We have ruined the planet

The United Nations (UN) has been brave enough to point out in its report on climate change that the situation is totally irreversible and that it is only the complete and total interaction of human beings that is directly to blame for the situation we are experiencing and which, unfortunately, we will experience - year after year - until the meteorological phenomena become more severe.

This is the other damned pandemic, in addition to the virus whose origin is unknown and it is not known which host caused the mutation in SARS-CoV-2, and the maelstrom of climate change. 

We have finished the planet, nature's top predator has devastated everything around it: the seas, the oceans, the forests, the ecosystems and even the sky has been filled with soot, CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. 

Many cities, in the first two decades of the 21st century, look like a platinum cream that devours the sky, enclosing the gases and concentrating the harmful particles that end up being breathed in by the inhabitants, but also by other living beings such as animals and plants. 

One by one, as if it were a domino effect, the cities trapped by this cream of pollution are falling, I remember that Madrid in 1999 boasted of a blue, clean and transparent sky while in Mexico City its inhabitants were already with the sticker of the circulation of vehicles nones and evens. 

The most dramatic aspect of all this is that Madrid, like Mexico City, already has a serious air pollution problem and that the zero and even vehicle programmes to try to curb the emission of harmful gases into the environment have been an absolute failure. 

The only thing these programmes have been good for is to contribute to feeding the car industry, which has rubbed its hands together seeing how families with only one vehicle have bought two or three to be able to drive every day; if today the odd one does not circulate, then the even one is used, and vice versa. 

The number of cars increased, families did not understand the urgency of the measure because nobody has taken seriously the introduction of environmental education in the school curriculum.  

Do you know when the "Hoy no Circula" programme started in Mexico City? In the last quarter of 1989. In that year, many of us were still in high school and nobody thought to explain to us what was happening to the environment and why we, as future consumers and potential vehicle users, should prioritise public transport or bicycles, or think about carpooling, rather than the most common option: buying a vehicle.

On top of that, mobility is complicated in cities like the capital of Mexico, with an excess of people on the Metro, the Metrobus, the combinations, the distances, the insecurity, the assaults and the kidnappings. In short, people buy cars and this continues to lubricate the vicious circle of atmospheric pollution. 

And I insist, it has been a failure here, there and everywhere, there is not a city in the world, not even Switzerland, Norway or Iceland that can claim to be free of air pollution, to have citizens who are absolutely conscious of discarding their own vehicle to reduce their ecological footprint and, instead, opt for a bicycle, an electric scooter or public transport. 

We have lost that battle globally, because nobody took it seriously decades ago, and already since the baby boom there were indications that the population explosion was causing an increase in demand for many material goods and would initiate a period of immoral material accumulation. 

Nobody believed that the UN would one day say that we have lost the battle against climate change to such an extent that it is now irreversible, a polite way of warning that the worst is coming; and it won't matter, because the pandemic of climate change makes no distinction between rich and poor countries, nor between more and less educated.  And for this there is no vaccine. 

The intensification of climate change makes the world more vulnerable and unstable and unpredictable than it already is; migration will not be contained: people leaving their homelands because they have lost everything to fire or flood or tornado or earthquake and perhaps extreme drought. This is the apocalypse.