I was in Boston last week when the massive heat wave struck. I was there to attend a Wordcamp, a gathering of people interested in WordPress. (WordPress powers forty percent of websites, including this one.) While the “camp” was great (in part because it was indoors), the heat outside was oppressive. Walking eight blocks or so to dinner from my hotel nearly gave me sunstroke.
For a while, I walked beside a homeless man with a shopping cart. Inside were his prized possessions, such as they were. They included two plastic jugs of water that he kept drinking from. He put on a happy face though amongst his profuse sweating. “Love the heat, love the heat”, he intoned, moving down the sidewalk.
It was probably 98 degrees. To me it, was about as brutal a heat as I could ever remember, which included one 104-degree day in Virginia’s humidity. It was perhaps made worse by all the asphalt and concrete around me. I eventually found the Jewish deli where I had dinner. The threat of heatstroke went away when the waitress poured me glass after glass of ice water.
The homeless man proved to be more resilient than I was, but he had no choice. I figure it would have killed me had I had to stay out in it all day. I felt woozy, sticky, terribly uncomfortable and sweaty beyond belief. I couldn’t fathom how people endured this kind of heat before air conditioning. The truth is though that most of the time they didn’t have to because it very rarely got so hot. What I was experiencing was climate change in action. It is only going to get worse.
I remember back to the 1970s when the Environmental Protection Agency was first established. By the end of the decade, the skies were largely clean and the rivers largely unpolluted. We felt like we had pollution under control. Climate change was not on anyone’s radar, except by maybe some outlier scientists. No wonder that when Ronald Reagan declared Morning in America again in the 1980s we were so enthusiastic. Off went the solar panels on top of the White House that dopey Jimmy (“cardigan sweater”) Carter had put up. We went back to getting our energy the old fashioned way, which at the time meant importing oil from mostly corrupt Middle East countries that we supported. We did manage to modestly increase fuel efficiency standards over the decades, but mostly we tuned out Al Gore’s warnings. Trump, of course, is doubling down on willful ignorance. And he’s hardly alone. In Brazil, their new Trump-like president Jair Bolsonaro declared open season on what’s left of the Amazon.
Addressing climate change is not entirely hopeless, but nearly so. With the exception of the United States, most developed countries agree there is a problem but most are taking half measures at best to address it. It doesn’t begin to realistically address the crisis. To realistically address the crisis, we all need to work together. Moreover, there is no short-term solution. It will require generations of work and carefully nurturing of our ecosystems. In the best case there will be much more massive deforestation, widespread species destruction, mass migrations and added misery and poverty. There’s a lot to be afraid of as the crisis worsens. Most people react to fear by building walls like the Supreme Court decided Trump could do on our southern border on Friday. Countries will try to have their cake and eat it too, which will make things worse for everyone.
Heat and misery then are now the new normal, but the effects of 108-degree records in cities like Paris recently are just beginning. It’s already pushing sea levels to rise but this will get much worse too. There are ten million people in Jakarta, Indonesia but most of it is expected to disappear under rising seas as it sits at just (or below) sea level. And it’s but one of the cities to be impacted the worst by climate change. Everything is changing, and none of it is changing for the better because of climate change.
So I was feeling sick not just from the heat, but because of the legacy I am leaving to my daughter’s generation and all future generations. They may expect that their lives will closely resemble the lives they were born into, but that’s largely not going to be the case. Their lives are likely to be shorter, more miserable and with a lower standard of living than their parents’.
But it’s not just future generations but also my generation too. At least financially I am the exception, but I see plenty of people in my generation that are living precarious lives largely unknown by their parents. I learned this week that my friend from childhood, Tom, is working at a distribution center. He’s just another Amazon droid in a poorly air conditioned warehouse shoving things into bins for distant customers for a little over $15.00/hour. Tom is an extremely talented advertising professional, but at age 61 he simply can’t find much beyond spot work for doing what he does best and most profitably. He’s been aged out and his industry favors the young. So while you sleep, Tom is shuffling things into bins for a fraction of what he’s worth. The only good part for Tom is that Amazon was shamed into raising wages to $15.00/hour. Also, because he works nights he gets a small bonus. Tom is hardly alone. Maybe $15.00/hour is a living wage, but not for a man with a mortgage, a wife, and two kids, one of who is going through a gender transition.
I feel sick for Tom not to mention his friend Jeff who is in a similar situation, and that the economy is failing millions like them. I feel sick for that homeless man too. Being retired and comfortable financially, I spend a fair amount of my leisure trying to rectify the mess my generation has made, such as helping to create a community network. But it’s not nearly enough. The problem is so massive it looks hopeless. I know that fear is a very strong motivator. But since most of us are short-term thinkers, our fear will be used against us to make our lives even more miserable. Malicious idiots seem to be in charge everywhere, and most of us are stupid enough to keep allowing them to do so.
No wonder that I feel sick. I have a feeling though that this is a condition I will never recover from. Neither will you.
The post I’m feeling sick and you should too appeared first on Occam's Razor.
