To make the planet a greener, more habitable space for all our species, we must attack coal with the same vigour that slavery and other grave injustices were opposed

I’ve never been into space, but at night my mind wanders and I dream off drifting off into orbit, spinning round the globe as I cast my eyes into eternity.

Endless galaxies and a universe so vast I cannot even begin to comprehend it. It’s at once exciting, full of the possibilities of a day when the human race may learn to conquer and colonise other lands the same way we learned to harness the power of wind to set sail across oceans.

Yet when I look back I see this shining blue orb, and I feel a sense of peace. Enormous oceans, teemed with a multitude of life exist here, and though I’m lucky enough to have seen much in my temporary blip in eternity, I have never seen the wide array of life on the ocean floor, or a whale in its natural habitat.

I’m lucky, as we all are to be born at a time when the earth is not too hot and not too cold, the so-called goldilocks theory of the universe. Whether it was an act of divine providence, the eternal energy of the universe or just a random act of extremely good fortune, we have been blessed with water, food and the chance to live, to pray, to dance and to die.

Yet despite the technological utopianism I sometimes dream of as I play on my smartphone or delight in the nocturnal possibilities offered by certain swipe apps, a dark foreboding often comes over me.

For while we have been blessed with this infinite beauty, we are also carrying out a very dangerous experiment. Burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels, overfarming the land and causing soil erosion, and focusing on animal agriculture when we have neither the space nor the global population to do so.

Could this dream, this moment of peace, being born here in the UK in a stable society with no war, an honest judiciary and police force and the ability to live how I see fit, be a blip in time?

Could I be waiting not for Eden to arrive, but for a storm, the likes of which has never even been imagined and which will bring biblical levels of suffering?

I think so. For it is not only the burgeoning human population that is burdening our fragile planet with its limited resources, but the insane obsession with continuing to burn fossil fuels past the point when we realised to do so is ecological suicide.

Whatever the arguments about sustainable growth using fossil fuels, the point must be made that very shortly there won’t be much of a population to sustainably grow if we continue. A certain level of warming is locked in that will have epoch making consequences for those living in the tropics, but to continue burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels will wreak true devastation, marking us not as all conquering tamers of beasts, but as terrified ants fleeing a burning nest that they themselves have lighted.

The time of discussion and debate is well past, and the moment has come upon us where we must act with extreme haste to minimise the damage that will be done through unchecked climate change. In Europe there have been droughts and extreme heat waves in our southern peninsula, and in the far less stable and technologically savvy Middle East, another wave of drought and warming will surely bring about another Syria style disaster in the next few years.

To invest in coal and oil and gas stocks in the past is one thing, many people had no such knowledge of the harm they were causing, myself included. Yet to do so when we can see Southern Europe burning alive from heatwaves, and drought and other extreme events on the horizon is madness. A madness of the sort that any remaining descendants we have in hundreds of years will cast a bemused glance over, wondering why today’s Easter Islanders carried out hari kari on a global scale.

To protect human beings who in their billions may die from unchecked climate change we must aggressively attack the burning of fossil fuels. There are young men and women of varying talents dying to utilise their skills to help avert disaster, and older and skilled people in industries as varied as catering to computing who can be used to prevent an even greater tragedy than the one currently being charted and who must be put to work to drive this transformation.

Too often the debate around divesting from coal and oil and gas reduces itself to trite and politically correct soundbites emphasising a “diverse energy mix” and vague language around climate change is muttered. Yet I will do no such thing. In less than 50 years we will continue to unleash a global calamity that will destroy almost all human life in the tropics, and will result in what is surely to be another global war or set of wars as billions flee uninhabitable and water starched and overpopulated zones of habitation.

Unless we can develop a miraculous set of technologies to handle the problems of food, energy and water we will have to consider space as a last option, as the clock is ticking and the earth has plenty of time being 4.5 billion years old. We on the other hand are a modest and young species that has learned to craft religion, poetry, writing and the other wonders of civilisation in a mere 12 thousand years,  whil our species is only 200,000 years old, all of us descended from those small bands of hunter gatherers who contained within them the fruits both of our glory but also our destruction.

The myth of unlimited technological and social progress has led to a complacency that is rooted in the lack of connection to the earth and our dependence on it for life. If we do not heed the warnings of our inevitable demise soon, the cold and at times ruthless universe will snuff out that arrogant species who did not see the writing on the wall.