by Donna on July 23, 2022 8:52 am
I just read that 2,000 people in Spain and Portugal alone have died from the heat wave in Europe. I think the worldwide death toll from recent and current heat waves could hit 10,000.
Climate scientists have been warning us about an increase in deadly heat waves, which is playing out as I type.
From If This Isn't a Climate Emergency, What Is?
Evan Osnos / The New Yorker
A warning label of some kind—“DISPIRITING CONTENT,” perhaps—feels appropriate for several other moments this week, each a political grotesque that captures a facet of the paralyzed climate politics in 2022. On Twitter, a popular home-edited clip starts with a scene from the film “Don’t Look Up”—a dark farce about a meteor plunging to Earth—in which a scientist appearing on a morning television show interrupts the blather and declares, “We’re trying to tell you that the entire planet is about to be destroyed.” The host recoils, then says, “We just keep the bad news light.”...
In the span of less than a month, the political prospects in Washington for substantive progress on the climate threat have evaporated. On June 30th, the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling in West Virginia v. E.P.A. curtailed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions, thwarting Biden’s ambitious plans to tackle climate change, and presaging what may be further decisions by the Court that could limit considerations of climate change in pipeline construction and undermine efforts to regulate tailpipe emissions.
Then, last week, Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, all but killed the Administration’s hopes for legislative progress on domestic issues, by teaming up with all fifty Republicans in the Senate to block a bill that would have included America’s most far-reaching response to climate change...
[Joe Manchin] has long been one of the Senate’s top recipients of campaign cash from the oil and gas industries; in the most recent quarter, even as he was negotiating climate-change measures, he accepted donations from executives at a long list of energy companies, including Georgia Power, Dominion Energy, Concord Energy, Southern Company Gas, Harvest Midstream, and the Alaska Oil & Gas Association. Not incidentally, his critics note, he is also a personal beneficiary of fossil-fuel-related investments, including from a coal brokerage that last year earned him five hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars—more than triple his hundred-and-seventy-four-thousand-dollar annual Senate salary.
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If human beings were sufficiently evolved, we would have built a needs-based civilization, not a profits-based one. That failure alone may cost us our civilization.
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