“Global warming threatens our health, our economy, our natural resources, and our children`s future. It is clear we must act.”
Eliot Spitzer
By Massimo Usai
(versione italiana qui’ )
I remember the first time they told me about global warming, I was in school.
The teacher was an alternative and progressive guy; he had studied in Bologna and could be seen by how he dressed, spoke, and said things.
He showed us photos of polar bears awkwardly standing on the retreating, ice-cracked muddy ground, then moved to maps focused on the ozone layer (or lack thereof).
His lectures exposed the problem with CFCs., which were completely new words to us.
I had promised myself never to use any spray cans of any kind again and never to want to hear about Air Conditioning again.
Actually, we didn’t have this luxury at home, and in my car, if I wanted cool, I had to lower the windows and hope that the mistral would blow.
I committed to recycling everything I could.
Environmentalism and its forms were my primary battle even once I entered politics.
When you talked about these things, you were seen as one who did not have any problems in life and wanted to be original and alternative. Still, the topic did not lead you to win any election, from neighborhood to national.
It was an “outline”, one more thing that only the youngest wanted to include in the party programs, but the others did not care at all.
All this happened in the 80s and 90s before this hard-to-imagine alternative reality became our tangible reality.
Like most people, I vowed to do my part to stop hurting our Planet but, to be honest, I didn’t think I had been able, after a few years, to witness in front of me the fading of the Planet.
I grew up carrying on speeches and battles that were losers, that did not disturb, or that, at the limit, were accepted with a smile of circumstance.
I believe that at this point, even the most vehement deniers are finding it difficult to ignore what is happening.
GLOBAL WARMING IS RIGHT NOW
Torrential downpours, flash floods, forest fires, scorching temperatures, late harvests, ruined harvests … this is precisely what we have seen in Europe in recent years. From a climatic point of view, Europe has a privileged position over the rest of the Planet.
2021 was the year the world witnessed its first climate change-induced famine in Madagascar.
America was torn to pieces by a hurricane so powerful that it didn’t even lose strength as it traveled hundreds of miles across the earth.
Then we saw unprecedented droughts that evaporated entire sections of rivers in Argentina.
It is now assumed that a one-year-old child today will experience weather events 24 times more extreme in their lives than any older generation.
Now, after the summer we just had, even that figure seems tame. We are glimpsing that future that we never expected to witness.
I must confess that finally, I have noticed that many of us are afraid; I am so scared for myself and the younger generations.
From 31 October to 12 November, Glasgow will host the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), seen by many as a critical moment for our Planet’s future.
While international engagement is essential to changing the world’s future, and we can play a role in calling for and supporting change at the institutional, political and corporate levels, there is still much we can do to help heal our beautiful Planet.
The hysterical reactions from motorists in London in recent days against those who protest because the British government does nothing against the climate disaster does not bode well for us who want to save the Planet.
Of course, it only takes a few populist slogans to convince people that “personal affairs are more important than the climate problem“.
But this situation making us understand that the problem is that many do not realize that if we do not take immediate action on the climate, their personal affairs also disappear, along with them as people and their loved ones.
So this problem is severe and significant, more than an hour late to go to work and everyone should calm their nerves and see beyond the finger pointing to the moon.
The Pandemic has taught us that by acting heavily, and together, you can fight a virus.
Perhaps by working heavily together on global warming, we can prevent the disaster in front of us.
Honestly, if we had invested before and better in research and hospitals and avoided 18 months of lockdown, wouldn’t it have been better?
I think so.
So why wait for a sure next climate catastrophe to bring us back to a lockdown, perhaps even less fun than the one we have been through?
Because the climate could lead us to close ourselves again in our homes, without even having Netflix or Social Networks to let us pass the time.
A climate catastrophe would undoubtedly be much worse than the one that made us experience the Virus.
We must seriously ask ourselves how we can all do to help change the trajectory of the climate crisis.
This is our chance to take responsibility, take control of our future and make sure those lessons we had in school long ago don’t become the reality we hoped would never happen.
That reality that many underestimated then and many still do.
The fact that many did not see and made fun of when we were so warmly committed to convincing them that those Bears with no more ice under their feet were a significant problem for us who took the underground and complained exaggeratedly about a strike that would have caused 20 minutes delay to our trip.