BOSTON – Many older environmentalists, myself included, have been trying to warn our fellow human beings about the danger of global warming since the 1980s.
Back then, there were fewer signs that what the vast majority of climate scientists were already saying about the then-looming crisis would come true.
Over the years, we’d be more likely than people around us to worry about summers getting hotter than they had been in our childhood. Or storms getting more intense. Or getting less rain where there used to be more and more rain where there used to be less. And so on. But the real dangers were still in the future and many people have trouble processing dangers that are not in the present, we understood.
And we did what we could for 40 years.
And it wasn’t enough.
And now global warming is definitely here. And it’s gotten so bad so fast that this week many of us on the East Coast were treated to two major manifestations of the climate crisis that is upon us like a wolf burying its fangs in our collective neck: Another of the increasingly frequent “heat domes” that translate to increasingly horrendous heatwaves plus terrible smoke from wildfires in Ontario.
And the smoke was so bad that it actually mitigated the heat wave. Something so messed up that few of us who aren’t, say, trained geophysicists have ever conceived that such a thing could happen outside of a major volcanic eruption in our hemisphere … like the big one in Iceland in 2010.
So where do we go from here? Well, things aren’t looking good.
We have a Republican administration, working more directly for the fossil fuel industry and other related destructive and antiquated industries than any other to date, that seems determined to do as much damage to the planet as it possibly can while in power. We have a Democratic Party that is better on global warming, but not that much better, hoping to retake the federal government. We have other political forces more committed to bringing the “drill baby drill, burn baby burn” crowds to heel—like the Green Party and Democratic Socialists of America. But they remain very small relative to the population (outside of DSA’s impressive base in New York City thus far) and hemmed in on every side by the major parties. And most of the largest environmental organizations have simply run out of steam.
Major advances in several areas of science and technology are likely sufficient to allow humanity to at least blunt the worst effects of global warming. And some countries are funding such research and working to meet self-imposed climate targets. But most are not, least of all the United States. Which “is the second-highest climate polluting country, responsible for around 12% of global emissions,” according to Yale Climate Connections. The highest being China, a nation that is also doing much more to remediate global warming than the US. Nor is the best science useful if it’s not deployed. Even as the pollution responsible for warming continues to get worse year by year.
Do I know some magic path out of this morass? No. But I will tell you this: Everyone needs to consider spending at least some time every year doing what they can to improve the climate or soon this week’s convergence of bad global warming outcomes will be unstoppable.
Just like all of us environmentalists have been saying all along. In the public interest. Not for personal gain. Unlike what the climate scofflaws profiting from the destruction of human civilization have all-too-successfully propagandized far too many Americans into believing.
Mull that over while you wait for the smoke to clear and heat to subside … until the next “smokewave” and the next heatwave.
And the next and the next and the next and the next …
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. If you want to see more reporting like this, sign up for BINJ’s free weekly newsletter at binj.news/signup.
