The Question That Should Weigh Most Heavily on Our Minds

The summer of 2021 was a season in global hell. Salmon roasted in the rivers of British Columbia, while some six hundred people suddenly expired in the unprecedented heatwave: the sign of the onset of an early twenty-first-century summer. There followed another round of record-breaking wildfires in the US Pacific Northwest, still not over as these words are written. Forests in the Mediterranean basin were reduced to soot. A viral film clip showed a ferry packed with people being evacuated from the Greek island of Evia: all around them, steep mountainsides glowing with fire. Flames roared through Algeria, Tunisia, Albania, France; barely had Turkey come to grips with the dizzyingly destructive wildfires before flash floods struck, sweeping away villages and killing nearly hundred in the northern parts of the country. Similar scenes unfolded in western Germany, China, South Sudan, Myanmar, the Indian state of Maharashtra, the American state of Tennessee. A planet alternately on fire and under water. In the summer of 2021, this even encompassed some of the most affluent places on Earth.

And still, it goes on. It goes on. From the White House, as of August 2021, Joe Biden is busy handing out approvals for oil and gas drilling on public land at a speed not seen since George W. Bush was president. He is putting pressure on OPEC to produce more oil. On the northern slopes of Alaska, ConocoPhillips has his blessing to construct pipelines. Still, because the permafrost is melting, the company has to artificially freeze the ground to hold the pipelines in place so more oil can be conveyed to the world market for burning. Over in Canada, Enbridge is blasting and bulldozing its way through indigenous lands to build pipelines for tar-sands oil, while in Britain, the government is planning to open the new Cambo oilfield near the Shetland Islands and a new deep coal mine in Cumbria (not to mention the third runway at Heathrow). Angela Merkel has again rejected calls for phasing out lignite coal any earlier than in 2038; at least until then, the mines of Germany will continue to grow and send more of the dirtiest of fossil fuels to the furnaces. The single largest private company based in France is Total. It is currently constructing what will be the world’s longest heated oil pipeline in eastern Africa, sending oil from the fields around Lake Albert through Uganda and Tanzania to the coast, whence the oil can be shipped around the world for combustion; president Emmanuel Macron is egging Total on, in Africa as in the Arctic, where the company is drilling for yet more fossil gas to sell at a handsome profit.

Extreme weather events in a warming world result from the total amount of CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere. The more there is, the worse it will be; a few more years of business-as-usual and the summer of 2021 will look benevolent in hindsight, the first circle in a bottomless hell.

And still, it continues. It continues, and then it goes on some more.

Even as bourgeois an institution as the International Energy Agency has declared that the only chance to stay below 1.5 degrees of global warming is for humanity to build no new fossil fuel installations. Not a single new pipeline or coal mine or airport. But, of course, the ruling classes are doing precisely the opposite: rushing to pour fuel on the fires. The production of fossil fuels should be cut by at least six per cent per year to hit zero as soon as humanely possible; instead, producers are planning to increase production by an average of two per cent per year in the coming decades. That’s two per cent more fossil fuels taken out of the ground, year after year; two per cent more than in the previous year, than two per cent more, and so on. And already now, mountainsides are glowing with fire.

But the real mystery is not the insanity of this system. It has been known for quite some time (although the magnitude of the insanity is further clarified with every passing year). Instead, the real mystery is our own lack of action. For how long are we going to stand by – complaining politely at most, silently watching more often – as this goes on? Are we going to let this system kill us all? Shall we go down without a proper fight? It is by now abundantly clear that only significant unrest from below has a chance to shake the ruling classes out of their compulsive habit to fan the flames. In its absence, it will go on until the last drop of fuel. The property that destroys the Earth could very well be destroyed by people interested in their own and others’ survival. And yet, none of this is happening, still. Why? When do we start fighting back? Why are we waiting and holding back? After the summer of 2021, this is the question that should weigh most heavily on our minds.