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LAST UPDATE | 1 Jul
IS THERE INTELLIGENT life out there? That was the question posed in the 2008 film, ‘The Day The Earth Stood Still’.
Here, an alien has arrived on Earth on a mission to save the planet… from humans. The visitor, called Klaatu, explains the predicament concisely: “This planet is dying. The human race is killing it.
“If the Earth dies, you die. If you (humanity) die, the Earth survives”.
The logic is impeccable.
Nearly two decades later, Klaatu’s analysis sounds a lot less like science fiction and more like a reasonable assessment of how one species, rolling drunk on petroleum, is on an omnicidal rampage that is so intense it will in time be embedded within the very fossil record of the planet.
It is richly ironic that in an era of instant global telecommunications, where we have never had such unfettered access to a near-infinity of information, humanity is instead inching forward blindly towards the abyss.
We are addled and distracted like never before, as authoritarian governments work fist-in-glove with techno-fascist corporations to weaponise our minds and devour our attention as effectively as they wring profit from laying waste to the living world.
Everywhere you look, a cacophony of alarm bells is ringing, yet, incredibly, nobody is listening. I keep extensive files on climate-related media coverage, and it only takes a few moments to see headlines like ‘JP Morgan warns of end to human life in climate report’ or this, from April last: ‘Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism’.
I didn’t have to go far into the archive to find this 2020 report, from Reuters, headed: ‘Uninhabitable hell: climate change and disease threaten millions, UN warns’, while a report published by Forbes in June projected a calamitous 40% collapse in food production in both the US and Europe as global heating continues unabated.
The rapid accumulation of scientific data, combined with reams of unassailable real-time empirical evidence pointing to an ever-deepening global crisis, has not in any way triggered a commensurate political or societal response.
The flight from reason has, of course, been most pronounced in the Trump-era US, a veritable kakistocracy, a government of the worst, most corrupt, incompetent and least qualified people imaginable. In the space of just a few months, the world’s powerhouse of science and technology for the last seven or eight decades has been ransacked and gutted by charlatans, quacks, carpetbaggers and thieves.
The fossil fuel industry, recognising the threat to its planet-killing business model posed by renewable energy, has pumped hundreds of millions of fossil fuel money into influencing politics. It can barely have imagined just how successful its investment would be. Not content to shut down highly successful green infrastructure investments, Trump is now moving to capriciously slap taxes on wind and solar projects, a move even the utterly delusional Elon Musk labelled as “utterly insane”.
Amid the chaos, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, in a report this week called for an end to all fossil fuel exploration and subsidies. Further, Morgera urged a total ban on fossil fuel advertising and lobbying, calling for criminal sanctions on those who peddle dangerous climate denial and disinformation, including greenwashing.
In recent days, a scene that could have been transposed directly from the dystopian film The Hunger Games unfolded as over 90 private jets descended on Venice for the marriage of hyper-billionaire Jeff Bezos, an extravaganza of epic vulgarity costing tens of millions of dollars.
The bride’s engagement ring alone cost $5 million, while Amazon employees urinate in bottles.
In addition to the ultra-wealthy attendees, the Hollywood celebrity guest list included eco-warrior Leonardo DiCaprio, who seemed embarrassed to be seen at the event, given the lengths he went to hide his face from public view.
Ironically, this actor has done some genuinely valuable work on raising awareness around the climate emergency. In his Oscar acceptance speech in 2016, DiCaprio powerfully denounced the “politics of greed”. Quite.
If Hollywood were looking for the plot for its latest global disaster movie, look no further than “the climate endgame”. This is the catchy phrase used by scientists in a 2022 study that warned that the risk of global societal collapse or outright human extinction due to climate breakdown has been “dangerously underexplored”.
On our current pathway, the world is facing a future of extreme heat far beyond that now racking continental Europe (Spain earlier this week set a new all-time heat record for June of 46ºC, with red alerts also in force across France, Portugal, Italy and Croatia).
Scientists estimate that between one and three billion people are likely to become forced climate migrants over the next 50 years, as extreme temperatures render around one-fifth of the land surface of Earth too hot for human survival. The human ‘climate niche’ is surprisingly narrow, and the greed, vanity and myopia of the super-rich and the political classes they control are fast locking humanity onto a trajectory for a global tragedy without precedent – and without end.
The savagery of what is unfolding in Gaza today may yet be a grim portent for new global norms by mid-century, a world riven by water and resource wars, forced displacement and spiralling state and ethnic violence as the international order buckles, democracies crumble and tyrants rule.
Unfortunately, there is no space-travelling Klaatu coming to rescue Earth and its millions of hapless species from the ravages of the genus homo sapiens – the unwisely named ‘wise ape’.
Nearly a century ago, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw captured it well when he wrote: “The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum”.
John Gibbons is a journalist and author of ‘The Lie Of The Land – A Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis’. It is published by Penguin, released in September.
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