Europe to act right now against climate change

This is an opinion article by an external contributor. The views belong to the writer.
Europe to act right now against climate change

It is the year 2035. Exactly 13 years after the European Commission announced that they were one step closer to adopting a common charging solution for our electronic devices.

Also, 13 years after the same executive promised that by this year, all new car sales should be zero emissions. I remember the day they announced it, I had such a hard time deciding if I should open the cava to celebrate or not. But, thanks to them, we are finally saved from climate change. Really, big thanks, people.

As I am getting ready to go to the office, I take a glance throughout the window, just to see if it will snow, or if I will be sweating all day. The sky looks pretty clear, so I take my chance on just a T-shirt and shorts. Sandals will be too much, I think, so I decide to wear my sneakers instead.

Once down my building, I ride my 15-year-old second-hand bicycle that I bought pre-material crisis era, and I head down to the train station. The streets are full of cars. And I wonder what would have happened if they just banned all kind of cars and invested in greener transportation.

I can only imagine a city full of scooters, bicycles, and maybe new means of transport I don’t even know about yet. But, instead, I still see all those cars, most of them still with a combustion engine, since the huge all-in-one-crisis didn’t allow the working class to acquire zero emissions cars.

Once I arrive at the train station, I see there are still some delays, which makes me wonder, really, why didn’t they choose to invest in public transport instead? When the train makes it to my destination, it starts snowing. And I blame myself for having trusted my guts, rather than having checked the climate change app.

This app is frankly awesome, since it informs about the exact weather per hour, depending on the latitude you live in, what’s the sea level at this point of time in your region, and the number of natural disasters that happened in the proximity during the last couple of years.

I finally arrive to the office. Cold, but safe. When I sit down and I take out the laptop of my bag, I leave my phone on the desktop to realize just in that moment that I have almost no battery. The frustration starts building up, and I’m about to go savage on the world just because I am so stupid that I left it home.

But then I remember: “wait a second, we have a common charging solution! We made it happen! I can charge my phone with a regular charger!” And as I observe the tornado occurring just in front of our office space, I tell myself: “wow, who would have thought, our institution did fight against climate change after all.”

As the tornado keeps on beating all those parked cars and starts breaking windows of the building in front of ours, I realize what a soft change that was. And it’s only then when I start thinking…

“Gosh I wish the European Commission could have done more. I wish someone would have told our politicians and executive bodies back then that we needed a radical change. I wish there would have been scientific papers, demonstrations, and an entire community of people asking them for that change. I wish… I wish they had listened to all of us. But they hadn’t. They just… hadn’t.”


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