What, Exactly, Are We Waiting For?
Seriously: WHAT?
Are you ready? Buckle up.
David Hom suffered from diabetes and felt nauseated before he went out to hang his laundry in 108-degree weather, another day in Arizona’s record-smashing, unrelenting July heat wave.
His family found the 73-year-old lying on the ground, his lower body burned. Hom died at the hospital, his core body temperature at 107 degrees.
The death certificates of more than 2,300 people who died in the United States last summer mention the effects of excessive heat, the highest number in 45 years of records, according to an Associated Press analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. With May already breaking heat records, 2024 could be even deadlier.
A monthslong heat wave across swathes of India has killed more than 100 people and led to over 40,000 suspected cases of heat stroke in the past three and a half months, according to data from India’s Health Ministry.
Between March 1 and June 18, 110 people in India died after suffering heat strokes…
NOAA National Weather Service forecasters at the Climate Prediction Center predict above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin this year. NOAA’s outlook for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which spans from June 1 to November 30, predicts an 85% chance of an above-normal season…
The terrifying predictions from NOAA’s sober, non-sensationalist scientists are here.
And how about wildfires?
Experts predict a more intense 2024 wildfire season than usual for the United States. As parts of Lahaina, Maui are still recovering from last year’s catastrophic fires and communities in parts of the U.S. are already inhaling smoke from Canadian wildfires, the urgency to understand and prepare for potential wildfire impacts has never been greater.
That’s from Forbes. They predictably do not use the word “climate” until the very last paragraph but, remarkably, they are reporting on the issue and do, eventually, say the words.
The reporting is out there. Death — by wildfires, heat, flash floods. Migrants are on the move where they can be, trying to flee excruciating conditions. Weather is becoming more and more dire. The hits keep coming: category 5 hurricanes, monster hail storms, heat domes, rain bombs… catastrophe after catastrophe is piling up.
In the US, you’d be hard pressed to learn from the MSM that much of this is in any way related to the changing climate — but it is. And if you have an iota of curiosity, and Google, you can easily find all of this out.
Yet while all of this - and SO MUCH MORE - is manifesting itself around the globe, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activities are rising and are higher than at any point in history. In 2023, the global average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 419.3 ppm: 50% higher than before the Industrial Revolution. The annual rate of increase is also about 100 times faster than previous natural increases.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activities are now higher than at any point in our history. In fact, recent data reveals that global CO2 emissions were 182 times higher in 2022 than they were in 1850, around the time the Industrial Revolution was underway.
As most clued in folks know by now, additional warming is “baked in” - if you’ll pardon the horrible pun - even in a scenario in which human greenhouse gas emissions stop tomorrow.
If we stop emitting today, it’s not the end of the story for global warming. There’s a delay in temperature increase as the climate catches up with all the carbon that’s in the atmosphere. After maybe 40 more years, the climate will stabilize at a temperature higher than what was normal for previous generations.
And… so… why am I asking what we’re waiting for? Are not we not already doomed? Should those of us alive today, who are living in the democratic first world and enjoying a relatively high standard of living, with perks like cars (to drive away from wildfires) and air conditioning (to escape the worst of the heat) not just keep on doing what we are doing - recycling if we feel the urge and maybe buying an EV eventually - and let the chips fall where they may?
Thanks for sharing, if you care to do so! :-)
I can think of a couple of reasons.
There are no fucking guarantees. You may think you are immune. You may think that “other things” are more important. But global warming seems to be, if not accelerating, at least moving in a much more terrifying direction than predicted a couple of decades ago, while wrecking more havoc than predicted, earlier than predicted. Is your homeowners fire insurance up to date? Is your flood insurance up to date? Are you sure you can keep cool, keep out of wild weather, keep away from raging flash floods and wildfires, 100% of the time? Are your parents in Florida or Arizona able to get out of the heat and humidity? Are you worried at all about what you might do in the event of widespread crop shortages? In the event of mass migration and public panic?
There is still time to slash emissions enough to keep warming to something like 7F (4C) rather than 11F (6C). Those numbers seem small, but the differences in climate would be extreme. The higher number would NOT be conducive to life as we know it right now. The lower number could be catastrophic, but the lower the number, the more likely we are to be able to mitigate - prepare - create solutions that could potentially save millions upon millions of lives. (Source.)
I’m genuinely dumbfounded that more people are not absolutely up in arms about this issue.
You’re up, Pew.
Climate change is a lower priority for Americans than other national issues. While a majority of adults view climate change as a major threat, it is a lower priority than issues such as strengthening the economy and reducing health care costs.
