A few decades ago an iconic advertisement showed an Indian on a hill overlooking a highway with polluting vehicles and trash blowing around. He had a single tear coming down his cheek showing his sorrow about how Americans have destroyed what was once a beautiful land.

Today he might shed more than one tear because we may have cleaned up some of he blowing trash by putting it into mountains he could stand on. Each of the vehicles are emitting far less lead free fumes but now there are many times more vehicles polluting the air with CO₂. The Indian saw smoke pouring out of stacks and trash floating in the River. We have greatly reduced the stack pollution and the floating trash. Back then few Americans were concerned about global warming and how the pollution would change the ecosystem so rapidly. Droughts are destroying forests and insects that were restricted to warm winters are not able to live hundreds of miles farther North and at higher altitudes. The same with animals and birds moving farther North as the climate warms. Some move expanding their reach which others move to resist the warming climate. An excellent example is the Flamingo that was once restricted to mostly Southern Florida can now be found in summer as far North as Maine and Minnesota because the long summers and rising seawater is destroying their former nesting areas.

Perhaps the future is so disastrous that an old song may be more apropos than the tear. Maybe the Indian should have been singing “Cry Me A River”.

I was born into a family shortly after World War II ended that had gone through the Depression and World War I. We had all the money. England gave or leased America’s islands and bases around the world for loans. England and France were losing colonies by politics or revolt. China was going Communist while Nationalists went to Taiwan.

We were the only super power with Joseph Stalin clamping down on the Eastern Europe they had captured during World War I. The USSR was developing nuclear weapons making them a military competitor. To increase the fear and polarization children were taught in school to hide under their desks when USSR missiles exploded nearby. People on my block built bomb shelters in their back yards during the Cuban Crisis.

China was a minor player so every country and local war fell into either of the two camps with few being independent and playing one pole against the other.

In the 1980s the USSR came apart, China was being boosted by globalization of manufacturing, and the fervor of World War III was gone. The economies of most countries skyrocketed. The World Leaders started to see the danger of climate change in the early 2000s.

Now we have Russia invading former Soviet States, Iran’s religious Nationalism creating conflicts in the Middle East, China’s rise in military expansion in the South China Sea and threats to Taiwan, as well as the rise of Authoritarianism and Dictatorships. Ethnic and Religious distrust in many countries exacerbated by migration creates instability. Geopolitics has not been this unstable in at least sixty years.

Where does “working to cut emissions” rank in this environment?