“Science will Save Us” will Just Lead to a Dead Earth

I was riding my bicycle home from the book store earlier today.  Abiding by etiquette and staying in the skimpy bike lane.   but got honked at, like I was hogging the road, by the pick-up truck with the American-flag-and-bald-eagle-hologrammed rear window and the “Trump” bumper sticker.  Typical.

Not as typical (but retrospectively, I really shouldn’t be surprised), was the Prius who ran me off the road.  The encounter triggered me thinking about Climate Change as I so often do… It doesn’t take much. I was thinking about the climate denier rhetoric that “technology will save us” so there is no need to worry.

It is a completely nonsensical idea! To me it is equated to getting shot, profusely bleeding out 2 liters of blood (keep in mind, an adult only has about 5 liters of blood in total in his/her body) but telling yourself that “it’s okay, the doctors will save me no matter what.” So you wait until the last minute to go to the hospital, then the doctors come out and tell your family, sorry, we lost him. There was nothing we could do. He didn’t get here in time. He lost too much blood. Our technology didn’t work, we couldn’t even transfuse enough blood to him in time to save him. If he had only gotten here sooner, before it was too late. We are not magicians and can’t bring him back from the dead.

You may think it is a crazy idea and no one would ever do that if they were losing a liter of blood every ten minutes. But imagine they did. They were so sure that technology had come up with a cure for immense blood loss that it would either save them in the nick of time or bring them back from the dead. That they died and it was too late.

Now replace your body with planet Earth. And replace the doctors for NASA, or the IPCC, or the countless number of scientists from every background that get dubbed as the potential saviors, but more so cop-outs of our climate destruction. Scientists who are scratching their heads and saying, “shit, we have no idea how to fix this.”  If we could only stop the figurative bleeding (or depletion of resources, over-population, virulent poisons in the soil, ocean and air, depletion of the o-zone, melting of the ice caps, super storms on steroids) in time.