But honestly, there's only one story that should have been central to our age, even if, sadly enough, most of the time it wasn't. Rising inflation makes for constant headlines these days, rising temperatures not so much. In fact, as we creep toward an all-too-literal hell on earth, as the heating of the planet and the disasters that go with it intensifying hurricanes and floods, megadroughts, melting glaciers, heat domes, fires that can make their own weather, you name it grow ever more severe in ways almost too dramatic to take in, the centrality of climate change, of the fossil-fuelized broiling of this planet, to our future should be too obvious to ignore.
I mean just imagine that, by 2050, according to the latest estimates, hundreds of millions of people (yes, there are those millions again!) could be displaced from their devastated homes and homelands by global warming. By then, it's even possible that more than a billion of us could have become refugees.
Sadly, at a time when Republican hijinks are headlines daily, when Joe Biden's dropping poll numbers can be the story of the moment, when the fate of Donald Trump's former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows is front and center, climate change still seemed like a passing concern for most of 2021. Even when the weather itself was staggering, the climate emergency often was, at best, an afterthought.
Take the monstrous set of tornadoes that swept through Kentucky and five other states just two weeks ago, leaving an unparalleled path of destruction in their wake. Yes, it's true that not enough is known yet to connect them with utter certainty to climate change. But give me a break, it should have been the first thought that came into the mind of any reporter covering the story (or any viewer watching it), especially since the areas those tornadoes swept through in December were experiencing unseasonably warm temperatures of a record sort, which should have been ominous enough in itself. (Overheated Minnesota would, within days, experience its first December tornadoes ever.)
I watched NBC Nightly News on the evenings after that orgy of devastation and indeed the tornado story was the lead in a big time way. On the first night, December 11th, with Kate Snow on duty, coverage of the horror story in Kentucky and elsewhere lasted a full 15 minutes without commercial break; on the second night, with Lester Holt in charge, 13 minutes and yet on neither night were the words "climate change" ever mentioned. (They finally came up at the eight-minute mark of the third night.)
And that seemed to catch our world in a nutshell (or perhaps I mean a fireball) in 2021.
And here's the saddest thing: as the year ends in a country where significant parts of the population, including more than 130 members of Congress (and you know just which party they belong to), still don't believe there's a climate emergency or that it's faintly the issue of our time: it's perfectly possible that a climate denier and fossil-fuel nut could be elected president again in 2024 (and then you can kiss this world goodbye). And even if that doesn't happen, keep in mind that few blinked here when, only days after President Joe Biden returned from a global climate-change summit in Glasgow, Scotland, where he promised to do his damnedest to get this country off greenhouse-gas-producing power, his administration promptly auctioned off 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico's seabed to companies like Exxon, Chevron, and BP for oil and natural gas drilling. That record auction essentially guaranteed more future freak-out weather on a planet in peril. And only recently, West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin got a ban on new offshore drilling for gas and oil along this country's Atlantic and Pacific coasts removed from Biden's Build Back Better bill, only to announce soon after that he wouldn't vote for the bill anyway.
Oh, and just to end on a cheerier note, as 2021 wound down, the Senate, which can agree on so little, passed almost unanimously the most staggering Pentagon budget of our time. The senators, like their House colleagues, even added an additional $24 billion the Biden administration hadn't asked for.
So, as 2021 concludes, thanks a million for" well, not much, in all honesty.
Still, let's hope against hope that, in 2022, we humans can figure out how to refocus on what matters and on the world we genuinely care to create for our children and grandchildren. It may seem unlikely after 12 months like this, but impossible it's not and that's a new year's wish worth having as 2021 finally comes to an end.
Copyright 2021 Tom Engelhardt
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