You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet.
B-b-b-baby, you just ain't seen nothing yet!
The world decided - or rather the SCOTUS did - to ignore the problem at the last, best chance to avoid this in 1992. Had things gone differently, had the USA not descended into madness and hyper-partisan tribalism and anti-science fever dreams, a great many things would have been different...
$4T would not have been poured down the sewer in Iraq and Afghanistan...
Government response to climate change would have been vastly different without an 8-year orgy of oilmen in charge...
The population would have been better educated about the coming calamities and only Fox News adherents alone would remain dupes...
COVID-19 would not have benefitted from the anti-science fever swamp, as it would have been far smaller and muted...
600,000+ American families would not have gaping sucking chest wounds that can never heal...
An Atrocity like Trump would have been far too unserious to win a primary the way he did...and he would have never happened...
The second term of Hillary Clinton would be getting underway right now, likely with wider majorities in the House, a 5-4 SCOTUS to the LEFT, and real hopes of turning the corner on infrastructure that was built around and to enhance carbon-negative transportation and electrification.
So, in retrospective...thanks to "3rd party candidates" and rationalizers who "see no difference at all between the parties". Thanks to butterfly ballots and Susan Sarandon. Thanks to capitalism at its unrestrained worst impulse - the eternal profit motive and externalizations of costs and consequences.
The planet is going to be fine in another millennia - we will be long gone, our civilization and species wiped out and forgotten among the ever changing cosmic background. Evolution will pick up again with whatever life forms adapt and conquer the hell-scape we have baked into the equations with 28+ years of baby steps, half-measures and outright foolish policy making.
We have wrought our own doom. The CO2 levels in the atmosphere already include 100's of years worth of gases that will continue to warm the planet above baseline Holocene-levels for centuries to come. THIS - wildfires, massive storms, heat domes - is just the beginning. Crop failures, desertification, mass migrations of invasive species and pests, emergent diseases and worse are still in the dug-out, waiting to get to the on-deck circle.
Homo sapiens goes into the cosmic history books as the most horrifying example of lack of foresight and understanding imaginable. Some day, far into the future, well beyond the imaginations of anyone on Earth, a different species - either terrestrial in nature or alien to this moist pebble - may find an artifact of our time, likely a plastic bag. They will gaze upon it like Hamlet looking through Yorick's skull, but lacking any context or connection, they will likely conclude it was a meaningless triffle, nothing worth investigating further and thus will fade the last remnants of humanity upon the universe. Swept away by our own hubris and lack of vision or imagination, ultimately tossed to the ashbin of history without any significance at all.
It has all been for nothing. ALL of it...the history of civilization, the struggles for equality and fairness, the entirety of human history - a massive waste of potential and horrifying reality of exploitation, hubris and stupidity...
At least we had some groovy music and some really boss polyester bell-bottom leisure suits.
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