Our home is burning, The End is near. These are the headlines we see in the news nowadays. Rapid climate change is destabilizing our world. Even though we may not want to believe these headlines, they are the inevitable, and the bitter “reality” of the serious situation we are currently in. Despite that, from viral climate campaigns to polished “Green City” slogans, the movement to save the Earth feels louder and hopeful than ever. However, only very few actually stop to ask and think who is still suffering, or whether any of these efforts are reaching the people who need them most.
We raise awareness, but often ignore the brutal truths and tragedies happening around the world even right now. We need to start realizing that children are dying behind hopeful posts and hashtags. Even without the citizens’ tragedies happening everyday, catastrophic events are occurring, rising up to us more and more each day. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and droughts are happening everywhere on the Earth. This is the “truth” that many people just ignore and pass by.
However, can we fix climate change? Regardless of the countless efforts we make to fix this matter, the temperature is rising rapidly every year, and we are setting new records for numbers of tragic natural disasters every year. For our generation to inherit a livable future, we must expose the painful truth behind today’s climate optimism: that those who follow the rules are often punished, while those who pollute are rewarded.
In recent years, governments, corporations, and everyday actions advocated by citizens have assembled around the idea of pursuing climate stabilization. When we look around, we see school programs and Earth Day celebrations promoting environmental responsibility, clean technology headlines, and new climate startups suggesting that innovation is leading the way toward a sustainable future. Even beyond the classroom, international summits are announcing new emission targets and tech companies investing in clean energy make us feel reassured.
At first glance, it seems like the world is finally changing course, and heading toward the right direction with certainty. It feels like climate change is not only acknowledged, but actively being solved. Everything seems so hopeful, and it feels like the problem is finally within our control. Or at least, that’s what we’re told. But the more we look, the more we realize the crisis isn’t coming in the future, but it’s already happening. The truth is, we’re running out of time, and the damage is no longer something we can ignore.
While hopeful messages and polished campaigns continue, the environmental crisis is only getting worse, and the damage we’ve done may already be past the point of return. For example, catastrophic floods in Pakistan caused over $40 billion in damage and displaced more than 30 million people showing us that climate disasters are no longer distant possibilities. They’re happening now. And even these losses represent just a diminutive fraction of what we are facing. According to the Swiss Re Institute, one of the world’s largest reinsurance firms, global temperatures could rise beyond 3°C by 2050, potentially wiping out up to 18% of the world’s GDP.
These figures aren’t guesses, but comes from stress tests across 48 economies, conducted by experts who specialize in measuring real risk. The losses they anticipate span every sector, including agriculture, labor, housing, trade, and infrastructure. In many low-income countries, economic losses could rise above 25%, deepening inequality and forcing entire communities to relocate. Crops may fail more often, coastlines may vanish, and sectors like tourism, shipping, and insurance could collapse under growing pressure. And when financial giants begin preparing for breakdowns this large, we can no longer claim the crisis is far away. It’s happening now.
These numbers are not predictions for tomorrow but actually patterns already forming. Since the 1980s, climate disasters have quadrupled. Every year, over 20 million people are forced from their homes because of floods, fires, and storms. Droughts are lasting longer, heatwaves are becoming more fatal, and entire ecosystems are vanishing. These events are no longer exceptions but signs of a system under stress. Food supplies are disappearing, access to clean water is shrinking, and hospitals are struggling to manage the rise in climate-related illness.
This isn’t just an environmental issue anymore. It’s a direct threat to how our society works. However, the most painful part is realizing that while world leaders shake hands and companies celebrate innovation, the actual response is still too slow. It’s not enough to talk about progress. We have to admit that the world we are living in is already destroyed. We haven’t even entered adulthood, and yet we’re watching the safety net fall apart. And we’re expected to believe that recycling bins and electric cars will be enough to hold it all together.
Though the economic loss and infrastructural damage are undeniably catastrophe, devastation lies at a far more irreversible cost: human life. It is already stealing futures quietly and relentlessly from people whose stories are never told. These tragedies are not outliers, but reflections of a world growing increasingly unstable and losing its ability to protect what once felt certain. For instance, in the case of the Parsley family, their vacation along the Guadalupe River in Texas was abruptly collapsed into irretrievable loss.
Without warning, an unexpected heavy rain caused by rising climate instability triggered a flash flood that swept away their riverside cabin in the middle of the night. Six members of the family survived. Twenty-month-old Clay did not. His body was found miles downstream the following morning. There were no alerts, no margin for error, but only the sudden collapse of safety in a place presumed to be peaceful. We often label these events “natural,” yet there was nothing natural about a child dying in his sleep due to atmospheric shifts no ordinary citizen can control.
