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Oceans are warming 40 percent faster than the United Nations predicted just five years ago.
Greta looked, people were gossiping about celebrities, taking pictures of themselves imitating celebrities, buying new cars and new clothes they didn’t need—as if they had all the time in the world to douse the flames.
“Why,” Greta wondered, “should we be studying for a future that soon may be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? And what is the point of learning facts in the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society.”
“I don’t want your hope . . . I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”
disinformation, obfuscation, and straight-up lies about the reality of global warming.
we’re online shopping and willfully turning our minds into Swiss cheese by scrolling through Twitter or Instagram. Or else we’re binge-watching Netflix shows about the zombie apocalypse that turn our terrors into entertainment,
while tacitly confirming that the future ends in collapse anyway, so why bother trying to stop the inevitable? It also might explain the way serious people can simultaneously grasp how close we are to an irreversible tipping point and still regard the only people who are calling for this to be treated as an emergency as unserious and unrealistic.
collapse of certain species of Pacific salmon that hold entire magnificent ecosystems on their backs.
Australia, despite its wealth, insists on massively expanding coal production in the teeth of the climate crisis; Canada has done the same with the Alberta tar sands; the United States has done the same with Bakken oil, fracked gas, and deepwater drilling, becoming the world’s largest oil exporter; the United Kingdom has attempted to ram through fracking operations despite fierce opposition and evidence linking it to earthquakes.
Within days of its most dramatic actions in April 2019, Wales and Scotland both declared a state of “climate emergency,” and the British Parliament, under pressure from opposition parties, quickly followed suit.
Norway’s government has announced plans to prohibit the sale of cars with internal combustion engines by 2025, a move that will certainly accelerate a shift to electric vehicles if its aggressive targets spread to other countries.
We need beautifully designed, racially integrated, zero-carbon urban housing, built with democratic input from communities of color—rather than the sprawling white suburbs and racially segregated urban housing projects of the postwar period.
