Something funny just crossed my mind about us human beings. There are ghosts in this world that we don’t see, yet, we believe and sort of know that they exist. And then there are other facts that exist all around us similarly and we even see them, yet, we somehow do not realise that they actually exist too. One such fact is that China has already become the largest economy in the world surpassing the United States. By employing the best yardstick that the IMF and the CIA use to measure and compare national economies, which is called the MER (market exchange rates), to calculate the GDP, China’s economy is more than one-sixth larger than that of the US. There is not much noise about it except by scholars such as Harvard’s Graham Allison. Therefore, it has yet to become an accepted fact.
The other such fact that has already happened and yet we think this sort of stuff is futuristic and one that may or may not even happen is the magic number 1.5 degree Celsius warming of the planet. In 2023, more than 40% of the earth had already touched 1.5 degree warming, which is the threshold agreed upon in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. That is the warming point beyond which a chain of disasters will hit the planet, from which escape may not be possible. That is not all. Around 20% of the earth has already warmed more than 2 degrees Celsius.
The meaning of 1.5 degree warming means that the earth has warmed by that much since humans started burning fossil fuel on an industrial scale in the late 1800s. Scientists have been warming that 1.5 is bad enough but only reversible damage could happen at that level of warming. Beyond that, we may not be able to slow, stop or reverse the warming and the damage that will result from such a cooked-up world. Let me also break it to you that around 5% of the planet has already warmed more than 3 degree Celsius.
More than 2.5 million people in the US alone have been displaced from their homes in the year 2023 due to climate change. And climate change is directly because of human activity such as the burning of fossil fuel primarily. There is another thing also happening directly due to human actions: much of the infrastructure of the coastal cities such as New York and Baltimore are built over land that is sinking. Let me clarify, this is not exactly the rising sea level, but rather the sinking of the land near the sea.
A team of scientists at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation and Innovation Lab found that the land over which some of the coastal cities are built have sunk between the years 2007 and 2020. Every year, the land sinks by 1-2 millimeters. There are highways and airports on the lands that are subsiding. Sometimes I think that we humans have made artificial entities for our comfort and advancement, yet, we are helpless against them.
The US constitution’s 14th amendment was originally written for the sake of the freed black slaves so that they could enjoy equal rights and freedoms. Yet, due to a bizarre and twisted interpretation of that amendment, corporations in the US have been given human-like rights and enormous powers that no human can ever think of having. Those corporations are artificial entities but they are treated as human beings called US persons. It is the product of some of such US persons such as Exxon, Chevron, and so forth that cause planetary warming and all the threats that come with it. The American government as well as the citizenry are helpless against these frankensteins. They say together we shall rise. I’d rather say that by unquestioning and habitual use of fossil fuel, together we shall drown. The only things that rise together are carbon emissions.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 25th, 2024.
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