We’re Not Going to Fix Global Warming

Amber Fraley
3 min readJun 7, 2024
Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash

When we had our daughter in 2003, both my husband and I still felt hope climate change would be addressed. Twenty years later, I’m appalled at how wrong we both were.

What’s so frustrating is that either way, humanity is going to have spend a lot of money. Either we spend money up front to fix the problem before it becomes catastrophically worse, or we spend just as much in the future to Band-Aid our way through the warming, and the flooding, and the increase in ever-more-powerful hurricanes and tornados.

Increasingly, I’m convinced we’ll go with the latter option, because that’s what capitalism does — wrings as much money as it can out of one thing before moving on to the next thing. The people with the oil money will make sure they get every last cent out of the old system before they’re absolutely forced to invest in new forms of energy— and of course the public will pay for those new investments, anyway.

Here’s the reality — humans aren’t going to go extinct. I think we’re going to see some population decline, not just because people aren’t having as many kids, but because I think there will be more drought. Countries without the money to address food and water shortages will experience deaths.

That’s also why I’m afraid we’re headed toward a future of even more increase between the haves and…

--

--

Amber Fraley
Amber Fraley

Written by Amber Fraley

Writing about abortion rights, mental illness, trauma, narcissistic abuse & survival, politics. Journalist, novelist, wife, mom, Kansan, repro rights activist.

Responses (52)