The year 2014 was the hottest year we have on historic record. Without a doubt, we are literally cooking because of temperature increases that are small but sustained, and annul any perception of imminent danger to the human species. The syndrome of the frog who dies happy because he isn’t able to perceive the temperature changes that make him lose his reflexes can also be applied to humans.

 

I have participated -if my memory serves me- in twelve of the twenty preparatory conferences that have been held by UN member countries, without making any serious progress on a worldwide climate change treaty that would include the main polluting countries. The meeting in Lima (COP20) ended with many nice promises but no concrete solutions.

 

The situation is so grave that after 20 years of negotiations, the UN and scientists have given up on achieving a treaty that will return the Earth to its normal temperature (350 ppm) and today are negotiating a world that is two degrees hotter than normal (400 ppm) for the year 2050. The bad thing is that we are already bordering on 399 ppm, which doesn’t leave us much margin for the future.

 

How have we gotten into such a dramatic situation? Today’s civilization has based its growth on the use of fossil fuels that have saturated the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, of which CO2 is the most well known. This is part of the problem, which the UN hopes to intervene with mitigation and climate change adaptation measures. The other part of the problem is our consumer society, the real way this civilization expresses itself, where the wellbeing of human beings has been linked to the continuous and infinite increase of material goods as a way to satisfy human needs.

 

The climate treaty discussed in Lima and next year in Paris is not about changing our consumer society, which is truly responsible for climate change, but about ways to make it more sustainable, trusting that science, technology or God will save us from its foreseeable collapse.

 

Recently, an announcement was made that the UN has formed an official interdisciplinary group of experts from several countries to work on how to announce to humanity that a global disaster may occur. The group has already met several times. Some may think that the group is talking about a large meteorite or a solar blaze; others may think it could be communicating about global economic collapse or a nuclear war.

 

Maybe the climate discussion can at last give us the opportunity to talk about the society in which we can and want to live. Because if a meteorite hit our planet and killed millions of human beings, maybe humanity would learn quickly and terribly that we should give environmental sustainability absolute priority over economic development, and as a species we might be able to save ourselves. But since the rise in temperature is slow but sustained, we won’t react until the moment when we are about to expire.

 

It will be neither capital nor the State that will save the Earth. Only a powerful, worldwide citizen’s movement that carries a new culture that puts an end to our society of consumption and waste can give us the opportunity to keep dwelling on this beautiful planet. When this issue becomes central to international negotiations, I will once again participate in the climate change conferences.