Why isn’t Climate Action Working?
By Betty Leskova
Edited by Olivia Ural
As someone who has spent their last two years and likely the rest of their life dedicated to science, it is incomprehensible that so many do not have a real connection to the field. For me, science has always been a way of thinking about the solutions to world problems that no other field has solved. Nevertheless, many reduce science to its focus on curiosity and its discussion of seemingly trivial concepts like zooxanthellae in corals. Wasn’t it less than 90 years ago that the discovery of nuclear fusion by J. Robert Oppenheimer changed history, transforming the socio-political state until the crisp of time? While I can not persuade you to believe in the importance of science, I do believe that the future lies within science and not in any other field. Fundamentally, science is our key to other worlds, completely unimaginable from the human perspective, such as our most pressing issues that feel eternal.
Why is it that, despite the bans on wildlife poaching, it appears to be more widespread today? Why is it that no one seems to know who John Tyndall is, the man who discovered climate change in 1820, yet everyone is well-versed with individuals such as Ronald Regan who cut funding for climate change research? And most importantly, why are we unable to recognize that our attempts to solve environmental problems have nothing to do with superficially caring for our ‘planet,’ but rather with conserving our species as we know it? The inherent issue with human beings is that we are all inherently selfish. When given the choice between winning a prize as a group or winning individually, Alexander Stewart and Joshua Plotkin from Cornell University found that in almost all cases when large rewards were at stake, individuals chose to take their chances individually in obtaining a larger prize, even if it meant others would receive nothing. This characteristic is what makes every COP conference to be as useless as the precedent. No matter the efforts made to change the legislation, they never work, because little is based on real scientific evidence. The claims that are, however, are ‘too far-fetched’ for the everyday individual who may have heard about the nucleus in the cell but knows little about radiation or the albedo effect. Even when these efforts are genuine, they drag on endlessly. Our grip on the world is loosening and it is not long before it will fall out of our grasp and shatter.
What is most frustrating about all of this, is that the probability of humans existing on Earth at this exact time is one septillionth. Yet we take every day we spend on earth for granted, and no one seems to want to change their lifestyles remotely to conserve not only our species but all the others that suffer as a consequence of our actions. When we discuss climate change, we always speak about the effects on humans, but never about the impacts on land animals, marine life, tropical plants, bacteria, and many other organisms. Since the beginning of time, nature has never had the intention of harming us, yet with the path we are heading in, we will burn nature in the blink of an eye, leaving a shell of a planet behind us as we move on to terraform Mars or any other planet we desire. The world has granted us a snowball, a gift of life, a gift of biodiversity, a fragile gift, and it is up to us, and only us, to ensure this gift is well protected and that it does not shatter when our grip fails.
