” You know the news ? Vladimir Putin has just been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. He found the way to eradicate COVID-19 in 24 hours. »
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
It was my brother who taught me that this bad joke was circulating the day after the invasion of Ukraine, the latter seeming to make the health risk almost futile in comparison with a nuclearized Third World War.
Globalized humanity
It was reminiscent of that other joke, in March 2020 this time, when the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything in three days. It was said that Greta Thunberg was depressed, inconsolable to have been robbed of her disaster.
These jokes make us realize that our new globalized humanity is no longer faced with the sole fear of global warming, two others having been added.
First of all, health fear, which we can think is permanently installed regardless of COVID-19, its variants or sub-variants. We are now aware that a new virus, possibly even more dangerous, could emerge at any time, with the dramatic consequences that we know.
The other great fear which has just been added is that of a much more devastating world war than that in Ukraine of which we are currently the spectators. Despite its terrible character, this conflict has so far remained limited, with an archaic Russian army, without the use of new technologies with dizzying potential for destruction.
And there is obviously the first great fear in chronological terms, that of accelerated global warming as a result of human action, with increasingly disastrous consequences for nations and peoples.
Non-instantaneous tragedy
The climate peril has lost the monopoly, if not the precedence, it had managed to impose on global political consciousness until the arrival of COVID-19 two years ago.
Indeed, compared to health risks and war, both of which are capable of tipping us into tragedy in an instant, global warming, even if it accelerates, will not happen so instantaneously. This gives more time to adapt, but has the disadvantage of diminishing the sense of danger and urgency.
This is no doubt one of the reasons why, when the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published on climate change, it was highlighted that , if we didn’t act decisively within the next three years, the planet would be finished.
This melodramatic assertion has unfortunately discredited in part a report that contained many other things, insofar as it is highly unlikely that this three-year deadline will be respected and that people will know it.
Or we say to ourselves that this report, the result of a partly political negotiation between 195 countries, is not as reliable as that. Or we believe in it and we decide to make the most of life until the announced apocalypse, even if it means dancing on the volcano and eating meat more than once a week.
Steven Guilbeault
The reality is that, human nature being what it is, it only imposes repulsive efforts on itself when it is up against the wall. My apologies for the cynicism, but, beyond expert reports and political declarations, what is basically missing from the global warming file, it would be a real mega-catastrophe that would scare everyone.
Failing this, the matter will unfortunately sometimes tend to take second place to the health risk and the fear of war, as we have just seen with the announcement of the approval of the Bay du Nord oil project by the Federal Minister of Environment, Steven Guilbeault.
Barely three days after the IPCC report, under the aegis of a minister whose environmental convictions cannot be doubted, in a PLC-NPD government dripping with self-righteousness in this area…
The war in Ukraine, which underscored the importance of states’ energy autonomy, played a role in this, if only to help ease the pill.
The French presidential
The latest polls predicted a tight neck and neck in the first round between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron.
With more than four points ahead of the leader of the National Rally, the French president finds himself on the contrary well placed to win in the second round. Contrary to the poor performance expected from an Éric Zemmour subscribed to errors of judgment, the other surprise on Sunday was the exceptionally high score of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France insoumise whose leftist supporters are expected to vote mostly Macron April 24.
It is a new illustration of the fact that it is not the polls, but the citizens who ultimately decide, politics being often made up of things that were not supposed to happen, but do happen.