Combatting Political Corruption Combats Climate Change | Big Think

If we don’t deal with climate change, we—and certainly our children—are in for a very rough time. We’re already seeing heat waves and extreme weather, droughts and wildfires, as a consequence. That’s extremely clear.

I come from California, and you don’t need scientists to tell you about climate change if you come from California. It’s all over the place. It really is. It’s very obvious just wandering around the state. Spring comes a month earlier than it used to. It’s much hotter in the summer. There’s much less rain.

So there are those kinds of consequences, but if we let this problem continue to worsen, then 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now, our children are going to suffer a lot. About half of the world’s largest cities are on coastlines, and if the Greenland ice melts, then the sea is going to rise by over 20 feet. And half of the world’s cities will be underwater, literally.

And weather will be far more extreme. The last time that the world was as hot as it will get this century, if we don’t fix climate change, was about 100,000 years ago, and scientists have found evidence of extremely destructive storms. Storms that were strong enough to lift very large boulders from the bottom of the ocean and put them on top of mountains.

So Hurricane Sandy is very, very minor trouble compared to what we’ll face if we don’t handle this problem. But in the last decade, there’s been remarkable progress in renewable energy technology, in electric cars, in sustainable agriculture. And now we know how to solve this problem.

And in fact, we could solve this problem in a way that would make the world more prosperous and healthier and happier. Renewable energy is becoming quite competitive economically with energy from fossil fuels. Within five years, electric cars will be fully competitive with gasoline-powered cars, and they’re much less expensive to operate and maintain. They’re also quieter. They also accelerate faster, by the way.

In most regards, we could have very useful, happy, productive, prosperous, healthy lives by dealing with this problem. The countries in the world that are the most prosperous, and have the most equal distribution of income and wealth, and also the longest life expectancies are, in general, the countries that are dealing best with climate change. Germany, Scandinavia, Japan, a number of European countries.

And the countries that are behaving the worst are countries that are very corrupt and that have a great deal of poverty and inequality. It’s not a coincidence that countries like Venezuela, Indonesia, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are the countries with the worst records with regard to this problem and are also countries that are dependent on fossil fuels or on industrial agriculture controlled by a very small number of people who are very politically corrupt.

And so I came to realize that if we deal with political corruption, we’ll also be dealing with climate change. And conversely, if we deal with climate change, we’ll also help the world a lot with regard to corruption and inequality.