Climate change: by the rich, of the rich, for the poor

Thinking about the popular HBO show, Game Of Thrones, in retrospect it’s clear now that the weakest among the army of humans eventually kill the strongest and meanest of the white walkers. No skillful swordsmen, no dragon, no land army, but rather a little girl with just a knife ends up killing the leader of the most dangerous army against which the entire humanity stands no chance. The weakest and the ones who were ridiculed at the outset were also the ones that survived in the end. Everybody else vanishes. The last men standing aren’t really due to their sheer power or fighting or intellectual skills.

Similarly, when we look at the story of what happened to the dinosaurs, we realise that the weakest among them survived in the end. The birds we have today are arguably the only descendants of the dinosaurs.

The iridium filled meteorite came down the Yucatán peninsula and raised a cloud of dust into the atmosphere where it stayed for months, blocking the sun, cooling off the earth and killing all life on it. Apparently, dinosaurs also went extinct with climate change. Except that was a naturally occurring climate change. The dinosaurs were in no way responsible for causing it. Their reign ended and the birds at that time escaped. And we now use iridium in our offices to prevent any stack of papers from flying away. Yes, that shiny heavy little stone is iridium. That’s what killed the dinosaurs.

If we look at the climate change of today though, we don’t see the same pattern repeating itself. The wealthy and the strong have caused it chiefly. The poor and the weak suffer the most from it. However, the poor and the weak do not possess the means or the knowledge and power to tackle it. For a start, the poor don’t even know that it exists or that it is also a thing. It goes without saying that one can’t fight an enemy it can’t see or knows about. So, no dramatic fight here. No weak reaching for his sword or knife is going to solve this global warming problem.

The wealthy world has made pledges and just as the excessive heat every year and every month breaks previous records, these wealthy nations break their own pledges of net carbon emissions and other such jargon that the average Joe doesn’t understand.

The interesting thing is that the rich doesn’t need to unleash all or some of its mighty power to fight against this extinction capable threat. What it needs to do is rather change how it does things, especially generating power and powering vehicles. Society never goes through abrupt transformation. It doesn’t change it lifestyle as much as it changes how they do the same things slightly differently.

We used to watch movies on VCR with a cassette. Then came the CDs and DVDs. And now there’s online streaming. People didn’t abandon watching movies. They changed how they access and watch them. The solution to climate change is not in driving less and consuming less energy but rather generating it differently. Instead of coal and fossil fuel as a source of power for our homes, industries and vehicles, we should exploit the sun and the wind.

That is what the wealthy nations must initiate so that the rest of the world can follow. That has been the pattern of how things happen in our world. The sun may rise in the east but the dawn of everything else happens to be in the west.

Excessive heat and wildfires have become the norm this summer. Either we do something about this threat or else the weakest species of our times will move over to the next time there’s life on this planet. And then they’ll study about us and call us the unintelligent life. And they’d be right.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 27^th, 2023.

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