Question

Schnirel wrote a post whose conclusions, in my opinion, are really bizarre and don’t fit his usually straightforward way of thinking. What does the Rabbi think of what he wrote?
If one of us takes a match and burns it, an enormous, almost inconceivable number of carbon dioxide molecules are released into the air. How long does it take for those molecules to disperse uniformly around the world, so that some of them are in Australia, some at the North Pole, and some in Argentina? 
 
Some time ago I tried to make my own estimate, and I also checked answers people had given to this question. Apparently we are talking about a period of two to three years. Broadly speaking, carbon dioxide disperses through the air quickly. It is very difficult to identify in satellite images, say, areas on Earth where there is more CO2 in the atmosphere. Generally speaking, there is no geographic separation here: if the blame for fires, storms, and heat waves falls on the "climate crisis" (about two weeks ago a palm tree fell on a visitor in Tiberias and caused her death; I heard someone on the radio speaking on behalf of the municipality and of course he rushed to blame the climate crisis—why not), then the cause is not the CO2 emitted in Israel but the total global amount. 
 
Unlike, say, water pollution or garbage cleanup, issues in which steps taken within a country can change the local situation and we don’t need to care what is being done about them in Namibia or Siberia, rising carbon dioxide concentration in the air is a global problem, for which the whole world is one single place; there is no geographic separation between countries or even between continents. 
 
Now that we have clarified this point, please spend a few seconds looking at the two attached images. One shows carbon dioxide emissions over the last twenty years in three geographic regions: the United States, Europe, and China. As you can see, emissions in Europe and the United States remained more or less constant—something like six billion tons a year—whereas China made a crazy leap in the same period, from four billion tons to ten. In other words, if the United States had reduced its CO2 emissions to absolute zero over the last twenty years, the Chinese would have "compensated" the world for that entire difference through their increase in emissions. 
 
In the second image you can see the relative change over that period (how much emissions rose or fell, in percentages, relative to the year 2000), and here I also added India and Israel for comparison. Again we see the same picture: in developed countries there is a slight decline; in countries where development is in full swing, in China and India, there is a huge increase. If we take into account that the population of China alone, and also the population of India alone, is greater than the total population of the United States and Europe combined, one can clearly understand where things are heading. 
 
In my opinion, two conclusions emerge from these graphs. 
 
First, think of a world in which people sign a "Convention of Justice and Fairness" promising that they will behave justly, not cheat, not steal, and not exploit others, and that if a dispute arises they will respect the decision of some agreed-upon arbitration body. Suppose one hundred percent of people signed the convention and fully upheld it. In such a world it would be possible to streamline the social structure and save trillions without any problem: there would no longer be any need for police, the army would be unnecessary, there would be no need for accountants, for guards at the supermarket exit—fantastic. 
 
But of course there is a catch: if only 90% of people honor their signature, we have gained nothing. That remaining ten percent would be able to steal without police and evade taxes where there is no oversight, so all these systems would have to be reactivated. The benefit of the Convention of Justice and Fairness exists only when one hundred percent of people observe it, so on the face of it this is a lovely educational project but one with no practical value—there will always be someone who breaks the agreement. 
 
The activity against the "climate crisis" seems to be something similar. It is a huge educational enterprise, requiring a family in Colorado to buy an expensive electric car in order to save the residents of New Orleans from flooding, but in practice, as the graphs I attached show, it is almost entirely moralizing educational nonsense. While some guy from London takes a train to Sweden to save the carbon emissions that flying would require (I shared an office with one like that at a conference two years ago), in China and India they are opening another ten factories with eighty smokestacks. 
 
Second, it is important that we understand what the Gretas and the Greta-types of our world are really demanding. China and India are countries in which a large part of the population is still on the brink of hunger, without medicines worthy of the name and without many other goods that we take for granted (and of course China and India are in relatively good shape; most African countries have still not joined the development race). To expect these societies to stop developing is to directly or indirectly sentence millions to death and hundreds of millions to lives of crushing poverty, hunger, and disease. Anyone willing to look those people in the eye and say that this is what needs to be done in order to prevent a two-degree temperature rise by the end of the century—let him be honest and say so. And if not—then let them leave us alone with their nonsense.