12 | Rolling Stone | April 2020
NASAEditor’s Letter
The Price of Greed
W
ELCOME TO THE NEW
decade. Gather your
strength and say your
prayers. The fight of
your life is underway,and we’ve already lost the first rounds. The
deadline to global climate disaster is a mov-
ing target but, by all scientific consensus,
is dead ahead and rapidly closing. We have
already done irreparable damage, and there
are just these 10 few years that remain be-
fore our earthly home is beyond our ability
to repair. We are in imminent danger.
This emergency issue of ROLLING STONE
was inspired by a speech that the then-
16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg
made to the United Nations General
Assembly last fall: “You have stolen my
dreams and my childhood with your empty
words. And yet I am 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 do is talk about money and fairy
tales of eternal economic growth. How
dare you!”
A discussion of the climate crisis inevita-
bly begins with a litany of alarms and flash-
ing red lights. Antarctica is melting faster
and faster; an ice shelf the size of Florida
is at risk of collapse, and the temperature
at one remote ice station was recently the
same as in Atlanta. The Amazon rainforest
Sing it hard, and sing it well,
Send the robber barons straight to hell.
The greedy thieves who came around,
And ate the flesh of everything they found.
Whose crimes have gone unpunished now.
Who walk the streets as free men now.
They brought death to our hometown, boys.
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
“Death to My Hometown”are turning into self-reinforcing cycles. It
is difficult to conceptualize carbon as the
enemy. How do you see or fight an odorless,
colorless, invisible gas? But the proofs are
unmistakable and inexorable.
These events may be geographically
distant from one another, but taken to-
gether, we are witnessing what looks like a
slow-motion apocalypse. In Australia, the
fires were quickly followed by floods, what
are called “compound extremes,” where
one disaster intensifies the next. The fires
burned an area as large as South Korea.
What has been the response in Australia?
The government moves ahead with plansis being burned down and could slip into
a self-destroying end phase. Rainstorms
and floods rage in the American South and
throughout Western Europe and Southeast
Asia. 2020 is already virtually certain to be
one of the 10 warmest years on record, and
has a nearly 50 percent chance of being the
warmest in recorded history. A month ago,
I read about the appearance of milewide
clouds of hundreds of billions of locusts
devastating Kenya and Ethiopia — caused
in part by the same Indian Ocean weather
changes that drove the fires in Australia.
What were once worst-case scenarios
have been exceeded again and again, and