After the Nepal Landslides: A Disaster, and the Climate Account We All Share

The past few summers have been hard to ignore. Heat records fall, weather patterns turn strange, and the conversation about the greenhouse effect keeps sliding between urgency and denial — including a stretch when the United States stepped back from the Paris Agreement and the case for cutting emissions was openly questioned. None of that is settled, and reasonable people still disagree about pace and policy.

But here is the part that is no longer theoretical: the disaster has already arrived, and its consequences are already on the ground. Whatever one believes about how fast we should decarbonize, the landslides in Nepal are a reminder that the bill comes due for everyone, not only for those who caused it. That alone is reason enough to pay attention, and to do what we can.

There is a chain worth being honest about. What came down in Nepal was meltwater, not rain — the landslides and outburst floods were driven by glacial melt, as warming ice let go of water it had held for a long time. Behind that sits a climate that is warming faster than the averages suggest. Behind that sits a century of rising global emissions. And behind that sits the combustion of fossil fuels that powered a great deal of the growth we now take for granted.

We should be careful here. It is easy, and wrong, to point at one landslide and say “this was caused by emissions.” The honest version is smaller and more durable: the probability shifts, the trends point one way, and the direction is not random. A warming atmosphere does not author a single disaster. It loads the dice.

That is the part that should trouble us. The climate account is shared, but it is not settled evenly. Every ton of carbon is a small withdrawal from a balance we all hold in common — and the communities that lose the most to a changing climate are too often the ones who put the least into it.

What changes things is everyone’s effort, added together. And whether or not it changes the outcome, taking part is the point — our participation is the only honest answer we have to a problem none of us caused alone. The account is harder to forget when more people see that showing up matters.

For our own part, this is why we began moving toward cleaner electricity in 2018, and have used recycled materials for years.