We're all complicit

and we need to get over it

Noah Berger/AP - California’s Lassen National Forest on July 26.

The world is on fire.

But we’ve known that for awhile.

Are we ready to do something about it now that it’s too late?

Earlier this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report that concluded, among other things, that over the next 30 years temperatures will continue to rise no matter how sharply we cut greenhouse gas emissions right now, and that we can expect the frequency of severe weather events to increase significantly as well.

Those are the facts based on what we’ve already done, but in the scenario where we continue to do as little as we have to reduce emissions, temperatures could rise up to 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. For context, the Paris Agreement’s target was 3.3 degrees.

For some context that’s a little closer to home, a few of you reading this will be alive in the year 2100. Your kids will be in the prime of their retirement. Their kids will be navigating a job market that has sent all the billionaires to space and still pays inmates a fraction of minimum wage to fight fires that never end.

This is not a distant future, but it’s something we’ve repeatedly ignored in the recent past. If you scroll down to the related posts on the New York Times’s coverage, you’ll see similar warnings in 2019, 2018, and so on. We ignored it then, and we might yet ignore this code red.

It’s tempting to throw our hands up and say what’s done is done and continue doing what’s convenient for us and our families. It’s also realistically going to take the combined forces of international policy, economic disincentives, and private sector moonshots to make a dent on the scale necessary to slow down climate change.

This doesn’t absolve you of your role. And if this is a wakeup call for you, let’s get down to business and talk about how we can support the above initiatives, but for a lot of us, it’s probably going to take our own houses burning down to internalize the catastrophic consequences that we’ve all but locked in for our kids and their kids.

That would be tragic, but whenever you’re ready to pitch in, and whatever the reason is, those of us who have already pulled our motivation from the ashes need to be ready to welcome you. We can’t waste time puffing out our chests at our own foresight, belaboring others’ tardiness, or pointing out something else they’re doing “wrong” that negates their willingness to come to the table on this. Because none of our hands are clean.

We’ll all have our reasons to join the cause, but none of us will have all of them. And if we can get over the fact that some of the things we do are harmful to the environment and band together in the ways that aren’t, we might have a chance to make a difference, especially as the band grows.

It’s too late for a lot of things, but it’s not too late to reroute your own future, to weed your own garden.

What do you think it’s going to take? What are you willing to do?

For us. For our kids. For the world as we won’t know it.