The one existential crisis

Graphic courtesy of the European Environment Agency (http://www.eea.europa.eu/legal/copyright)

The Democratic field has gone all in on solving the healthcare conundrum. Right now, Senator Elizabeth Warren is dominating the discussion with her plan of Medicare For All.

However, I will gently posit that this is missing the boat.

Healthcare is important. So is repairing our crumbling infrastructure (INFRASTRUCTURE WEEK!). So is solving our gun violence epidemic. So is providing affordable higher education and vocational training. So is housing the homeless. And so on, and so on.

But none of this will matter if we have no planet.

The intricacies of paying for M4A will be as nothing if Manhattan is underwater.

We won't need infrastructure when our forests are burning.

I try not to foist my beliefs on you all. But let me tell you a bit about what I grew up reading and watching.

I cut my eye teeth on tales of human doom. From Alas, Babylon, to The Day After, I grew up, like many of my Generation X, imagining a world soon to end from nuclear miscalculation. I was a teenager when President Ronald Reagan "joked" that he had outlawed the Soviet Union, and bombing would commence in five minutes. I had actual nightmares, and in my school we still practiced, once a year, hiding under our desks if the sirens went off.

So, for those of my generation, the end of the world has been a signal concern.

Imagine my relief when, in 1989, the whole Cold War edifice collapsed. The Soviet Union imploded. The Warsaw Pact disintegrated. Suddenly, nuclear annihilation was pushed back.

But, also in 1989, I watched a docudrama hosted by British science writer James Burke.

It was called After the Warming. It was the first time I learned about climate change.

At the end of this piece, I will post the YouTube video of it. (God Bless Google for not having taken it down.)

Although the show was mostly hopeful—plucky humanity comes through in the end and adapts to a changing climate—some of the scenarios it posits are the stuff of nightmares.

I'll relate one here, which, even thirty years later, still haunts me.

As the crisis hits critical mass, floods of refugees flee from Indonesia to Australia, escaping the climate's ravages. And the Australian military massacres them, Australia being unable to accept such a mass migration, it too suffering under climate change.

Just last week, new research tripled the estimate of how many people would be affected by coastal flooding by 2050. The scenario Mr. Burke envisioned may very well occur, as climate refugees flood, or attempt to flood, better-off areas.

I'm a writer. Part of what I do is imagine things. In my more sanguine moments, I imagine that humanity, through dint of its technology, will eventually ameliorate if not solve climate change. But it won't be done immediately. And millions—millions—will die before then. There is no way around that fact. Our technology will not advance quickly enough to prevent that. And certainly not when we have politicians like Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro questioning the very fact of climate change.

I'm not Bill McKibben, who sees nothing but civilizational collapse ahead of us. But neither am I a Pollyanna. There will be pain. There will be blood. There will be death. And before healthcare, and infrastructure, and all the myriad problems we face, securing the survival of the species has to be paramount. We need a government in Washington which recognizes that humanity's very existence is at stake, and to lead a global Manhattan Project to save it. There really is nothing more important than our survival.

To close out, take some time to watch James Burke's program. It stayed with me for decades until I found it again on YouTube. I hope it has the same effect on you.