Chatting with one of my fellow volunteers one morning about seasonal change in the weather we are experiencing here in Poland, we soon found ourselves engaged in a more fraught discussion about climate change. I commented that climate change on our planet has always been and still is a natural and normal phenomenon, and ultimately humanity is just going to have to adapt to rising ambient temperatures and all the knock-on effects, which I think made her suspect I’m a “greenhouse gas denier.” I clarified that I do believe human activity is a major factor in dramatic global warming, but I just don’t see any way we humans are going to be able to do much about it — because I don’t think anyone (including me) is ready to lead a life of subsistance farming relying primarily on human and animal labor as the main source of power, and I believe that’s essentially what we’d need to reverse the “greenhouse gas” effect. She called me out for essentially letting this notion that we are unable to control our excesses as a straw man to justify wanton emmission of greenhouse gasses. I clarified that I in no sense condone careless emission of greenhouse gasses, but just taking a practical view, for all intents and purposes, the collective willpower of humanity will be needed to counter greenhouse gas emissions. Even though I personally favor ecological conservatism, even though I am vegan, don’t own an automobile and only fly occasionally in connection with important life events, my lifestyle is still probably far from being carbon neutral. Furthermore, I don’t think very many people take the problem at all seriously yet. Most of those people who are concerned about global warming simply expect or hope that their political leaders will do something about it. But the politicians just give it lip service, and the policies they enact are merely for show — nowhere near “draconian” enough to stop the global warming trend. And everyone just buries their heads in the sand with regard to the future, because for folks living on the planet now, a comfortable climate-controlled home and convenient transportation today is more important than a tolerable global climate a couple of centuries from now.
Once we sort of agreed that global warming is likely to bring calamitous consequences to humanity, we began talking about how the calamitous effects are going to disproportionately affect inhabitants of poor nations worldwide, who have very limited resources to effect any adaption, whereas inhabitants of wealthier nations will be able to “invest” accumulated capital into adaptive responses. At this juncture, I mentioned my dream for the Roundtable for American Youth Abroad to serve as an eye-opener for American youth, to help them at least see and understand that the world is not a simple reflection of the fairytale land that they were brought up in. My friend reacted by asking, if I am so eager to show American youth how comfortably they live compared to the rest of the world, why am I spending time and effort in Poland, rather than someplace like Tigray in Ethiopia (where people are really poor and a bloody civil war is raging and the refugees don’t actually have any sympathetic neighbors waiting to receive them at the border), or Afghanistan (where people are also really poor, and the Taliban is quickly filling the leadership void left when U.S. military forces withdrew)?
(to be continued . . . )