Do you know what, quite literally, keeps me up at night? It’s not just that we are likely to experience major climate change disaster by 2040, or sooner, if we don’t change our behavior radically.
It’s that it’s clear we simply WON’T do nearly enough, in part because the current US regime is targeting “environmental rules it sees as overly burdensome to the fossil fuel industry, including major Obama-era policies aimed at fighting climate change.”
Check out Harvard Law School’s Environmental Regulation Rollback Tracker, and Columbia Law School’s Climate Tracker.
Sure, other countries, which HAVEN’T pulled out of the Paris Accords, and many US states are fighting back against the destruction. Still, EPA Is Set to Roll Back Restrictions on Coal-Burning Power Plants? This “despite plummeting costs of cleaner fuels including natural gas and solar.”
We’re seeing the destruction already, in the loss of glacial ice, the devastating flooding around the globe, the 12-month fire season in California, and a bunch of other signs I imagine you can cite yourselves.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I think the symbolic nadir of American thought on the subject took place in February 2015 when Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) brought a snowball on US Senate floor as evidence the globe is not warming. As the Washington Post sarcastically noted, it SNOWED in the District of Columbia in WINTER.
In any case, he, as many do, conflated weather, what it’s doing at any given moment, with climate, which addresses the broader trends.
The five warmest years in the global record have all come in the 2010s
The 10 warmest years on record have all come since 1998
The 20 warmest years on record have all come since 1995
By 2040, I’ll be in my 80s. But my daughter will be in her 30s. You know, one is SUPPOSED to leave the country a BETTER place for one’s kids, and I – we – are FAILING miserably. Technological breakthroughs are supposed to make their lives better than ours, even as this regime looks to bring back the methodologies of the past.
(Written at 4:15 a.m. Even The Onion doesn’t bring a smile. Will I be more optimistic in the morning? Unlikely.)
When my bud Amy Biancolli 
