Bill's Focus

This is it – Planet B is not ready for us yet

No doubt, our moods have been highly elevated over the last two weeks. Mine is! The entire political landscape has shifted dramatically. VP Harris and Democrats are experiencing a serious enthusiasm bounce. Wow, what a difference.

Polling has shifted quickly. Trump and “Team Fascism” are squirming and scrambling. Trump has actually attacked the mixed race identity of his opponent. The more Vance speaks about childless cat ladies, the worse it gets for the party of Project 2025. As the momentum for Harris grows exponentially, the party of hate will continue to implode. Good.

But now that it appears that the country could return to some form of national sanity, by default, I return to the only subject that really matters – the Climate Catastrophe.

My wise sister asked in a recent phone chat: “Why aren’t we spending most of our time on the dangers of a warming planet? Every subject that politicians are arguing about now will hold little importance if we don’t have a habitable planet to live on. What’s wrong with with these people?”

Vermont is drowning. The West is burning up. The ocean is our greatest single source of protein. We still dump trash and garbage into it. Micro plastics are in our food chain. Coral reefs are dying from the effects of higher temperatures and acidification. Mangroves are being ripped away from shorelines by “100 year storms” that happen every year. These are the nurseries where our fish are born and shelter.

Please read the following from
Georgia Warren
Editorial director, membership of the Guardian

“While we were all consumed by the eye-popping political events of the past few weeks, I wonder how many of us clocked that we lived through the hottest recorded day on Earth. As you read this, more than a hundred wildfires are burning through the US west, Vermont is dealing with the aftermath of “apocalyptic” flooding, and ERs across the country are overwhelmed with people suffering the effects of extreme heat.

The climate crisis is the most urgent story of our time, and yet it rarely tops the day’s news agenda. So, in case you missed it, I wanted to draw your attention to a groundbreaking investigation by our environment team, which revealed last week that the US and other wealthy countries are leading a global surge in new oil and gas exploration in 2024 – in spite of commitments to lead the transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources.

As my colleague Oliver Millman reported (‘This used to be a beautiful place’: how the US became the world’s biggest fossil fuel state): “No country in history has extracted as much oil as the US has in each of the past six years. US gas production also tops the global charts, having surged 50% in the past decade.”

Our rapid ascension to the world’s top fossil fuel producer has flown largely under the radar. “I bet if you asked 10 people in the US which country was the world’s biggest oil producer, most would say Saudi Arabia,” David Dismukes, an energy expert at Louisiana State University told our reporters. “That narrative is so imprinted now. I’m not sure many would even mention the US.”

Despite the Democratic party’s championing of its measures to curb climate disaster, especially the Inflation Reduction Act, domestic oil and gas production has soared under the Biden administration. As Guardian senior climate justice reporter Nina Lakhani told me: “When you look at the past four years, oil and gas production is higher than under any other president in the past 30. Joe Biden has been the fossil fuel producer-in-chief.”

The day after we published our investigation, secretary general of the UN António Guterres cited our work in a speech in New York. “I must call out the flood of fossil fuel expansion we are seeing in some of the world’s wealthiest countries,” Guterres said. “The leadership of those with the greatest capabilities and capacities is essential. Countries must phase out fossil fuels – fast and fairly.”

To be fair, the momentum of this race for global fossil fuel extraction began long before President Biden took office. And there are huge geopolitical advantages to being energy independent.

And none of this diminishes the fact that under President Joe Biden, more efforts and more resources have been thrown at shifting to sustainable sources of energy than during any previous administration. We should be proud of this direction. But it is just a small beginning.

It feels to me as if our mental TVs are permanently tuned into a terrible soap opera. How petty all this election horse race nonsense seems to me when we ought to be talking about sea levels rising four feet in Florida in the next 50 years. Shouldn’t we be planning how to conduct a strategic withdrawal from cities and regions that are already flooding? Nope. Let’s just hand this one off to our grandchildren.

Instead…let’s worry about whether that bullet really grazed his ear or whether childless cat ladies have a stake in their future.

There is a classic dark comedy film called “Idiocracy”. It’s a film about a future world full of self indulgent idiots. The “smart educated people” are not having kids – “why bring them into a world like this?” Upon reflection, not only was it prescient…it was perhaps an understatement compared to 2024.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-08/documents/climate-change-fl.pdf

https://www.bobvila.com/articles/places-with-uninsurable-homes-flooding/