raised the temperature by a degree Fahrenheit, and will, in spite of our best possible efforts, raise it by another degree in the next few decades. Sea levels will continue to rise for centuries, no matter what we do, as quickly as a foot every generation.
This the future that the West leaves to the unborn of the East and the South; indeed to their own as well ? A watery death for billions in the lowlands by the ocean ? A short, emaciated life for the rest, as monoculture crops, created by the best science of the West, shrivel and die in climes outside their design? Why then should the East or the South curb their carbon emissions if they are doomed in any case ? Why not reach and grasp and use fossil fuels exactly as the West has done, in hope that their peoples have perhaps some small chance of survival as the world warms ? For if we are all to hang from a rope spun from the carbon history of the West, why, let us all hang together. The West has had its centuries in the sun, and before the noose snaps tight, why begrudge the wretched of the world some little hydrocarbon happiness ?
China’s middle class will soon outweigh the rest, and the children of India await in the wings, for demography will not be denied. Their present charge is to their destitute masses, and they weigh to a nicety death today from fossil fuel taxes against death tomorrow from souring oceans and withered soils. Their scientists, astute as any, know full well what the future holds and account to the last gram the cumulative carbon released thus far by the West.
And more: They see their strength daily wax, as the West wanes; they pay for your banks and your houses, your cars and your gasoline, your bombs and your armies, your wars and your genocides, your corporations and your politicians. More, they know exactly now how the game is played. Death and Suffering are no strangers to them, familiar terrors known and understood.
Will they not ensure the West pays and pays again for the past? Can we really imagine that they will sacrifice their children’s future so that yours may live as you did, in profligate gluttony ? Will they not make your children bear this burden at least in equal measure, share bitter fruit of rising tides and failing crops ?
Both our hopes and our fears may be belied. For our hope is that the West might cease polluting the world with carbon and our fear is that the East and South will not.
I have little hope that the great and the powerful of the West will change; they have not done so in the past, and their present actions spell doom. But the East and the South hold the future in their hands. They may yet turn away from that black gold, and reach instead for the sun and the wind, and the heart of the atom. Indeed, they do already; their efforts are fumbling and slow, but they are a beginning. If we are to have any chance at all of saving some of the future, these efforts must prevail.
And perhaps not the least, in turning away from fossil fuels, they may show the West that in the end, the poor of the earth can forgive and save their overlords, indeed perhaps it is only the poor that might do so. For those in power have much to lose in abandoning their ways of life, and the poor have naught to lose and a world to gain. In the end, it may be that the hearts of the small and powerless are larger than those of their tyrants.
And perhaps, in our own hearts, we know that already.
