Mommy, Daddy, Why Did You Kill Us All When You Could Have Acted Sooner?

The year is 2090, and you've just come back to your room at the retirement home after a long day of therapy. The doctors say your hip surgery was a success, and you'll soon be able to go back to your home and get around just fine.

Your son has come to visit you for the first time this week. You both know why he's there. Regret has filled everyone as the world continues to spiral into the chaos of the day. In most places, humanity has descended into a lawless, ruthless, and anarchy-filled society.

With your son and his wife is their boy. He has a question that has been on his mind for years. He wants to ask that question of his parents. He is preparing to ask that question of the world as his wife is at home, expecting their first child.

Mom, Dad, why did your generation kill us all when you could have done something sooner? When you could have acted?

The Unfortunate Truth Of Humanities Inaction

We know it’s coming. We’ve known for years, and when today's leaders blow their horns and bellow into their microphones for hours on end, I wonder why some of them didn’t act sooner. For that matter, why didn't we?

Some of our politicians have been in office for forty years and longer. They were called to serve and serve they did. With respect to the few that tried, most used to the office to maintain power and all of the perks that come with having real power to do something, yet never having to actually do the right things. The one big perk, the amassment of wealth.

While the rich got richer, the poor stayed poor, and the middle class started to gradually slope downwards into the poverty line economically, the people of the planet Earth behaved shamefully. I'm one of them, and you are too! Sure, we weren't ignoring statistical data on CO2 emissions while taking payments from big oil and the fossil fuel industries. We weren't ignoring the long-term and damaging effects that single-use plastics have on our environment. We were busing dealing with our own ignorances as we chased the American dream.

When the global pandemic of 2019 began to take its' toll on 2020 and the years beyond, I found myself paying closer attention to the things going on in the world. What else were we to do with the downtime from the lockdowns? Play video games, surf for porn, Netflix, and chill? I started reading, writing, doing research on the articles I would go onto right since the pandemic began. I started to find myself, and learn what really mattered in the world.

Now that I've found myself, I wonder what we're going to say to future generations. What kind of message might we want to leave for them? Will it be something from the Earth's Black Box?

Perhaps the project to record the last days of humanity, and every other bit of harvestable data in the world, can include a drive or two for open letters to the future. In those letters, we can tell the kids that will suffer in the latter half of the 21st century, why we couldn't have become better stewards of this world.

There are bigger questions that loom on the horizon. As NASA and The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration are projecting that in just over a ten-year time span we will begin to see the horrors of our short-sightedness as a moon wobble during the next lunar cycle affects the already rising oceans, perhaps we should be asking why we aren't doing anything now? We still have a chance. There are ways to slow the tide of CO2 emissions and curb the effects. But, it would take the greatest undertaking in mankind's relatively short history. Humanity landing on the same page, committed to the same mission and realizing that this is not just good for America, but for Russia, China, Afghanistan, Europe, Australia, Asia, and everyone else.

How do we tell generations that have yet to reach adulthood or be fully grown that we F'd it up for everyone? It seems like a discussion that we should want to avoid. Yet, due to politics and different ideologies, or the political equivalent of we just don't like you, we're left with leaders in the United States that go to climate summits to preach about net-zero emmission standards then return to the oval and approve 80 million acres of drilling leases. They shut down pipelines domestically, the lift sanctions so that countries like Russia and the #3 Co2 emitter in the world, Gazprom AOA can build a pipeline for Russian oil to get to Germany.

Perhaps it's laziness, a complete detachment from the world and what it needs each of us to do to help protect our planet, our home. For instance, do you know the companies that are the worst environmental polluters? The ones that emitted the most CO2?

The Top 5 Polluters Of 2020 Were:

• #5 National Iranian Oil Co-NIOC
• #4 Exxon Mobil (NYSE: XOM)
• #3 Gazprom AOA — One Of Biggest In Russia
• #2 Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX)
• #1 Saudi Aramco-Responsible for 59.26 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

How about the opposite side of the coin, the companies that were the least polluting and more committed to environmentally friendly policies.

Top 9 Environmentally Friendly Companies:

• IKEA
• Unilever
• Panasonic
• Patagonia
• Nike
• Beyond Meat
• Seventh Generation
• Tesla
• REI

The Answers

The answers are truly two-fold. First, we have to pursue technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans. Love him or hate him Elon Musk is aggressively pursuing technologies that will extract CO2 from the air and the oceans.

The second of the two-part solution is for humanity to change. While the technology to correct our short-sightedness may be tough to achieve. The hardest thing may be to get all of humanity to change their ways in order to stop putting CO2 into the environment. To do anything without getting the rest of us on board is to assure failure.

A Last Thought

Before kids, and their children's children are asking those of us that came before them, why we didn't do everything we could to keep the planet from ending up an anarchist wasteland, barely inhabitable, shouldn't we ask ourselves why we haven't? We continue to consume single-use plastics. We continue to do business with the world's most devastating polluters. We continue to elect officials that have records that are untrustworthy as they make promises of change. As long as we continue to do nothing, and continue to elect those that won't do the right things just so they can stay in office and be relevant, we are continuing to kill off the children of the future.