Why Climate Apathy scares me to death

In most parts of the world, it is a bigger hurdle to climate action than climate denialism

My son was born in the peak of winter a few years ago. We do have an air conditioner in one of the rooms in our house but having graduated to the middle class from poverty just a generation ago, we are not accustomed to using it. It is switched on either during a spell of extreme heat or when somebody has a very high fever that refuses to come down with the antipyretics and cold sponging.

So, as has been the custom among the generations of our ancestors in the village, we resorted to burning charcoal to keep the baby warm, especially as he got an oil massage.

As a professional doctor, I knew the potential risks of burning charcoal in a closed room but those were the sleep-deprived hazy days of my life when I struggled to balance my duties at home and the office. Being a private practitioner in Nepal’s heavily privatized and fragmented health care system, there was no way I was going to get a paternity leave. Indeed, I was examining slides and signing pathology reports as my wife was undergoing the caesarean section upstairs in the theater.

One day, I noticed after a late-evening massage session that our son Ibsen was not merely sleepy but drowsy. He would not even wake up after painful stimuli. I panicked and immediately called my pediatrician friend. He immediately suspected carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning after asking me about the heating in the home and ordered me to take the child to the hospital immediately.

In the taxi, Ibsen showed some movements in the limbs but other than that he was unresponsive to anything. I immediately regretted having not noticed the danger of CO poisoning with all that smoke in the room. Terrible thoughts kept crossing my mind during that 5-7 minute journey to hospital and the same must have happened with my wife. But we were both silent and eager to reach the hospital at the earliest.

In the hospital, the pediatrician friend confirmed his diagnosis and gently chastised us for letting this near-tragedy to happen while explaining the potentially very poor prognosis of the condition.

Just to rule out chest infection, he ordered an X-ray. As the painful minutes passed in the hospital, though, Ibsen’s movements grew in frequency and strength. By the time the X-ray procedure was over, he began suckling and we both felt like a huge boulder had been taken off our chests. Soon, we were on our way back home with a determination to kick the charcoal-stove out from our house.

So, how was it possible that a child of a doctor and a nurse had to go through such a near-death experience? I think if we extrapolate my and my wife’s attitude during the incident to the whole of humanity, we can perfectly explain why climate apathy is so stubbornly persistent even as the entire civilization lurches towards the cliff.

In theory I knew smoke in a closed room can cause CO poisoning. Indeed in Nepal, it feels like no winter passes by without any tragic case of people sleeping to their death while trying to keep themselves warm. But in reality, I implicitly trusted the other members in my family to spot any sign of CO poisoning in case it happened. They, in turn, must have trusted me, a doctor, to do the same. As our son was there, in front of our eyes, dozing off with the gentle massage, we were lulled to the belief that there was nothing untoward in his sleepiness.

There is a masterful episode of the Cautionary Tales podcast by the Financial Times columnist Tim Harford explaining this situation beautifully. There he explains why precisely 165 partygoers lost their lives in a 1977 fire in the Beverly Hills Supper Club despite being warned about the fire a good four minutes before it reached the hall they were partying in. They didn’t budge during those precious and potentially life-saving minutes because no one else was budging even after a waiter warned them about the fire that had started in another part of the same building.

Many of us, deep down in our minds, now know that climate change is a huge, potentially civilization-threatening problem and we should have been already combating it at a war footing. But we are OK moving towards the catastrophic 3C warning of the planet because everybody else is. After all, how would all of your neighbors, friends and relatives be going about their normal lives if anything posed such a mortal danger?

We trust the non-instincts of people around us because that justifies our own inaction and condones our reluctance to leave our comfort zones.

I often think of the near-tragedy in our son’s life and shiver when I contemplate the scenario in which I went to bed that day thinking my son was just sleepy—and not drowsy with near-fatal posoning—like the other days. What reality would we have woken up to the following morning?

I think, as humanity, we are on this less fortunate path right now. The sooner we wake up from this seductive dream full of carbon-guzzling products of convenience and face the potentially tragic reality with honesty and humility, the better the chances of letting more kids like my own to survive to their old ages.

This much for today. Let me share something with you.

Good news one: with the first pledge to pay for THG in, I have decided to dedicate more time and effort to this venture. The posts here will be more frequent and more in-depth from now onwards. For this, I’ll be downscaling my AV venture at Youtube. You can encourage me in this revamp by 1) forwarding this to your friends (email is gold standard, private messaging is quite effective but public posts in social media sites have very little reach due to algorithmic restrictions) 2) pledging to pay for THG as soon as it goes paid.

Good news two: I’ll be speaking at TEDx Narayangarh in my hometown this coming Saturday. Yes, you’ve guessed it right, the title of my talk is: Love is Our Last Hope against Climate Chaos. If you are nearby please join us.