Known knowns of climate change

In my university days in Peshawar, at the hostel, the Jamaat-i-Islami students were always actively hustling and urging people to join them at the masjid. There was something interesting they used to say: that imagine Islam as an exam where we know in advance all the questions we would be asked before entering the exam hall. My reaction was that students would do well on such an exam. Then they would unleash their faith pitch and say, well, the paper is out. We already know what we need to do in order to pass. We need to pray five times a day, fast during Ramazan, give Zakat, and so forth.

For climate change, the paper is out too. We already know what we need to do and what we don’t. Yet, just as I used to procrastinate in faith, the world procrastinates in tackling the threat of climate change.

The United States and other strong nations spend a ton of resources in its quest to know about the next threat to their security. For climate change, the world doesn’t need to spend a dime trying to know where the threat is coming from and how to avert it. The threat of climate change is not in the future. It is right here right now. And the ambitious steps that must be taken to avoid the extinction of human species must be taken now as well.

Just like the solution to end terrorism lies not in going to distant lands on this planet and whacking people there but rather in avoiding exactly that, the solution to the threat of climate change also lies in completely stopping and altering how we generate energy instead of digging for more resources. Just as terrorism is a reaction to aggression, climate change is the reaction to what we have been doing to earth. That must change. Burning of fossil fuel must stop if we hope to leave a habitable planet for our grandchildren.

And just like aggression is the favourite pastime of wealthy nations that enjoy impunity, fossil fuel burning is also the result of the wealthy nations’ thirst for energy. In an ideal world, there would be a world court holding the wealthy polluters responsible for affecting all life on Earth. The US and China are the world’s biggest polluters, adding a massive amount of carbon to the atmosphere. That carbon traps the escaping heat from the Earth and causes the Earth to heat up resulting in global warming, heatwaves, wildfires, rising sea levels, hurricanes, destruction of flora and fauna, and so forth.

The interesting and sad reality is that while sea levels would rise, water resources would dwindle. To understand this bizarre fact, let me simply say that usable water would decrease in quantity and unusable water would increase causing an inundation on a scale we yet have not seen. The horrors are still ahead of us not behind.

Donald Rumsfeld’s classifications of threats have one called known knowns, meaning the threats to our security we know we know. The fact that we must stop digging for more oil, that we must get rid of the fossil fuel industry, that driving electric cars wouldn’t make any difference as long as the electricity is generated using coal, that we must impose carbon tax, that our air conditioning units pollute the air with too much carbon, that the Arctic melt would accelerate the destruction, are all the things we know we know. Yet, we also know that we are not doing much about it.

A United Nations report on Wednesday warned that the richest 1% of the global population emits more than twice as much greenhouse gas as the combined share of the poorest 50% of the global population. “The wealthy bear the greatest responsibility,” the report said. Perhaps it would be better to get rid of as many rich people as the trees we get rid of every year.