Today is the time of the year in which we commemorate one of the saddest days of the humanity. In the morning of eighteen years ago, two planes crushing into the two highest Manhattan skyscrapers decreed death of thousands of people who were unconsciously working.
Today, intended as decade, we are facing another catastrophe that started silently at the end of last century and then became seriously threatening for the whole world: climate change.
We have to act now. But we don’t. Nobody does anything tangible at a national level: during their political campaigns politicians swear they will first take care of real emergencies like climate change. However, even those countries that seem to be more committed to a real change do not really turn the problem down: a country can use renewable energies, the so-called “alternative energies”, but as long as these energies are seen as “complementary”, we won’t change anything. It’s like trying to cure somebody with placebo: they may seem good now, but in the long run they will eventually need real medicines.
In the real world we could sadly say that the Paris Agreement was the placebo: dozens of countries swore they would have regulated CO2 emissions to slowing down the advance of climate change, when in the reality, as Jonathan Franzen stated in The end of the end of the Earth, they knew from the beginning it would have been utopia.
What do we need now not to stop the climate change (if things remained like this, it couldn’t be stopped) but to slowing it down? Civic awareness.
We have to start acting less egoistically: don’t take an Uber if you are not in a rush and the subway brings you right where you have to go; don’t use plastic utensils; don’t leave the faucet running, if you don’t use it.
I can’t say all the things we shouldn’t do to preserve our planet. If you have enough brain cells, you can easily understand what to do to make things better. If you don’t know what to do and you think that climate change is a joke and perhaps you see very cold New York springs and you might think that “we need some global warming instead”, well, what can I say? You would probably be a great politician.