It was December
2115, the hundredth anniversary of the agreement to a climate treaty reached among
all the members of the United Nations, in Paris
Back then, the clan
founder, Malvolio Petrex, chairman and chief executive officer
of the largest oil company at the time, had come to realize the inconsistencies
of his, and his company’s, position. They
were, at one and the same time, using all their financial power and political
influence to perpetuate, indeed to expand, the use of the oil they extracted
from the ground, while correctly realizing that their exploitative activities
were worsening the global warming already well under way. After all, the Paris
Malvolio Petrex
knew that global warming was going to get much worse in the coming years,
because his company and others were continuing to produce fossil fuels at
ever-increasing rates of growth, year after year. After all, more and more energy was needed to
fuel the demands of economies all over the world, being used to expand their
economies and raise the poorest peoples of the world out of poverty.
He wasn’t too
worried about his own welfare, though.
Thanks to his immeasurable wealth, he already had peppered several
secure estates around the world, in various climatic and ecological
settings. But as any other dynastic
figure that we may encounter throughout history, he was concerned about the
wellbeing of his progeny. He knew that
the travesties his business activities were creating would worsen after he was
gone, impacting the lives and indeed the safety of his scions. He understood that worsening warming would
lead to economic and political unrest among the impoverished and others less
well off than he because they would be suffering the harmful effects of
warming: flooding in some regions; droughts, wildfires and famine in others;
and inexorable sea level rise driving millions around the world from their
traditional homes and livelihoods.
And so he embarked
on a program to develop self-contained environments for himself and his
family. The environments would insulate
his family from the unpleasantness of dealing with the effects of climate
change by keeping the open atmosphere out, and the family’s living quarters and
areas for amusing themselves in. The first
models were installed on the grounds of his existing estates, and were
relatively modest.
Now, one hundred
years later, after many rounds of development and improvement, this Petrex
estate was enveloped in its own protective terradome. It was a large, fully enclosed environment
covering almost one square mile, incorporating the estate’s mansion, its
recreational areas, and fields producing much of its food needs. The terradome insulated the estate from the
worst “weird” climate and weather events brought on by the extreme warming that
the world had attained by then, as well as keeping a portion of the sun’s
warming light from penetrating to the land within it. The Petrex family had practically no need to
travel outside the terradome; it was almost entirely self-sufficient.
As a result, they
were insulated as well from the harms and damages induced by the warmer climate
that most of the peoples of the world were suffering. Or maybe they knew and, just like Malvolio
Petrex a hundred years earlier, chose to ignore it. The population at large was subjected to far worse
conditions than Petrex’s world had experienced one hundred years earlier:
debilitating heat waves and droughts, intense storms bringing on severe
flooding, encroaching oceans because of the severe degree of sea level rise,
all brought on by the excess global warming that burning fossil fuels induced.
By the time of the
centennial anniversary the opportunity for
effective action to combat global warming had long passed.
* * * *
President Obama
delivered an annual State of the Union speech on January 28, 2014 , as reported by this writer earlier. He stated what is probably the most
profound and basic motivation for attacking the problem of global warming:
“Climate
change is a fact. And when our
children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave
them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be
able to say yes, we did.”
Importantly, we
know with practically complete certainty that the excess warming of the planet
is due to humanity’s burning of fossil fuels to power our economies. The President’s statement illuminates the
core of our attitudes and behavior about global warming, namely, the strong
desire we all feel to pass on to our children and further progeny a secure
world not threatened by the consequences of our present environmental
actions.
Moral basis for climate action. President Obama laid down a forceful imperative, that of
working to abate global warming for the welfare of our children and their
children, and by inference, our future progeny whom we will never know. We can
consider this the most powerful, fundamental driver for action against global
warming. It is a principal motivation for the faithful, who consider that we
are stewards of God’s creation, responsible for preserving its bounties for
ourselves and our progeny. It is an important guiding principle for others as
well who direct their actions to the betterment of the world and the lives of
their fellow humans.
The effects of global warming pervade the
entire earth.
Once fossil fuels are burned, the carbon dioxide they produce is
distributed worldwide throughout the atmosphere. The stronger greenhouse
effect that results leads to unprecedented warming of the earth system, its
air, water and land. Indeed, heating is
occurring about sixty to one hundred times faster than during any earlier
warming or cooling interval uncovered in the geological record going back
almost one million years. The greenhouse effect warms the atmosphere, but over 90%
of the excess heat enters the oceans. It
is stored there long-term and recirculates back to the atmosphere as ocean
currents change.
Warming affects all inhabitants of our
planet, poor and rich, weak and powerful alike.
It is folly to think that those having wealth and exerting power can be
insulated from its effects. The Paris
