August 11, 2021 ☼ climate
Source: The Washington Post - Link
Imagine in the coming years a global politics shaped by resurgent nationalism. Governments prioritize their own energy and food needs, invest more in national security than in global development, and undercut international efforts to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases. In this future, carbon emissions will roughly double by the end of the century, hastening along with them the drastic array of catastrophic environmental effects linked to global warming, from the melting of the Arctic to heat waves that make whole regions uninhabitable to an intensification of the extreme droughts, wildfires and floods that have already blighted parts of the world this summer.
When some climate scientists speak casually, they categorize this imagined future as “Trump world,” a reference to former president Donald Trump’s rejection of climate science in favor of an aggressive nationalism that championed short-term economic growth no matter the looming calamities posed by a human-influenced climate change. But things don’t have to go that way.
This is horrifying. The problem is that not enough will be done to put off the nightmare.