Behind all the talk about carbon targets and green innovation is a quieter truth, where climate collapse doesn’t begin with data but begins with personal tragedies that rarely make it into the public’s memory. One example is Richard Canales, a retired handyman known for helping his elderly neighbors. On February 4th, 2024, in Guerneville, California, he was driving along a road he knew well when sudden flooding from an atmospheric river swept through. Twelve inches of rain fell in just one day, and the land he trusted gave way. His body was found the next morning.
He did not ignore the crisis—he simply relied on a history that no longer applied. His death, like so many others, reveals a deeper crisis: the growing disconnect between lived experience and environmental expectation in a world where precedent is no longer protection. And beyond these individual cases lie millions more whose suffering is quieter, longer, and systemically neglected. In regions across the Global South, entire generations are growing up in landscapes marked by recurring drought, seasonal flooding, and vanishing food security.
UNICEF now estimates that over 1 billion children face “extremely high risk” from climate-related hazards—a figure that is less a prediction than a diagnosis of the world we have already entered. For these children, climate change isn’t just a future threat, but a part of the world they’re growing up in nowadays. Moreover, if we keep framing the issue around big ideas and unreachable solutions, we risk building a movement that feels advanced, but forgets the people who need help the most.
While the physical and emotional costs of climate change are impossible to ignore, there’s another problem we don’t talk about enough—how our systems respond. We like to believe that the fight against environmental collapse is a shared effort, that everyone contributes, and that playing by the rules will lead to meaningful change. But what actually happens tells a different story: sincerity is punished, and those who manipulate the system often benefit the most. We’re told that small actions matter, such as, bringing a tote bag, skipping the straw, biking instead of driving. Millions of people believe it.
They change their habits, educate their families, and follow the rules because they’re told it will help. Yet a single private jet flight can emit more carbon than an entire household does in a year, quietly erasing the impact of all those efforts. That contradiction makes you wonder whether a system that celebrates personal sacrifice while excusing extreme waste can ever be fair. Throughout communities, ordinary people carry the weight of environmental responsibility. In California, for example, small farmers have been fined thousands of dollars for minor violations of water rules, even when they were just trying to save their crops.
In contrast, major agricultural companies often operate under special exemptions written into law through lobbying and political connections. Although environmental regulations may seem equal at the first sight, they often hit the hardest where people have the least power to push back. Those causing the most harm often avoid being held responsible or face consequences they deserve, but rather the gardeners, landowners, and homeowners trying their best face penalties. At the same time, corporations have learned how to look responsible without actually changing. Many buy carbon credits or add green labels, allowing them to keep polluting as long as they fund tree-planting projects or make minor improvements.
These efforts might look good on paper but often don’t reduce real harm at all. As an example, in 2022, Shell ran ads about clean energy while still investing billions in fossil fuels. And the worst part is, they didn’t break any rules. That’s the problem. When doing damage can still earn praise, the people who try the hardest end up feeling like their efforts don’t count. You see this even in schools. Students are celebrated for recycling campaigns or walk-to-school days, and those efforts are real. But many of them live near factories, highways, or airports where the pollution cancels out everything they’re working for.
Schools tell students to be responsible, but rarely teach them to question who’s really in charge. That’s what it comes down to. The system isn’t flawed, but working exactly as it was designed to. It rewards those who put on a show of caring, while leaving others to deal with the consequences and problems they started with. These days, climate policy seems to care more about looking good than doing good. Pollution gets treated like a currency, like something companies can trade or offset as long as it helps them look responsible and righteous. The sad fact is that attention goes to whoever is the loudest, not to whoever is doing the real work. And in the end, the burden falls on the people with the fewest tools to fight back.Unless we confront the unfair responsibility and praise are distributed, we won’t be able to solve the crisis to begin with. Headlines can celebrate progress and campaigns can talk about hope, but none of it will matter if convenience keeps winning over honesty. Those who care the most will still be told it’s not enough, while those doing the least will keep getting credit for effortless changes. And worst of all, this broken way of thinking makes real progress impossible. No solution can work if the people being punished are the ones trying to help. Before we take on climate change, we have to fix the way we respond to it. Because without fairness, there’s nothing solid to build on. And without that, even our most urgent efforts will fall apart.
We are not asking for miracles. We are asking for fairness. Because the truth is, this crisis was not created equally, and it cannot be solved by pretending it was. The burden has fallen hardest on those with the least power, while those most responsible still shape the story, still walk away applauded. We do not need more slogans or empty promises, nor a system that values honesty over performance, and justice over convenience. Until we fix that, even our best intentions will collapse under a structure that was never built to hold them. And if we are expected to inherit this future, then we deserve a say in how it’s rebuilt. One that begins not with praise, but with truth.
By: Jaden Kim
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