This is the hardest mountain humanity will ever climb
I wake up to other people’s fire. In southern Europe, the news feeds show a continent on a stove — towns melting into glass, hospitals filling with heatstroke, and temperatures breaking 40°C. The headlines are hot and loud. The smell of smoldering pines and burnt houses is on everyone’s tongue.
Yet, as I stand on the fringes of the Swedish Lapland, a different season is announcing itself: summer is giving up with a small, precise sound. The air has lost its rounded warmth, now sliding like a coin along the windowsill. And a creeping metallic cold sips under the door, brushing my spine. But this is not the same cold my childhood taught me to love. This one is edged with industry: the chill of extraction, of emptying the earth so we can pretend we are saving it.
In 1956, geologist M. King Hubbert warned of the inevitability of peak oil — a day when the supply fueling modern life would dwindle. His forecast was nearly prophetic: U.S. crude production peaked in 1970, then dipped, only to be pushed higher decades later through fracking and offshore drilling, surpassing historical highs everywhere. Today, under the roasting powers of fossil fuels turning cities into pressure cookers, the world faces a…