Let’s not sacrifice human flourishing on the altar of climate
Some habits refuse to die, even at the scale of civilizations. Long before the first coal seam was cut, people looked at a hostile sky and concluded that the weather could be bargained with. The currency they chose was human life.
The Mexica (also called the Aztec) gave children to Tlaloc, the rain god. The Inca walked chosen boys and girls to the summits of Andean volcanoes and left them there. The Chimú, after rains tore apart their coastal fields, killed more than a hundred children and their llamas on a bluff above the sea. Archaeologists keep finding the evidence, from ritual burials across ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes to the skeletal remains of children recovered at Tula, where the bones themselves testify to what the community believed the sky demanded.
They were desperate, and they were wrong about causation. The sacrifices were attempts to manage an unpredictable world through religious appeasement. The victims became the price of rain, harvests, dynastic power, or cosmic stability.
Our age does not build altars to rain gods. Instead, we have built altars of regulatory regimes, campaign platforms, and international agreements. We speak of carbon budgets, net-zero dates, and planetary boundaries. The vocabulary is scientific and the rituals are bureaucratic.
What does this modern altar look like in the real world? It looks like a family in Congo cooking over dung because natural gas is now a climate problem. It looks like a lender in Europe refusing to finance a gas plant while its own board members fly home to air conditioning.
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Vijay Jayaraj is research associate for developing countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a science and research associate at the CO2 Coalition, and a visiting fellow at the U.S. National Center for Energy Analytics. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, and he has served as a research assistant at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Center in Canada.
This piece originally appeared at WORLD and has been republished here with permission.
