The world we leave you
The days of August pass in languid drowsiness caused by heat waves that follow one after the other as if it were another virus. They have not left us since mid-June and have caused the worst forest fires since records have been kept, some of them caused by human hands, incredible as it may seem. It is the front-page news on the television news, interviewing neighbours evacuated from their homes and exhausted firefighters. And we watch the flames on our televisions and think that this is going badly and that this summer's scorching temperatures may end up being the coolest in years to come, and wonder what kind of world we are leaving for our children.
The good news is that the world's biggest polluter, the country that releases the most CO2 per capita into the atmosphere, the United States, has just approved a $370 billion plan to reduce those emissions by 40% by the end of this decade, compared to what it polluted in 2005. This is very important because no matter how much Europe does, and is doing, we only pollute 9% of the total and Spain 1%. Even so, it is bittersweet news because Biden has achieved this success by 51 votes to 50 in the Senate, which voted along strictly partisan lines and which was only possible after arm-twisting by Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema, both Democrats, and thanks to the decisive vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, who presides over the Upper House. It is hard to believe that not a single Republican senator, not a single one, supported the bill despite the fact that they too are affected by global warming, and this shows the polarised atmosphere in the country as it faces the November congressional elections. The other bad news is that, as a result of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, China has withdrawn from talks with the US on climate change. And if China and India don't cooperate, all our efforts will be in vain. It seems a very stupid reaction on Beijing's part and hopefully it will change it when the anger of these days wears off, because we are all in this together and global warming does not stop at borders and affects us all and not just some of us. If China does not cooperate in the fight, it harms itself as much as it harms the rest of the world because it is the biggest polluter in global terms.
Alongside this, other news stories seem to lose importance despite their seriousness and are relegated to the inside pages of the newspapers, where photographs of bombings continue to appear, to which we seem to become accustomed and which we end up welcoming with a certain indifference. So it is with the war in Ukraine where the Russians seem to have taken a breather - for reasons that are open to speculation - before continuing with renewed vigour their invasion that now threatens other cities with consonant-ridden, hard-to-pronounce names, but where human beings live and wait in terror for the missiles to fall on their heads again. Or as in Gaza, where the Israelis have responded with their characteristic harshness and disproportionate means to missiles launched by Islamic Jihad fanatics, apparently without the support of Hamas which is the dominant political/military force in the Strip. We see the craters left by Israeli bombs between blocks of houses and read the death toll, before turning the page and learning that the Chinese are surrounding Taiwan with their ships and planes and even launching missiles at high altitude over the island, in what some see as a rehearsal for a future invasion. It is frightening to think of the indifference with which we read on the beach about all these atrocities, just as it is frightening to think of the casualness with which some media also talk about the beginnings of a Third World War, which I hope will never come.
It seems that international law, the rules that govern the world - especially since 1945 - have become obsolete and the big countries have decided that they do not apply to them in their relations with weaker neighbours who are a nuisance to them. This is what the United States has been doing for years with its blockade of Cuba (not to mention other more distant countries such as Vietnam or Iraq), or the aforementioned cases of Russia with Ukraine, China with Taiwan and Israel with Gaza, and this is a trend that does not suit the vast majority of medium-sized countries, which are thus left to the whims of the big countries, and which once again forces us to think about the world that our generation will leave to those who follow us. Unfortunately, it is nothing to write home about.
Jorge Dezcallar, Ambassador of Spain.