I teach a seminar about the environment at Kansai Gaidai, and I often talk to my students about global warming, which is caused by cars, trucks, planes, factories, power stations, etc. I tell my students that global warming is an extremely serious problem, which is changing the world we live in and bringing great suffering (i.e. droughts, famine, floods, etc.) to millions of people and animals all over the world.
However, even though I know about global warming, I have a car, and tomorrow I am going to fly to Palau, a small island in the South Pacific, for a vacation with my wife. It takes four and a half hours to fly there, so the plane we will fly in will produce lots of carbon dioxide and make global warming worse.
This is one of the great paradoxes of modern life. On the one hand, most people, including me, know that global warming is a serious problem which is changing the whole world, but on the other hand, we love our cars and foreign holidays so much that we cannot give them up. Our addiction to them is too strong.
I often wonder what will happen to the world in the next five or ten years. We know that global warming will probably get worse, but we have no idea how this will affect human society. Will people still be driving cars which use gasoline in ten years' time? Will people still be flying abroad for vacations in ten years' time? Will we still have enough food in Japan in ten years' time? If the sea continues to rise, what will happen to cities by the sea such as Osaka, Kobe, Tokyo, New York, London, Sydney, etc.? Will these cities disappear under water?
We do not know the answer to any of these questions. All we know is that the world will change. Personally, I feel optimistic about the future, and I am looking forward to seeing how the world will change. I feel that whatever happens will be perfectly OK, though I cannot explain why I feel this.