The Way Ahead
My Mama wrote a cinquain last night. It’s about climate change.
Unseen
Our way ahead
Flood, fire, great howling winds
Scour the prairie, felling our old
Bur oak
Last year was the hottest year on record. We just had the hottest August in the 175 years we’ve been keeping records. Ghastly wildfires are raging. Biblical flooding is ravaging Eastern Europe, forcing evacuations, killing folks who can’t get out in time, and grinding up bridges, cars, and buildings.
This is our old bur oak. It was a mature tree when my mother’s dad was a baby (he was born in 1898), so it’s unlikely that climate change was the culprit when, one day this spring, it toppled over - quite slowly and majestically - into the driveway.
But the changing climate has its fingerprints all over the other phenomena - the floods, the howling winds, the rain bombs and wildfires and punishing, pavement-melting heat.
It’s no mystery why the climate is changing: humans and their industrial processes have belched out greenhouse gasses sufficient to warm the oceans and atmosphere over 1.5C above the pre-industrial average. More heat = more energy in the atmosphere for storms. More heat = more drought. More heat = more deaths just from the heat. And so on.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know the rudimentary basics. It isn’t difficult science if I can understand the outlines. And it isn’t difficult to communicate what’s happening: just look outside! Or read the thermometer. Or look at the ne… oh, wait. No - don’t look at the news. Because the MSM (aka “legacy media”) would rather report on Justin Timberlake’s DUI or Donald Trump’s latest insane clown social media post than tell the truth about what is happening.
And the more the media lie by omission, by covering far less important “news” like celebrity gossip and every single Trump rally in every single Bug Tussle dump he drags his ass to, the more the “average American” will be able simply to ignore the changing climate, and be unable to identify its horrific and growing effects.
The way ahead is knowledge coupled with action.
Popular media covers climate change, but not nearly enough, or without continuing to squeeze in caveats and weasel words that allow many to think that the science isn’t proven, and it isn’t going to be that bad anyway.
And during this election season, while only one candidate for president in fact can state with clarity that climate change exists, both are calling for more oil and gas production! In fact, while Kamala Harris called out the “clean energy economy” during her epic debate with Donald Trump, she also pointed with pride to increases in fossil fuel energy production:
And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.
For a candidate for president to continue to boast about extracting fossil fuels is unsurprising… but it is also soul crushing. For the major news networks to continue failing to report on the realities of what is happening is also unsurprising - and also terribly disheartening.
Is it really still up to tiny voices like mine and my Mama’s to scream into the hurricane that it is now time to STOP drilling and start concentrating on ways to keep citizens safe from what is coming? Is it?
I guess it is.
The way ahead is for all of us to shout and scream and try to get the attention of the people who have the power to use government for good… and if they won’t listen…
#ClimateRevolution now.