Pine Nuts: Love Thy Mother before AI pulls a 'bye bye baby'

How much longer can Mother Earth sustain us? That is the question. Science forewarns us that our present rate of burning fossil fuels will soon elevate Earth’s temperature to above what we humans can tolerate, and we will be, toast.

But help is on the way, sort of. It’s called the UN Climate Summit, and it has answers to save the planet.

Implementing those answers, however, is another question. You see, every UN country must sign off on an agreement, and even then, that agreement is not legally binding.

As this layman sees it, the first glaring problem lies in the irony that the president of this year’s Climate Summit happens to be an oil executive, and not just any oil executive, but the CEO of one of the largest oil companies on the planet.

This is akin to putting a wolf in charge of watching the sheep, and yet this Climate Summit is the only platform where diplomats, corporate leaders, sultans and presidents can gather together to effectively save us from turning ourselves into one humongous 4th of July sparkler.

I hate to say it, but I imagine the last words ever heard from Planet Earth might very well be the same as those prophetic last words from Joan of Arc, “Is it hot in here or is it just me?”

We have an efficient early warning system in place with our billion-dollar climate disasters, collapsing biodiversity, melting glaciers, biblical floods, fires draughts and storms, but sadly, that is not enough early warning to convince us to take drastic actions that are necessary to stave off extinction.

And we’re no Cinderella, as America is producing a record 13.2 million barrels a day, more than Russia or Saudi Arabia.

Personally, this is not how I want to go…I am sprinting ahead of a wildfire when I’m suddenly swept up in a flashflood and deposited out to sea with my hair on fire. Yet somehow that beats the slow-motion methane poisoning that is more probable.

But getting back to developing countries who are getting hit first and hardest by climate crisis, we, the biggest culprits, continue to short-sheet those poor countries and tell them they will be compensated.

Well, a baby born today in any of those developing countries will be the oldest man in the world before he sees that compensation, and by then, it will be too late. So developing countries continue to suffer the worst consequences of climate change for which they did not create.

Finally, the great mesh of life demands that we pull our heads out of the sand, stand up straight, look climate in the eye, and take steps necessary to save ourselves before it’s too late. Geopolitical climate control is not a zero-sum game. It’s time to grasp the urgency of the moment, and seize the dooda, as the saying is.

Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, we had better draw down our nuclear arsenals before AI decides we are not worth saving, and we say, “Bye Bye Baby.”

— For more than 30 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American." Go here for the spoken word version of this and other columns.