Nothing to envy

Just as the first turbulence hit the Airbus high over the Ural Mountains, I finished reading Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy – Ordinary Lives in North Korea”. It is a book that made me cry: the forced late-pregnancy abortions, the prison camps, and the unbearable everyday brutality that followed in the wake of the famines that killed off nearly one-fifth of North Korea’s population.

Looking back over the last days, I have again spent an unreasonable amount of time online debating the future. Reading this book made all those debates seem unbearably silly. This is about real people suffering right now, not in some distant post-apocalyptic scenario. But at the same time, the book reminded me of how little words mean on the day when there is no food, when money has become worthless, and industrial society does indeed come to a standstill. Contrasting the complete darkness seen from space with the bright lights of Seoul and China, it is worth reflecting on the fact that North Korea may be the only country in the world truly on a path towards decarbonization (not that this will be much comfort for its people as winter sets in).

For my own part, I will soon be back in Sweden: meeting loved ones, making lussekatter, and most likely soon feeling rather repulsed by the vulgar abundance that accompanies every Christmas. Some people who read only a few lines on this weblog or on my Facebook page may think that I have a blind faith in capitalism or that I am against things like higher gasoline taxes. I am not. In fact, I think that much higher taxes on fossil fuels (and meat) would be a very good idea in a carbon-constrained world. My only worry is that if those taxes were set as high as I wish them to be, they would also cause a massive political backlash against environmental policies and instigate a “culture war” that may drag on for decades. And, as I wrote late last night, those are decades that we most likely do not have if we are to avoid catastrophic environmental changes on a planetary scale.

Enough said about that. Transferring earlier today in Beijing, I started talking to a Danish man in his forties working in the pharmaceutical industry in southern Seoul. One of those bright Scandinavians living and working abroad, every time I go flying I tend to bump into them, and they make me proud of what Scandinavia stands for in the world: that they reflect on how traditional Korean gender roles will affect their kids in school, that they are curious of the outside world, and that they are highly skilled at their different jobs. If only Pia Kjærsgaard had listened to any of these conversations, she might have realized why Scandinavia should not turn inwards but outwards.