Answer:I could honestly write this about any number of important things the that Americans have been letting slide over the last few decades — health care, guns, economic inequality, etc. etc. But it’s pretty clear, to me at least, that the most important one is the devastation of our environment. We are living through the opening stages of a clear and obvious climate crisis. The science on this has been pretty definitive for a long time — scientists have been measuring the greenhouse effect and have felt reasonably confident about its causes for decades now. Until recently, I think we told ourselves that this was all theoretical — that this wasn’t our problem, that it would happen to some future generation or some future version of ourselves. Right now, we are living through a transition in which climate change goes from being a theoretical future problem to a real crisis that we will have to contend with in our lifetimes. The IPCC, the UN’s blue-ribbon panel on climate change, has estimated that many of climate change’s worst effects will begin to kick in once average temperatures hit about 1.5 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels. We have already increased the earth’s temperature by about a degree. The IPCC estimates that in order to stay below 1.5 degrees in temperature rise, we have to reduce our carbon emissions by 45% by 2030, and eliminate them altogether by 2050. But we have not even started to address the problem. Recent reports show that global carbon emissions rose last year after having plateaued for a few years. The upcoming international climate summit is almost guaranteed to fail to produce anything near the amount of change necessary, despite the fact that international leaders are saying all of the right things in the days leading up to the meetings.
So here come the Very Bad Things. Some people like to talk about how this will be the end of human civilization, but it probably won’t be like that, nor is it very helpful to paint overly apocalyptic scenarios for human society. It will likely be something close to apocalyptic for much of the non-human living world. We are already seeing shocking declines in insect populations and the populations of wild animals around the globe. This is only the beginning of what will likely be the sixth great extinction on the planet. For coral reefs and the animals and plants that depend on them, for example, this is the end times.
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