A Future We Choose

Speaking of believing in the future, the United Nations Environment Programme has just released an updated "Global Environment Outlook," subtitled A Future We Choose. These reports are the fruit of a magnificent on-going act of scientific collaboration. Hundreds of scientists from a plethora of disciplines and countries have worked across the decades to produce a single point of view which they summarize as follows:

The report finds that investing in a stable climate, healthy nature and land, and a pollution-free planet can deliver trillions of dollars each year in additional global GDP, avoid millions of deaths, and lift hundreds of millions of people out of hunger and poverty in the coming decades.

Following current development pathways will bring catastrophic climate change, devastation to nature and biodiversity, debilitating land degradation and desertification, and lingering deadly pollution – all at a huge cost to people, planet and economies.

So there you have it: prosperity or catastrophe. The evidence has never been clearer, the costs are increasing by the day, and the solutions are well understood and are known to be economically and technically entirely feasible. And yet, as best I can tell, this report, the seventh and best of its kind, has received even less notice than any of its predecessors, a direct result of the dismantling of the US government's sensory organs and of the general stifling of environmental discourse that is being driven by the maimed parts of that government still in operation. Of all its many, many crimes, this is the Administration's worse and the one for which we will all pay the most and the longest. I saw this coming a long way off, but watching it happen is horrifying beyond what I ever imagined.