We’ve been having to say goodbye a lot lately. We’ve been having to say it to vast swaths of life that we took for granted and assumed would always be there. Political sanity, reasoned public discourse, longer life expectancies, and above all the sense of a future. Not just our own personal futures, but a future for everyone—family and friends and their children and their children’s children and so on over the horizon and the same for everyone on the planet. We can’t be confident of that anymore, and in fact we have a creeping dread that the small children of today will be facing horror-movie level emergencies by the time they’re adults.

We’ve been having to say goodbye to what we didn’t even know we had, a confidence that whatever messes we humans made, at least the planet would survive, and the forests and oceans and river systems along with it. The idea of Nuclear Winter was sobering, but winters are temporary. We didn’t think we could trash the place as thoroughly as football fans trash the downtown area on a Saturday night.

We’ve been having to say goodbye to the post-polio public health system that slashed child mortality and lulled us into thinking that early death via disease was a rarity. We’ve been having to say goodbye to the idea of the United States as, with all its faults, a stable democratic country with a Bill of Rights and an orderly transfer of power in response to legitimate elections. Well, sort of. It’s questionable how legitimate the Electoral College really is, and how democratic it is that Wyoming—with half a million people—gets two senators just as California with forty million people does, and then there’s that long history of voter suppression in the former Confederacy … but at least we adhered to the polite convention that the losing party conceded, as opposed to addressing a mob near the White House and telling it to go attack the legislature. At least we had that going for us.

With all that it feels like way too much having to say goodbye to Tom Flynn too. It feels strange writing a Free Inquiry column that Tom won’t be reading—strange, and sad, and all wrong. The time is out of joint.

My copy of the previous issue arrived a few days ago, and I was surprised to see that we had both written about collapse; my piece begins where his ends. It feels like a last bit of comradely mind-meld, which is oddly consoling.

The subject, of course, is not one that’s easy to ignore, at least not if you give a damn. Way too many people do ignore it, but their kids won’t be able to. Nikita Khrushchev is purported to have said “The living will envy the dead” during a discussion of nuclear war, and that thought is likely to occur to more and more people as the planet continues to cook. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued in August says we’re stuck with a temperature rise of about 1.5 degrees Celsius no matter what we do and that the results will be grim. The New York Times summarized:

Nearly 1 billion people worldwide could swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Some animal and plant species alive today will be gone. Coral reefs, which sustain fisheries for large swaths of the globe, will suffer more frequent mass die-offs.

I suspect the “could” and “would” are in there to soften the blow a little and that the reality is not “could” but “will.” If the temperature rise is locked in, then the heat waves are locked in and the severe droughts are locked in.

Those sentences are short and matter of fact, and it’s easy to read them and move on, but if you pause to think seriously about what that will be like … you really wish we had a backup planet we could summon. Sweltering in more frequent heat waves, for instance, will cause not just discomfort but exhaustion, difficulty breathing, heat stroke, and death. Hundreds of millions struggling for water means millions of deaths, because without water human beings die in three days. If the coral reefs go and take the fisheries with them, that will mean mass famines, with more millions of deaths. As people try to escape this fate, there will be mass migrations and mass resistance, with more millions of deaths as people fight over the shrinking bits of earth that permit agriculture and life.

I wish I could feel even a little bit confident that governments and political parties will get their acts together in time to avoid the worst calamities, but I can’t. The airline industry won’t let them, the cruise industry won’t, the automobile industry won’t, and on down the long list of industries that keep pumping those fossil-fuel emissions into the atmosphere. The industries make money and provide employment, and those two facts paralyze the will of politicians whether democratic or authoritarian.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope enough people catch on at last to make genuine, difficult, drastic changes possible. I hope new technologies can be developed that are carbon-neutral or even carbon-absorbing, and that endangered species can be brought back from the brink, and that coral reefs and the Amazon rainforest can be somehow restored. I hope, but I’m not optimistic.

We can’t afford to lose our best people at a time like this, and Tom Flynn was one of the best.