The unwrapping of the new Airbus A380 this week was just as glorious as its European builders had intended. There was blue light, the spacey symphony and then the huge tube itself that will carry 550 passengers. It was actually erotic. Even the presence of that linoleum salesman Tony Blair didn’t dull the big, shiny thing. For one moment, we were back in the era when owning an airline and flying in a plane was sexy.

Then, as Mr. Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder shared a cigarette and basked, I started researching fuel efficiency, international landing rights, the stratosphere, the changing flow of the Arctic rivers and the fact that the airline industry continues to be so unprofitable that Michael O’Leary, who owns cheap, awful, wildly successful Ryanair, thinks one day airlines will pay passengers to fly. As Richard Adams reports in the London Review of Books in an essay on four new books on the kinks of the aviation industry, the profits lie in airports (shopping malls for captives) and tourism, not in flights themselves.

Isn’t the new Terminal 1 at Pearson Airport lovely? And isn’t that Air Canada flight a misery, with the bullied staff, the awful and yet insufficient food, the collapsing seats and the way you open the washroom doors gingerly, fearing nesting toads?

I’m getting off-track. The problem isn’t the quality of airline travel, it is the existence of airline travel, which leads to a multiplicity of catastrophes. Everything is interconnected. One return flight between Britain and Australia produces more carbon dioxide than an entire British household in a year, Mr. Adams says, and the industry as a whole produces twice as much as India does in a year.

Furthermore, the fact that the industry crisscrosses a multitude of borders means that the pollution isn’t even included in the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases and the fuel isn’t even taxed. High altitudes (which are more fuel-efficient) mean that the CO{-2} just takes longer to disperse. As pollution goes, it takes the cake.

And then there is human nature itself. “If you build it, they will come” is true of airplanes as well as baseball diamonds.

What I mean by this is a variant on what Jane Jacobs has been telling us for years about neighbourhoods, where one thing follows another. If you build highways through them, they will fill up with cars. More highways mean more cars. Bigger planes will fly more people. And more people will take more flights. Build more and bigger airports to accommodate them, i.e., the battle to expand Toronto’s island airport, and more of your city becomes uninhabitable. Try visiting an area in London called Hounslow, directly beneath Heathrow flight paths. Your organs vibrate from the noise, conversations have built-in time-outs, and you blow your nose at your own risk.

I once wrote that airfares should rise, not fall, but my main reason then was social justice. The bean-counter (and excitingly, his own biographer!) Robert Milton, who presided over the decline of Air Canada, wants what every airline CEO wants: a tiny staff earning budget wages. How else can he cut airfares?

But fares and wages are connected in the same way that pollution and melting ice caps are related. If fares go down, jobs disappear and wages sink, so fewer people have money to spend, meaning that you, too, might lose work or pay. But that’s okay. You will be compensated with a cheap flight to a place you probably never needed to go in the first place. A side effect of your flight is that the Arctic rivers are now flowing faster, which will make the oceans colder and possibly alter the Gulf Stream.

You don’t mess with the Gulf Stream.

Pick a bad thing, any bad thing. For Professor Michael Byers at the University of British Columbia, also writing in the LRB, it is the starving polar bears of Hudson Bay in November. They hunt on ice for ring seals. But each year there is less ice. He predicts the end of polar bears by century’s end. Or there is Darfur. Prof. Byers says genocide is also linked to a drought caused by climate change.

I will only mention in passing a recent speech by Bill Moyers in which he says that as hard as it is for sane people to believe, the United States is now run by Christian fundamentalists who think this is all a good thing because it will lead to Armageddon, the destruction of the planet. Then Christ returns or something.

Call me old-fashioned, but Armageddon can’t be good. What fascinates me is how a number of factors — economic, theological, technological — have coalesced at a certain point in history to take us to it.

The great socialist politician Tony Benn once said in a speech: “You read of different events in different parts of the world and some of you think they are unrelated. But they are all connected.” No wonder Mr. Bush worked so hard to convince people that his election was all about gay marriage.

When Paul Martin is pressured by Mr. Bush to join his space militarization plan, many things are at play. We have Mr. Bush’s version of Christianity, his contempt for Kyoto, Mr. Martin’s business experience with the Americans as an owner of steamships, his calculation of our fondness for polar bears, our water, our oil reserves, nervous India’s nuclear weapons and dropping water table, powder keg Pakistan and the coming mess in Iran.

Mr. Martin and Stephen Harper would like you to think the next election will be all about legalizing pot or something relatively trivial.

No, it will be about a multiplicity of things, all of them linked. Don’t let them distract you from that. We are at a terrible moment of confluence after two centuries of industrialization. We may not survive it.