COLDEST JUNE DAY IN MEMORY
Out my front window cold gray haze to the horizon.
It's the coldest June in Pacifica since I moved here in 1993. Somehow we are in a strange chilly stretch that rivals full-on winter. A marine layer consisting of gray overcast and light on-shore winds are normal for summer here - but not so damn cold. This morning my thermometer registered 59F inside and 51F outside (with 51F w/ high humidity makes it seem much colder).
And what a day for bad news on the Climate Crisis front. As we push into summer all sorts of things are happening that are not good.
- The forests of Canada continue to burn like never before – see map. Air quality in Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh is classified as Very Unhealthy.
A heat wave almost to the “wet bulb” stage (over100F w/ high humidity) encompasses the American Southeast (MAGA-land packed w/ climate deniers).
Dead sea lions and porpoises are washing up on California beaches.
Freak weather soaks Australian outback, dumping months of rain in two days.
As we descend deeper into this critical decade in which either we start to meaningfully address this crisis or pass the point of no return, it doesn't look good. Yes, things are being done and some on a large scale. And technological breakthroughs that would help are being made and if implemented at the scale required could make a difference. But the climate globally keeps getting fucking hotter (even if Pacifica is having an especially cold summer). Keep in mind that if we reversed the warming today it would require decades to make any difference.
It seems with all this outpouring of grim news on the state of the global ecological situation there would be more of an uprising from the peasants, more pitchforks and burning effegys.
But the population for the most part is constantly being distracted by more immediate material concerns either serious of facile. This while the powers that be, our leaders, continue to engage
in their age-old habits of geopolitical gamesmanship and
imperialistic rivalry including (yes again) another arms race. And it doesn't help when one superpower's entire economy dependent on arms production.
Interconnected wirth international power games there is the immediate need to maintain the always precarious global economy at the nation state level.
And with much of the world's population's lower classes still mired in a near survival mode, while the middle classes in both older and newly industrialized countries remain involved in competitive conspicuous consumption goaded on by Fortune 500 corporate advertising. The basic problems is capitalist economies must either grow, or they stop and everyone suffers. But if they grow they must continue to consume a finite amount of now precious natural resources – and in the process produce prodigious amounts of toxic waste. If these tenuous market driven economies stop growing, they stall and/or contract. If that happens a dreaded recession occurs laying off lower and middle class workers right and left, stranding many without any means to maintain their former situational status.
So even leaders, aware of the damaging effects of continued growth on a now overheating biosphere, must first survive politically by feeding the beast so as to keeping their respective economies perking right along, that is growing. This regardless of the increasing well document evidence of the deleterious and eventually cataclysmic effects of a rapidly heating planet. And to make matters worse a parasitic billionaire class has a disproportionate influence over said leaders either of the autocratic variety (also themselves billionaires) or the (merely wealthy) democratic variety. So world leaders locally, nationally, globally continue to dilly and dally as the weather gets ever weirder. Their first concern must always be their own political survival.
And in the US you have an entire political persuasion (the GOP) with their own opportunistic and demagogic political leaders who have convinced itself that all of these “environmental issues” especially the so-called Climate Crisis is nothing but a 'hobby horse of the Left'. Only when panic sets in like skyrocketing food prices will a crisis mentality sets in and will these leaders on the US Right react and whole wholeheartedly suddenly embrace hare brained and dangerous geoengineering quick fixes.
We are indeed in a bind. We are prisoners to our tribal inclinations writ large as nation states. No powerful nation state will allow any international entity to take anything close to full command no matter how enlightened that a global entitie's leadership might be. The nation state remains a primitive embodiment of an ancient tribal past with its superannuated quest for imperialistic dominance now re-framed as 'hegemony'. Leaders may pretend to have higher more holistic aspirations than raw dominance but their need to justify themselves and their nation state and its population (with its nationalism) always finally prevails. Hence the weakness of United Nations as a global institution in confronting this world historical crisis of ongoing inexorable damage to the biosphere that we as a species evolved in.
