365 days

Every day of the year, we will be confronted with coverage of the war in Ukraine, hear about clashes in the Holy Land, civil war in Sudan, and receive the latest updates on Donald Trump’s legal travails. Day after day, the news media will try to entertain us or keep us busy with episodic news of drama predictably unfolding. And every day we will continue to ignore the news that matters most, the increasingly insistent reminders from Mother Earth, the need to wake up fast and realize that we have pushed our planet and our environment to the brink.

The more we ignore the signs, the more insistently Mother Earth will express her wrath, not just through hurricanes and forest fires, but through parched Earth and fish boiling in the oceans.

Let us recap on some of the news that Mother Earth has tried to bring to our attention; all lost in the news circus of Trump and Ukraine. One-third of the once-rich agricultural lands of our planet have already been seriously degraded, and 85 percent of the wetlands essential to life and biodiversity have been destroyed. The world’s fish stocks are already overexploited to 90 percent, and the algae and plankton providing us with most of our oxygen could collapse as a result. The rainforests that provide the rest of our oxygen, but also the biodiversity that, for example, yields new medicines, are being cut down at unprecedented rates only to raise more livestock that already occupy 80 percent of the agricultural lands that we have left. We all know how this only results in a further rise in carbon emissions, with our planet already on track for a projected 3-degree increase in global average temperatures by the end of the century.

How is it possible to imagine 10 billion humans surviving on a scorched Earth without descending into endless conflict?

Returning to the topic of biodiversity, we humans have killed off 300 species of mammals alone, precipitated the decline of vertebrate species by close to 68 percent in the past 50 years and of the world’s insect species by between 40 and 70 percent in the past 30 years alone. The background extinction rate of species was about one species per millennium before humans showed up; in the past few thousand years that extinction rate has accelerated by somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times, exclusively due to human intervention, putting close to one million species at risk of extinction in the coming decades. 

Of course, we are also endangering our own species, with almost half of the globe already experiencing water stress for at least one month every year, and half a billion people still living in extreme poverty, shame on us.

These are the daily tears Mother Earth is shedding as we look the other way. The gods of technology have turned us into zombies and we continue to believe their claims that only technology can save us. 

However, if science and technology were so omnipotent, why did they not help us predict and avoid the predicament we are in today? How is it that technology is always multiple steps behind Mother Earth? Much of the time technology is a mirage that only displaces the problem. 

Governments around the world are pushing us to move from fuel-powered vehicles to electric cars to “decarbonize” and reach “net zero emissions.” Nobody mentions the fact that almost 50 percent more carbon dioxide is released when manufacturing an electric car compared to a fuel-powered one, that EV batteries rely on rare Earths from problematic countries, that electric cars still run on whatever (often bad) methods are used to produce our electricity, and that an electric vehicle often doesn’t break even in terms of emissions before the 100,000 km mark. The mirage of technology is making us dump fuel vehicles, creating vast amounts of waste, while adopting a new technology that offers only marginal benefits.

There are no two ways about it — we have ignored the real news about our planet for too long. Soon, though, we will hear and experience that news 365 days a year, for we are already running off a climate and environmental cliff. We have already lost control; the tears of Mother Earth will soon flood humanity.

• Hassan bin Youssef Yassin worked with Saudi petroleum ministers Abdullah Tariki and Ahmed Zaki Yamani from 1959 to 1967. He led the Saudi Information Office in Washington from 1972 to 1981 and served with the Arab League observer delegation to the UN from 1981 to 1983.