CLIMATE CRISIS

We Are Not Prepared for What Is Coming

Today my mobile phone alerted me again to something alarming. It’s been like this since the beginning of summer. Some people pick up the phone to check the time. I pick it up to see what the temperature is. And today, almost as three weeks ago, I again got an alert for today’s bad weather.

For a long time, bad weather meant rain and cold to me. But the idea of seeing water falling from the sky and a cooling down of the temperature seems to me the paradisiacal scenario that I for so long associated with summer.

In conversations with my neighbors, the feeling is similar. We are all waiting for the winter to come quickly. And I, who live in the interior of Portugal, as close to the sea as to Spain, suffer all the disadvantages of it. There is no maritime influence here, just a torrid heat where there is not the slightest sea breeze or wind that runs.

It’s like a scene from a film where everything is silent, frozen in time, and heat waves can be seen in the distance when driving on a silent road. It is a distressing sight.

It has been many months since I have seen a small drop of water fall from the sky. I can never remember such a scenario.

How much things have changed in the 32-year period of my life!

My childhood, which was also spent here in this land, was marked by long, cold winters, with rain that never stopped falling, and with tales by my parents’ fireside.

A whole outfit was prepared, gloves, caps, boots, and woolen socks for the snowy days that always happened every winter and closed the schools. They were happy days. The schools were shut, my parents didn’t go to work, and we all went out as a family to play in the snow, make balls, and throw them cheerfully at each other.

My eight-year-old niece has never seen snow in her life. She has no gloves or caps in her wardrobe. In less than twenty years, the snow has stopped falling — the last memory I have of snow in my village dates back to 2006 — the rains have become less and less.

Now, droughts are more and more normal, summers last longer, and winters seem to last half a month. But they are totally different winters. There is sunshine all year round, even if it is cold.

Many are the foreigners who rejoice that there is sun all year round in sunny Portugal. And even the publicity makes it sound like it’s a good thing, the fact that there’s little rain all year round. But contrary to what many people think, Portugal is/was also cold, with lots of rain and snow, or were we not a northern Atlantic climate.

And this year, the tragedy has been accelerating as I have never witnessed before. This year the drought has been felt since January. Farmers have had no pasture for their animals for a long time, and water has run out from springs — my grandparents have a well that had had water without interruption since 1832 but dried up this summer!

A tiny awareness campaign, which has come late and is doing nothing, is on television calling on the Portuguese to turn off the tap and try to save water. But it’s summer; people go to swimming pools to try and cool off. Luxury cars need to be cleaned and washed with water every day. And people need daily showers to remove the sweat that emanates from their bodies in these infernal temperatures. Let’s not start with the need for water to extinguish the fires ravaging and destroying our forests!

The water shortage should be making everyone alarmed, but it’s not. Yesterday in the news, the CEO of one of the two electricity companies warned that the price of electricity will rise 40% or more already next month. I can see people alarmed straight away about going for their wallets.

And it’s not for no less! I don’t know how we will get through this horrible inflation and this instability, and my fear is that this is the beginning of the end, something we feared so much at the beginning of the millennium is happening now. People, however, don’t understand why electricity is rising when it’s so easy to predict.

Firstly, most electricity comes from hydroelectric power, produced in dams and rivers that are drying up. Without water, there is no energy, and when resources become scarce, the prices of these products go up.

This is also what happens in a free market economy. I have already warned how outrageous it has been to see GALP — the biggest petrol company in Portugal —making profits of almost €500 million, four times more than in the same period last year.

But the TV only features commentators with right-wing views, notably a fool who said yesterday that wealth should not be taxed because it harms the country. It’s always the same straw for the donkeys who want to eat it!

And so they let economic giants take the money and send it to who knows which offshore accounts, while this profit money comes directly from the Portuguese people who have been wasting away trying to fill the tanks of their cars.

This profit in the hands of half a dozen people in no way enriches the country, but only the pockets of half a dozen people who are not going to increase salaries or create more jobs, quite the opposite of what was commented on the news. This illusion does what illusions do, showing a disfigured and unreal reality.

I don’t know if, in fact, electricity will increase by more than 40% in one of the European countries where electricity is one of the most expensive in Europe. But if someone had told me two years ago that we would be paying more than double for diesel, I wouldn’t have believed it either.

But, here we are.

It seems 2019 was humanity’s last sane year. The last summer before the pandemic, before the war in Ukraine, before this price hike, before the summer of hell, we are all suffering!

Let’s be honest, at least those of us who are suffering these temperatures, every year we hear that every summer is hotter than the last, and we shrug our shoulders in disbelief, almost saying, “what an exaggeration.”

But this year, we are feeling every word of it in our bodies, aren’t we? There’s no memory of such prolonged heat, of days and days on end with hot weather that barely lets us sleep, with days when we’re afraid to go out into the street. To go to the beach? It’s not possible in this heat; it seems like an immediate condemnation.

Those who live on the coast may think this is all an exaggeration. But come to the interior and feel temperatures above 40 degrees Celcius ( 104 degrees Fahrenheit)for more than a week and night temperatures of almost thirty degrees Celcius ( 86 degrees Fahrenheit). Then you will tell me your own conclusions.

Yesterday on my 6 am morning walk — almost the only time of the day I can walk down the street without feeling like I’m going to pass out from the heat — I saw people awake watering their vegetable gardens. I also saw burnt leaves, as if a fire had gone through the vines and burnt it all. But there had been no fire there. The leaves were shriveled, perforated, and dry, and the grapes were tiny, almost dry before they had even ripened.

Humanity is walking at great strides toward an unexpected, hostile, dangerous, and unprecedented path. And we, as if this were a science fiction film, are watching all this, living in denial, always waiting for things to magically resolve themselves without us having to do anything.

We wait for technology, which we have used and abused since the beginning of the industrial revolution, to do something for us. When the solution would pass through a much bigger social revolution, namely how we have organized our lifestyle, something that I don’t foresee happening because in the capitalist system we have all been living, the rich think they can buy the solution for everything, while the working class will always think they will never have the power to change anything, and that things “are what they are.”

Humanity has forgotten its way, its natural world. It has neglected that it too is part of nature and has relied on artificiality and technologies that have only served to make us distant not only from each other but from our natural world…

I don’t know where we are going or how we are going, but whatever the path, it looks pretty bleak to me.

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Hello, I’m Araci, a female writer from Portugal. I like to write about my country, Portugal. But I also enjoy pop culture, American culture, and cultural differences. I hope you’ve enjoyed this article!

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