The Physical Impossibility Of Climate Collapse In The Mind Of Someone Living

Borrowed land, borrowed money, borrowed clime. We’re all living on borrowed time. I hear the diesel vehicles outside like the rumble of dinosaurs. I see ads for electric cars and it’s too little, too late. We’re not even changing our path to avoid our fate. We’re just changing vehicles and going the same way.

I look around everything in my life—in your life—and it’s all borrowed. When I order a beard clipper from Amazon, it’s made thanks to repressed cheap labor somewhere, shipped using poisonous fossil fuels, and then driven to me the next day using more poison. We have treated this as just a moral hazard for a while, but now it’s a natural disaster. The debts are coming due.

All the shit that we get in abundance, wrapped in plastic, it’s all borrowed. You can only ship materials from South America to China to Europe and then back to America if there’s a heavy subsidy somewhere. We have taken the solar energy stored by millions of years of plankton and trees and smoked it in a few hundred. By robbing the graves of the past, we have dug a grave for the future.

All of our progress, all of our convenience, all of our material splendor, it is all borrowed from future generations. We are so proud of it, but it’s not ours. This civilization is not some inheritance we leave our children. It is their future, turned into plastic baubles, that we get bored with and throw away.

All of our powers of motion wherever we want, they are all incurring an equal and opposite reaction from the oceans, from the winds, from their wrath. All of our creation of myriad commodities to satisfy every whim, they are mirrored by the destruction of myriad species that maintain the Earth, that are the Earth. We have spurred the evolution of machines and killed our own family. The family that sustains us. We borrowed the labor of all the birds and the bees for centuries. When they collapse, we really don’t get it. That is We.

It’s crazy thinking about this now because I don’t think about it.