There's no need to focus on present-day outliers like those 120-degree spring temperatures in India and Pakistan or that 126-degree day in Iran, since ever more extreme weather of so many kinds will simply be life on Earth. In fact, sooner or later, we'll have to stop calling it extreme weather, wouldn't we? Increasingly, it will just be the weather. Period.
And here's perhaps the most unnerving thing of all: somehow, in this country, climate change has yet to become a significant part of the national debate or mainstream politics. It's not a subject Democrats seem capable of running successfully on yet. And that couldn't be stranger because, barring a nuclear war, it's our very own apocalyptic future right before our eyes, written not in the stars, but in the very world we're now living in. What could be more convincing? Except, for the fact that, explain it as you will, it isn't.
Yes, it was briefly part of Joe Biden's long-sunk Build Back Better bill (thank you, coal baron Joe Manchin!), but now it's simply gone. Worse yet, ever since Biden hit the White House, his foreign policy team has been focused on promoting a new cold war with China. Its goal: rallying allies and others against a rising China and further militarizing the relationship between the planet's two superpowers. I mean, you might think that the two greatest greenhouse-gas emitters of the present moment, China and the United States, would feel a natural urge to work together to change the energy structure of this planet. But no such luck. (In fact, when was the last time you even heard anything about John Kerry, the Biden administration's special presidential envoy for climate change?)
And then, of course, add in the war in Ukraine (thanks a heap, Vlad!), which is only fossil-fuelizing this planet yet more and putting off significant movement toward green and clean energy to an unknown future. In fact, in the absence of Russian natural gas and oil, some desperate European countries are even considering turning back to coal, the worst of the carbon-emitting energy sources! It seems self-evident that an end should be brokered to that war immediately and not just for the suffering Ukrainians in an increasingly rubble-strewn land, or the miserable Russian soldiers fighting the Vlad's war, but for the rest of us, for the planet itself.
The Greatest Disaster in Human History?
Excuse me a moment, but I'd like to scream!
Honestly, don't expect climate change to be much of an issue, if any at all, in the November election. And the six conservative justices of the Supreme Court, not going anywhere soon, are already working hard to ensure that no future American government will be capable of taking significant action to mitigate the effects of global warming.
In short, I'm talking about a planet I didn't even expect to be living on and one I certainly don't want to hand on to my children and grandchildren. What in the world did they do to deserve this?
And it couldn't be stranger that we just don't get it. Yes, there are lots of scientists and a certain number of young people who have fully grasped the problem and are trying their best to rise to meet it. But this country as a whole (no less the world), not a chance in" yes, I might as well say it yet again" hell.
Otherwise, we would be mobilizing now to deal with global warming the same way President Franklin Roosevelt mobilized us for World War II. For the truth is that, if we don't move so much faster than we are now, the climate, the weather, could indeed prove to be our World War III (and IV and V). If so, it will put the Russian president to shame. It will be, to use Kurt Vonnegut's old phrase for World War II, a "slaughterhouse" of a new sort. And yet, logical as it might seem, such a mobilization doesn't yet appear to be faintly in the cards and, worse still, if American politics follows its present course, it might not be in any imaginable future.
And yet, in the end, that simply can't be, can it? At some level, it's just so obvious and not very complicated either. We " and that means much of the planet, not just those of us here in the United States " need to mobilize not against each other for once, but against what's clearly becoming the greatest disaster in human history.
Stop and think about that for a moment. Given our history, that's saying something, isn't it?
And yet the men " and they were men " I labeled terrarists years ago because they, and the giant oil companies they ran, seemed so utterly intent on devastating the planet (something I called "terracide") for the most immediate profits and an all-too-high-flying life for themselves still seem to be in the saddle. Yes, in this century, Washington conducted a disastrous 20-year war against terrorism, but never, whether Republicans or Democrats were in office, against this planet's true terrarists.
As I wrote about them almost a decade ago,
"Those who run the giant energy corporations knew perfectly well what was going on and could, of course, have read about it in the papers like the rest of us. And what did they do? They put their money into funding think tanks, politicians, foundations, and activists intent on emphasizing 'doubts' about the science [of climate change] (since it couldn't actually be refuted); they and their allies energetically promoted what came to be known as climate denialism. Then they sent their agents and lobbyists and money into the political system to ensure that their plundering ways would not be interfered with. And in the meantime, they redoubled their efforts to get ever tougher and sometimes 'dirtier' energy out of the ground in ever tougher and dirtier ways."
And, in truth, all too little has changed to date, as the giant energy companies in the Ukraine moment prosper, while the price of oil and natural gas only soars and the rest of us continue to swelter.
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