Climate Change Is One of the Greatest Threats

We are now entering what is known as the Anthropocene Epoch, or the age of Man. The changes Earth has so-far undergone since the Industrial Revolution have proved so substantial as to warrant a new geological epoch, of which normally takes tens to hundreds of millions of years to cycle. The primary and most notable change is the drastic increase of Carbon Dioxide and other so-called “Greenhouse Gases” in the atmosphere, causing a large increase in global temperature of up to 1.

5C above median levels as of 2018. While it may seem like an insignificant temperature, even small changes in average temperature can have drastic effects, with the artic and antartic experiencing temperatures tens of degrees higher than previously experienced.

There are a myriad of people working to create new methods to combat climate change, and one of the more moderate but prominent is known as a “Carbon Tax”. It involves an excise tax on any product that involves carbon emissions, with the severity of the tax depending on how much emissions are produced by the product.

While it would reduce consumption of greenhouse gases, it would also burden the people with the vast majority of the costs, which doesn’t make sense when the top 100 companies are responsible for 80% of the world’s emissions. Why should common people have to pay for the mistakes of corporations? This is an ongoing problem in France, with massive riots all over due to the implementation of a heavy carbon tax. It’s not that the people don’t believe in Climate Change, they are just mad they’re being forced to bear the burdens of it, both physically and economically.

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The main, and obvious effort to combat Climate Change is through the elimination of the overwhelming cause, fossil fuels. While Carbon Taxes in a sense seek to do this, its method is more indirect. Directly seeking to replace power sources with various non-fossil sources would go a long way.

The most obvious solution is renewables such as Wind and Solar, but more controversial methods such as Nuclear power could provide a more realistic alternative. While often decried by jpenvironmentalist groups for its inherent danger, modern Nuclear power techniques are very safe and produce massive amounts of power without the ecological harm caused by hydro power with dams. It may not be the smartest solution though, due to the public opposition of it. The most popular alternatives to fossil fuels are currently Wind and Solar power. Wind energy already makes up a significant margin of Texas’ energy production, even with the massive amount of oil drilling. Many European nations are investing wholesale into them, with Norway, a notably oil rich country, divesting its entire oil stock into renewable energy production. However, the 3 largest oil producing nations in the world: The US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia all recently vetoed a climate package designed to reduce emissions. This willful ignorance brings me to my next point.

To truly solve Climate Change, we need to cut deep into the very heart of the problem. That heart is the current system of global capitalism. Radical as it may sound, the purposeful ignorance of those at the top to environmental destruction to seek greater and greater short term profits is a crime against humanity against the highest order. The top 100 companies produce 75% of all greenhouse emissions, yet they want us to foot the bill. I’m not proposing any specific alternative to the way the world is currently structured, but we need some radical change if we want us and future generations to have a, well, future.

Climate Change is possibly one of the greatest threats ever faced by humanity, and the cruel irony is it is a threat we have imposed upon ourselves. We are willfully leaping out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire, forseeing our doom while doing nothing to prevent it. We only have a few years left before we hit irreversible levels of catastrophic warming, and we need to do something now.