The Titanic has already collided with the iceberg, but let’s continue dancing happily in its living room, national-populism preaches. Don’t worry, if we have to evacuate, Elon Musk’s rescue boats will arrive to take us to Mars. Well, to take those who can pay for the trip. It’s the market, friends!
I write from Salobreña in the early hours of the morning of Wednesday, November 13, 2024. I write in an area that is currently facing the threat of torrential rains detected by the AEMET. I trust the AEMET, its predictions are increasingly more accurate, thanks to technology and the preparation of its staff. Much more solvent, in any case, than those of those Mazón-like politicians who, once the DANA that fell on Valencia two weeks ago had been unleashed, locked themselves in the booth of a restaurant to hit on a journalist, I want to believe that only professional yews.
The AEMET has been right again. Yesterday it was a sunny and cheerful day in Salobreña, but now the sky that I contemplate from my desk is covered with gloomy clouds. They tell me on WhatsApp that it is already raining on the city of Granada, on Lanjarón, the gateway to the Alpujarra, and on the very nearby Motril. Here it only sparks for the moment, a few droplets fall as dirty as the underside of an SUV in the Sahara. But, anyway, the day has just started.
Last Sunday, the environmental association Cal y Caña displayed a map of the potentially flood-prone Salobreña in the municipal market square. It was scary. Only the old town was saved, the medina that the Arabs wisely placed on the slopes of a mountain and topped with a crenellated castle. The rest – the new Salobreña at sea level, the summer developments on the beach and the beautiful plain of the Guadalfeo River – could well become a lagoon – provisional or permanent – due to torrential rains or rising seas.
I’m quite anarchist, I’ve never been very interested in joining parties or associations, but on Sunday I signed up for Cal y Caña. The cause of saving the planet seems to me to be the most urgent and transversal of those that humanity faces in this 21st century. Although I am aware that it is not a popular cause, if it implies changes in our way of life, it does. I wrote it in this same newspaper last week: climate denialism, an essential component of Trump-style national-populism, fills the polls because it preaches what so many people want to hear: there is no reason to change.
The Titanic has already collided with the iceberg, but let’s continue dancing happily in the ship’s lounge, national populism preaches. Don’t worry, if things get even uglier and we have to evacuate, Elon Musk’s rescue boats will arrive to take us to Mars. Well, to take, of course, those who can pay for the trip. It’s the market, friends!
In the meantime, let’s hold international conferences on climate change that are not attended by China and the United States, the main polluters on the planet, and that are organized by hydrocarbon-rich countries such as Azerbaijan -2024- and Dubai -2023-. Let’s leave the care of the flock to the wolves. Let’s emit CO₂ until there is not a drop of gas and oil left on Earth. Let’s allow oil companies to continue making misleading advertising on social networks and the media. Let the Titanic orchestra sound louder!
Here and now, on the Costa Tropical in the autumn of 2024, many of us neighbors have been talking with concern for a few days about the Molvízar boulevard, the Barranco del Arca, the ravaged Sierra de los Guájares and other possible drains of torrential downpours such as those that could fall today from Malaga to Motril. Also about the buildings that continue to be built on the route of rainwater towards the sea, such as the new health center. Well, I swear for the health of my daughters that there is no shortage of those here who will blame Sánchez for anything that may happen, of course, and the environmentalists! They are those increasingly abundant people who have no qualms about shouting their ideological nonsense in bar bars, fodder for hoaxes, spectators of Iker Jiménez, voters of Ayuso, Abascal and Alvise.
And here I am, in my small studio in the old town of Salobreña, waiting for the deluge. I hope it’s not that bad, I tell myself, but I quickly add that I won’t have lost anything by buying supplies for two or three days and not going out while the orange alert is in effect. And I will confess that when I acquired this studio (cheaper than a parking space in Ayuso’s Madrid, gentlemen trolls of the right) I already thought about climate change.
I wasn’t going to buy something with the modest savings from forty years of work in a flood-prone area, no matter how much closer it was to the beach than this humble abode, which is also the home of those of you who are good people. That is, people with their own and sound ideas.
#Waiting #flood
