September 8, 2016

The immovable object and the irresistible force.

Lately, focused on the impending presidential election, Syria, the Ukraine and the South China Sea, American mainstream media have all but ignored climate change. It’s as if there’s a consensus that war will inevitably transform Earth into another Mars long before it broils into another Venus. Why bother –that logic suggests- making, let alone implementing extraordinarily costly plans for the benefit of future generations that may never be born?

Leaders claim their highest priority and responsibility is the protection of their people. However, if that mentality is extended to a military confrontation between the world’s biggest nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia, and increasingly, China, they will be doing the very opposite. Even a small number of their highly efficient nuclear arsenals will trigger a nuclear winter. In a matter of days the upper atmosphere would be engulfed in a thick layer of radioactive dust that would block the sun’s rays from reaching the Earth’s surface. Without them, the entire planet would quickly freeze and all plants and animals, including us, would die.

This time weapons cannot and will not succeed in imposing one belligerent’s will on the other. Accordingly, our species needs to mature to a level commensurate with the rapidly increasing power of its technology. Furthermore, the ruling elites, who indirectly control all those planet-killer weapons, need to understand that climate change has doomed the plutocratic world order they are so desperately trying to perpetuate. Either we follow it into oblivion or we save ourselves by quickly adopting, as a preliminary step, true Aristotelian democracy –the rule of the majority, who happen to be the poor- worldwide. The status quo will not get us there.