Pandemic and Global Warming

AROUND 60,000 people will gather in Belém, a small city 3,200 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on the eastern edge of the Amazon rainforest, in the second week of this month. As in previous years, delegates from nearly 200 countries, companies, and various organizations will discuss how to save the earth from the ravages of global warming.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference has become an annual event. Negotiations often stall, and participants struggle to agree on measures to prevent global destruction. Every country has interests, every industry has aspirations, and every company sends lobbyists to ensure these measures do not disrupt their operations.

If everyone understands that global warming is the calamity of our generation, why does the world not unite in order to fight it? Perhaps the answer to this clichéd question is that global warming is unlike—or not considered—a pandemic. Covid-19 attacks individuals, so humanity united to fight it. Those with the skills to innovate created vaccines, those in power created quarantine policies, and each of us played a role in stopping the virus from spreading further.

Global warming affects the entire planet simultaneously. Its effects are invisible, and its impact varies from person to person. The wealthy have more methods to protect themselves compared to the poor. Those with power are better equipped to avoid its harmful effects than those without. The climate crisis has created stark inequalities.

So, instead of fighting it, we prefer to manipulate it. Mark Kaufman, science editor for Mashable Asia, posted an article about how the “carbon footprint” distorts the way we view the climate crisis. The term became popular in the early 2000s, coined by the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, derived from a neutral term in environmental science: ecological footprint. British Petroleum hired them to deflect attention from their environmental sins that are causing the climate crisis.

With the emergence of the personal carbon footprint, the cause of the climate crisis has been deflected towards the individual, no longer is it the fault of the greenhouse gas-producing oil companies. This way, everyone feels a sense of environmental guilt. We calculate our carbon footprint on carbon calculators and then atone for it by planting trees. The carbon footprint campaign has changed the way people live, while forgetting that the primary perpetrators of the climate crisis are oil titans like BP.

George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison expand on other examples of climate crisis misconceptions in The Invisible Doctrine. In the book, published in 2024, the journalist and filmmaker wrote a chapter titled The Micro-Solutions Myth, which examines how carbon footprint marketing campaigns have successfully misled us from the root causes of global warming.

“If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they’re not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, former President of the Society of the Plastics Industry, told NPR. In other words, we are happy with the micro-solutions and forget about the macro-issues. Plastic is a major environmental problem because it is made from oil extracted from the earth, the process releases emissions, and after use, it becomes waste that eats away at the earth.

In short, industry campaigns have manipulated the climate crisis into a matter of each person’s concern. No matter how good a low-emission lifestyle may be, if we do not curb our massive emissions, the climate crisis will only accelerate. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has stated that we are on a fast track to a climate crisis due to continued increases in emissions.

When hundreds of heads of state gathered in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 for the Earth Summit, the precursor to the Climate Change Summit, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was 356.42 parts per million. When the summit returned to Brazil this year, CO₂ levels had risen to 425.3 parts per million. It will only take 23 more years to reach 507 parts per million, the amount of carbon dioxide that would cause the Earth’s temperature to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to before the Industrial Revolution in 1870.

A 1.5-degree rise is the maximum temperature the Earth can tolerate. After that, the planet will be in turmoil: sea levels will rise, climate-related disasters will strike at any time, crops will fail, viruses that have run out of hosts in wildlife losing their habitats will resurface and infect humans more rapidly. In short, a major apocalypse.

But perhaps that is simply the cycle of the world. Elizabeth Kolbert called it the “sixth extinction.” The Earth must be destroyed before it can recover, as Alan Weisman describes in World without Us, the Earth will regenerate after its destructive virus, the humans endowed with destructive minds, is wiped out.

The delegates who will convene in Belém next week may lack empathy and imagination for that bleak future. As Donald Trump said, “This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” The climate is changing, so what?