‘Highway to Hell’

“Climate scientists say the world is not doing enough to avert climate change’s devastating impacts on an earth accelerating crazily, as one writer puts it bluntly, on the highway to hell.

Good Shepherd’s famous ube jam from Baguio is gone.

Not gone as you can’t buy it anymore. The jam, the must-get souvenir of millions of Filipinos going up to the summer capital, can still be had.

Only, everyone’s favorite purple jam made by nuns strangely now comes only in creamy white! It is all true.

How that happens, let’s hear it straight from the nuns themselves. The nuns announced in a social media post:

“Due to changing climate, our ube farmers are having difficulty growing ube. It has been our struggle in the recent years to find a stable supply. And in the past weeks there were none. Those of you who went to Baguio know this.

“Now our ube jam sports a new look. Yes it is Ube Jam. From white ube. Yes, there is such a thing. And it is the available supply at the moment… and yes, it is just as good as the purple one…

“Now, let’s all do our share in caring for the earth and calling for climate justice. And let’s do this not only because we love Ube Jam but because we #CareForOurCommonHome.”

There it is folks — Baguio’s famous ube jam is the latest casualty of the global climate change emergency! It’s also further proof how rapid climate change, causing the world to be alarmingly warmer, makes nature angry.

“Nature is angry. And we fool ourselves if we think we can fool nature, because nature always strikes back, and around the world nature is striking back with fury,” UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres says generally of the anger.

All this because we greedy earthlings have pushed, as one climate activist puts it, “our planet far outside its comfort zone. Fossil-fuel (meaning oil products) combustion is melting the poles, swelling our oceans, drying out our rainforests and scorching our farmland. We’re seeing historic rainfalls and even hotter days than ever.”

Faced with impacts that are unfolding faster than expected, scientists say the only real chance we got is for all of us all over the world to act now.

Climate scientists say the world is not doing enough to avert climate change’s devastating impacts on an earth accelerating crazily, as one writer puts it bluntly, “on the highway to hell.”

Amid all this suicidal slide into nothingness, young people all over the world are having none of it, radicalizing them.

Nobody represents this radicalization of young people than Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg who has inspired millions of climate activists worldwide, all of them under the age of 25.

Inspired by Thunberg’s solitary weekly protest outside the Swedish parliament a year ago, millions of young people poured onto streets around the globe, including here, the other week, demanding that world’s leaders, attending this week’s United Nations climate summit, take emergency action against climate change.

On Monday, Thunberg spoke in a climate summit panel seeking to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. She berated world leaders. Her caustic denunciations deserve to be widely heard and read and reproduced.

Thunberg’s remarks: “My message is that we’ll be watching you.

“This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

“The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50 percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees (Celsius), and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

“Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

“So, a 50 percent risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

“To have a 67 percent chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise — the best odds given by the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) — the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

“How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just ‘business as usual’ and some technical solutions? With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8-1/2 years.

“There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

“You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

“We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”