Overall, 37% of Americans say addressing climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress in 2023, and another 34% say it’s an important but lower priority. This ranks climate change 17th out of 21 national issues included in a Center survey from January.
So - what are we waiting for? Do the majority of Americans need additional convincing? More statistics? More grim reporting? Maybe a nice mass casualty event?!
What am I doing wrong? What are any of us who are attempting to communicate about the climate crisis doing wrong? What more do we need to say? What else do we need to do?
I’d crawl naked, backwards, over broken glass to change some minds and make some converts to this cause. I guarantee that is nothing that anyone would want to see, but I’d do it.
A tiny minority of people are out in the streets, striking, demonstrating, handcuffing themselves to fossil fuel corporate offices, gluing themselves to the street.
They are frequently met with contempt, decision, dismissive scoffing, and - more frighteningly now - jail sentences for damaging property and the like.
We’ve lost the fight against any change to the climate, and we’re teetering on the precipice of losing more than we can even imagine: life, property, ecosystems, ways of living, whole genera of magnificent fellow travelers.
But we can still make a change! We can still slow emissions and ensure a less totally catastrophic eventual result. We can still demand that our governments at least fucking TAKE CARE OF US. They can build cooling centers. Mount massive ad campaigns to make sure folks know the dangers of the heat. Harden infrastructure. Provide subsidies for people to move out of fire zones and away from flood plains. Instate financial props for insurance costs. Set up sensible rationing systems to ensure we use less fuel, eat less beef, consume less fast fashion, and the like.
SOMETHING CAN STILL BE DONE. But “we the people” have to actually want our government to do it.
Please tell me in the comments: how can I help?
Remember:
Asking did not work.
Voting did not work.
Marching did not work.
Emissions keep going up.
Our leaders have failed us.
Climate change is a symptom predicament of ecological overshoot. Overshoot is caused by technology use. Here's how we got here: https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2023/07/how-did-we-get-here.html
Kira -- I'm 100% on board with the climate revolution now. I'm talking about actual, full revolution with the goal of taking power. I'll try to keep this brief, but I know you checked out my substack and I am eager to build coalitions around these ideas
- We should be very specific and clear about what the goals of the climate revolution are, in a way that accounts for the reality of the economies upon which all our livelihoods depend. What is our dream climate policy? Because once the revolution gains power, we will be faced with a situation where it will have been "too late" many times over. We will need to urgently slam the breaks on the combustion of energy, and we need to do so in a way that preserves the ideals that will have driven our revolution: justice, antiracism, and antipoverty. Especially given the latter, we cannot simply shut down the economy. Rather, we need to be able to carefully manage the economy, to exert our power in specific ways that allows us to set a small carbon budget and allot it to only the most pressing and justice-informed causes: to make sure our hospitals never experience a blackout, to allow us to use concrete in order to build nuclear power plants, and globally, to make sure that everyone has access to electricity and to build equitable economies with big enough production bases to eliminate poverty (this is a big priority of mine). In order to achieve this, we will need complete authority to dictate who gets to burn fossil fuels and when. It's not enough to make them more expensive; that would only serve to re-empower the kleptocracy we will have just overthrown. That is why I propose to make fuel the first post-commodity: the first thing that was once bought and sold freely, but now can *only be sold by the government.* Sure, there will be a black market, but we will ruthlessly crack down on it. It will be illegal to sell a gallon of gas on the private market. The government will control the entire oil, coal, and methane industries, but this is more than nationalization of the companies; it's the People's control over the industries. This is why, without shame or irony, I call for Petrocommunism. I have a very large series of essays about how specifically I believe fuel fits into Marxism, but for now I have a sort of manifesto up:
https://thespouter.substack.com/p/the-solution-to-petrocapitalism-is
If the goal of our Climate Revolution is petrocommunism, it must be a socialist revolution and be in solidarity with the working people, which means we stop fucking around with "green capitalism." Climate change is the ultimate contradiction of capitalism: it is a problem that capitalism caused that it can never, ever fix. We need to push environmentalism away from the liberal defenders of capitalism and create a new petrocommunist ideology. We need to redo for petrocommunism the intellectual work that was done by Lenin for communism.
https://thespouter.substack.com/p/the-dialectics-of-liberal-environmentalism
In terms of the energy mix for our communist, postcarbon economy: we'll need a massive buildout of nuclear, which we would be able to do with existing natural resources. We need solutions that already work on a large scale, and that empower workers. We will continue to build out wind and solar as we can, but we need to keep in mind that the extraction of cobalt and other rare earths needs to be limited. Nuclear, with all its downsides, is really the only option. We will do it right, not cut corners, and avoid meltdowns as much as is possible, which should be %100.
Are you in? Or am I too "extreme"?