Today, Italy has broken a record: all 27 of its largest cities are under a ‘red alert’ for extreme heat on the same day.

On top of physical exhaustion and mental strain comes the financial hit: the reservoirs of hydroelectric power stations have dried up, causing electricity prices to soar, with repercussions for the entire economy.
And there is the sadness of seeing, for the umpteenth time, the River Po reduced to a marsh, crops withering in the fields and the beloved places where we grew up becoming increasingly unrecognisable.

If we then broaden our view from Italy to the European nations closest to it, we risk an anxiety attack.
France has lost 30 per cent of its agricultural output. Germany, due solely to the low water levels of the Rhine, has lost 1 per cent of its industrial output.
Spain and Greece are engulfed by wildfires right in the middle of the tourist season. Hungary and Romania have had to shut down their nuclear power stations because the intakes that supplied water from the Danube to the plants were installed too high above the river’s current level and are no longer able to draw water from it.

Towers of Sand

It is estimated that the cost of these natural disasters – which it no longer makes sense to call ‘emergencies’ or ‘extreme events’ given that they now occur every two or three years, will rise to more than 130 billion a year by 2030, before soaring to who knows what level in the decades that follow.

Keynes liked to say that ‘in the long run, we’re all dead’, but he was wrong: my children, God willing, will live to see an Italy and a Europe radically transformed in order to survive six-month-long scorching summers and the end of abundant water supplies (the only true natural resource on a continent devoid of any others).

Some early signs are already becoming visible here and there: farms planting less water-intensive crops (giving up rice, first and foremost), factories switching to night-time working hours, data centres built in old, empty mines, and promising experiments such as sand batteries as tall as seven-storey buildings to store energy when it is available and release it when it is lacking.

But not everything can be adapted. To give just one example, a housing stock built up over generations by people who needed to protect themselves from the cold cannot be razed to the ground and rebuilt from scratch to protect against the heat.
The construction sector has too little added value to employ so many workers and generate such high returns on capital. Those who today rely on air conditioning will, in all likelihood, still be doing so in thirty years’ time.

Thinking of oneself as vulnerable

As I think about this ‘Dune’-like future, I find myself looking back fondly on the past as well. In particular, to the lessons on climate change I used to give my pupils about ten years ago (because, for some time now – for those who don’t know – schoolteachers have also had to double up as ‘environmental educators’, whatever that means).

Whilst acknowledging that, yes, we too would soon feel the effects, I nevertheless emphasised the narrative that it was the poorest countries that were suffering the most, whilst it was the richest ones that were emitting greenhouse gases. There were countless examples, from the disappearance of Lake Chad in Africa to the deadly heatwave in India.

It was a sophisticated evolution of the classic catechism-style moral: we’d moved from ‘Whilst we drive our SUVs, Africans have no water’ to‘Because we drive our SUVs, Africans have no water’.

That touch of compassion for the most destitute of the destitute helped to stir consciences, whilst the illusion that the lever for change lay in the hands of the ‘First World’ gave the exhilarating feeling that success in this endeavour was possible.

Well, the data from the last decade have turned this perspective on its head.
If, instead of talking vaguely about the ‘First World’, we focus specifically on the countries of Europe, we discover that they are the most vulnerable to climate disruption: their proximity to the melting Arctic and the enclosed geography of the Mediterranean are causing Europe to warm at twice the global average rate.
On the other hand, European countries are the ones that have paid the highest price for trying to slow it down: to date, they account for barely one-twelfth of total greenhouse gas emissions (whilst generating more than one-fifth of global GDP).

If we are to follow logic, the connection makes sense: since we stand to lose more than others, we have taken the issue more to heart.
But the moralising narrative that the rich cause climate change whilst the poor suffer its consequences is completely undermined by these figures.

Chinese disaster

It is true that it takes the ecosystem around twenty years to absorb the effects of carbon emissions into the atmosphere; therefore, this summer’s drought can still be considered ‘the fault’ of us, the Americans, the Japanese and others who emitted greenhouse gases up until the early 2000s.

But the Italy my children will inherit – a country without rice and where they will have to work night shifts – will be caused by current emissions, a third of which come from China, another third from the rest of Asia, a not inconsiderable proportion from the US, and already more from India than from Europe.

This very year we have seen confirmation of this overtaking: in just thirty years, China has emitted more greenhouse gases than Europe has emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

It may seem absurd, but it is true. From the time an English clergyman invented the steam engine in 1712 to when CERN in Geneva developed the Internet in 1989 – with all the other innovations in between that have led humankind out of an eternity of misery and hunger – Europe caused less damage to the climate than China has done between 1989 and the present day.

We’re no longer behind the wheel

In short, from now on, it’s a new chapter. We are in a new historical phase, where continuing to cast ourselves as the accused no longer makes any sense for us.

The climate crisis is causing suffering amongst the most disadvantaged sections of society in our cities, causing suffering amongst children and the elderly in our families, and even causing suffering amongst the animals in our pastures and our seas – without us doing anything significant to make it worse.

For the white man, accustomed as he is to feeling in the driving seat of the world and responsible for every mishap of humanity, this fact undoubtedly sounds shocking, but it is nonetheless a fact: in the climate crisis, we are now among the victims, and to make matters worse, we have scant – if any – means of stopping those responsible.

We are on the receiving end, just as much as the Africans of Lake Chad. Indeed: in an ironic twist of fate, it seems that the warming of the Mediterranean is increasing humidity south of the Sahara, causing monsoon rains and reviving the poor lake that, in front of my students, I had already written off as lost.

Our efforts to become a green continentby 2050 are commendable and will undoubtedly be crowned with success, given the rapid pace of technological progress.

But on their own, they will remain a drop in the ocean.
And in an ocean that is getting warmer and warmer.