Cause and effect. We think we have them nailed. Action begets result. Easy. Or that very often is the working assumption. But it’s not that simple.

There may, for example, be totally unintended consequences. And as effects move downstream they can amplify each other’s impact, combining in choppy and unpredictable ways, generating forces we don’t expect and can hardly contain, becoming bigger, wilder, more extreme.

Look at the wildfires in the western United States. For decades people said they were part of the natural cycle. And they are. Indeed, coast redwood trees in California have a balance of adaptive features which allow individual trees to withstand fire and promote regeneration following fire.

But that’s before the new climate normal revealed itself. The catastrophic drought of 2011 to 2016 killed over 150 million trees in California. In a sense, that and a lightning strike, is all it took to unleash a conflagration.

The heat has been unimaginable, compared by some scientists to the firestorms that wasted Dresden in World War II: “firenadoes” of 200kmh, plumes of ash rising to 15,000 metres, drifting thousands of kilometres over the Rockies and the Plains. In San Francisco the smoke and ash were thicker than any fog ever had been. Our family members in Colorado described the ash falling silently, steadily, like black snow.

This cataclysm is a fitting, glowering, apocalyptic backdrop to the looming general election in the United States of America.

They’re at a moment of truth in the States, a fork in the road. There’s a clear choice. If they elect Trump, or if he steals the election, the US and, inevitably, the rest of the world, will hurtle ever faster towards immolation. If they elect Biden, we still have a chance.

WITHOUT A VACCINE

Perhaps Joe Biden is not as radical a figure as the world needs right now, but at least he’s on the right page. He’s a consensus guy, with a platform aimed at winning over the floating voters who drifted to the Republicans in 2016. If he were standing in Europe, we’d style him a Christian Democrat like Angela Merkel – and all in all she hasn’t done too badly. After the chaos and hysteria of Trump’s four years that may be the best answer out there.

Trump, and everything he’s connected to, has corroded and parched political discourse in the US and desiccated its culture and society. He has quite deliberately fostered division and chaos and confusion. Institutions and processes have been undercut and hollowed out. The great wildernesses have been invaded and defiled. The rich have grown richer at the expense of everyone and everything else.

Using, and abusing, social media, Trump and his menagerie have courted and encouraged a cast of grotesques: fascist thugs, fundamentalists and apocalyptics, local militias and white supremacists. His deliberately inflammatory rhetoric and encouragement of thuggery and armed resistance may well be the lightning that starts the fire. If he loses the election, we may yet see an attempted coup.

In which case, it won’t just be the forests that burn.

But if the coming weeks are enormously important for the US they’re important for everyone else too. What happens there ramifies across the globe. We humans face a series of existential threats. Which is why we desperately need to act together.

Of these, the Covid-19 pandemic is the most immediate. Of course, it’s not going to wipe out humanity but its impact on global health, economic, social and cultural impact has already been immense. And it ain’t over yet.
Everybody is getting angrier by the day, and not only in Ireland. There’s fear and loathing in equal measure.

Some still revere the public health celebrities, but many more are resentful and rebellious.
At least there’s reassurance in history. All pandemics pass and usually quite quickly. The last great coronavirus pandemic struck in 1890-1892. It came in three waves of which the second was, by a distance, the most deadly.

That’s where we are right now with Covid-19. Then, after the third wave, it disappeared. And that happened, for the record, without a vaccine.

IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

This is not to understate the seriousness of the situation, nor the importance of finding a vaccine – and ever more calibrated treatments. But when it’s done, what then?

Well, then our health service’s response to Covid-19 should be subjected to a cold and independent reckoning that shouldn’t shy away from the wider social and economic damage. Would we have the present panic if there were greater ICU capacity? When might this have been set in place and by whom?
After that, we must turn to the other existential threats we face and with equal urgency.

In the geopolitical sphere there’s the rise of China and the decline of the US; there’s Brexit; there’s the rise of authoritarians and fascists. There’s the vast, and growing dislocation of populations by war, hunger and climate change. The global order is busted. Democracy is under enormous threat. How do we fix that?
In the social sphere, there’s the impact of social media and how its platforms have facilitated asocial individualism, chaos, disruption, a nasty form of anarchy and an almost incomprehensible disintegration of civility and community. No, it’s not universal and nor need it be permanent. But just imagine how appalling life would be if things continued downwards as they have been going for the last decade or so.

Above all, we must arrest and, if possible, reverse climate change. There are vast wildfires on all continents. The ice-caps are melting at an ever-increasing rate and ocean currents are slowing. The tipping points are clearly visible on the horizon through the smoke and dust.

Whatever the result of the upcoming Presidential election, the US will eventually have to come to terms with itself after the appalling decline ushered in by Donald Trump: its ragged response to the pandemic; its failure to engage with climate change; its ugly self-absorption and global anti-social behaviour.

But those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Indeed, we in Ireland may be all the more culpable for knowing what should be done and then not doing it. The Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2020 is a start but making it work is a taller order.

Those infernos in California and elsewhere aren’t a form of disaster fiction any more than Covid-19 is a contagion fantasy. All this shit’s for real and if we’re not part of the solution to these existential threats we’re part of the problem.

Seatbelts on!