Bill McKibben in NYT Op-ed: ‘We can’t keep on like this. It’s simply inhuman.’ – Gift Link
Lots of people I know are feeling this way.
In a NYT op-ed headlined ‘I’m Exhausted. You’re Demoralized. We Weren’t Built for a World Like This.’, Bill Mckibben writes:
Psychologists have claimed that evolutionary biology leaves humans ill equipped to deal with giant, slow-moving problems. But suddenly we live in a moment when problems are speeding and piling up.
The climate crisis now consists of walls of water sweeping down Nepali rivers, obliterating entire towns in the blink of an eye, and wildfires that wipe out California neighborhoods in hours. And we’re confronting the birth and Bunyanesque growth of a new technology, artificial intelligence, that, according to some of its creators, is fairly likely to kill us all in the near future. We have to sit and listen as men worth unfathomable sums speculate about whether our species will survive their companies’ initial public offerings.
Six of the biggest fossil fuel companies are projected to earn $2,967 a second in profits in 2026, new Oxfam research finds, ahead of the first global conference this week on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia. This marks an increase of almost $37 million a day compared to the 2025 profits of these six corporations – Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Exxon and TotalEnergies. Their total projected fossil fuel profits of 2026 are $94 billion: enough to provide solar power for the energy needs of almost 50 million people in Africa.
And concludes:
.. if human survival and economic resilience are important goals, so is a world calm enough to meet the needs of the human nervous system. We can’t keep on like this — it’s simply inhuman. We’re creating a world that’s fit only for something artificial.