Recently, climate writer Tad DeLay, in the CGTN YouTube “The Heat: Extreme Weather,” said at 13:29 on the timeline, “Carbon dioxide is the temperature knob, and it is also the mass extinction knob. And we need to ask ourselves why we are not able to stop the progress of this storm, and in my book I wager that it has something to do with the fact that on paper fossil fuel reserves currenty are worth a little over 250 trillion dollars. They also power 4/5 of our energy, right, such that turning them off would collapse us into a depression [ . . . ] so we are hooked on a particular relationship that we do not seem to have the material or ideological repertoire to extricate ourselves from.” I like DeLay’s specificity and clarity. It was interesting that his truth-telling came from CGTN “owned by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party”; was endorsed by professor/activist Andreas Malm who wrote that DeLay’s book is “a leap forward in the study of denial,” and that Delay, according to Google Books, was “a PhD student of philosophy of religion at Claremont Graduate University and holds an MA in theology and Biblical studies from Fuller Theological Seminary.” DeLay’s Website is here.
It may have been Aristotle who wrote, “The truth is often found where widely divergent views are freely aired.”
Similarly, the CGTN YouTube “The Heat: Extreme Weather,” anchored by Anand Naidoo, winner of a George Peabody award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina, featured Mansour Almazroui, a climate researcher and professor at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, and member of The Shura Council. Naidoo asked him, “And you’ve had a tragedy in Saudi Arabia over the past few weeks. At least 1,300 people have died, and this was climate-related, it was weather-related. They died during this year’s Muslim Pilgrimage, in Saudi Arabia, known as The Hajj, and we saw temperatures in Mecca and other sacred sites there range between 46 and 49 degrees Celsius. [46 C = 114.8 F, and 49 C = 120.2 F] What can you tell us about what happened?”
Almazroui answered, “[ . . . . ] actually the problem is some [Hajj pilgrims] are not legal. They go by themselves, and they walk in the street by all, and 83 percent of them died in the road by heat stroke. [ . . . . ] It’s not only the heat. Actually, there is humidity [ . . . . ]” He added they didn’t have reserved “camping” spots to escape the heat.
Naidoo asked, “We are also hearing from the American Meteorological Society that Saudi Arabia is actually a global hotspot when it comes to temperature increases, and it is experiencing one of the fastest rates of temperature increases on the planet. What’s causing this?”
Almazroui answered, “The big problem that we are having [ . . . ] this warming is related to the global carbon dioxide, I mean greenhouse gases. The problem is that whatever we do, these events are going to continue in the future [ . . . . ] Temperature by 2050 [is going to be] every day in summer above 50 degrees [C] [which equals 122 F]. This is really huge. [ . . . . ] Rainfall south of the Arabian Peninsula [is projected to] increase by 30% [resulting in ‘dangerous’ floods]. And you have to have adaptation and strategy for resilience.”
My favorite recent climate item is the July 6, 2024 YouTube “TV documentary on collapse readiness” about former academic Jem Bendell in which he said at 27:19, “We’ve done so much damage to the biosphere, and changed the climate so much already, that we’ve got a catastrophe ahead. [ . . . . ] This is like really painful when you really look at it, and that means that young people today are going to have a terrible time. It means that you and I in a few years time may be having a much more scary life than we do right now. Taking that onboard freed me from conforming to what society wanted from me, freed me from the idea I need to be successful in academia, or in the UN, or in all the other jobs I’ve had. I couldn’t give a shit about that anymore, and [that feeling is] great. [ . . . . ] So when I started to doubt everything I was doing then that wasn’t just a doubt about Maybe I should change jobs. It was going much deeper than that, making me question everything, and how would I have self-respect?”
I also like how the above video included the wise climate elder Joanna Macy. She said at 39:12, “I don’t believe we’re coming from anywhere else [but Earth]. We weren’t manufactured. So, you see what’s falling apart is a demented system. It is a political economic system of the industrial growth society. They are commodifying our Mother. They are breaking her up, and devouring that. [ . . . . ] This needs to come apart. [ . . . . ] How can we love this world as this demented and destructive political economy dies? We go into a system, what we call in systems thinking ‘positive disintegration,’ so that the soft sensitive skin and fingertips, so that the vulnerable parts, eyes, and lips, and ears, can grow, so that we can grow in connection. It’s only to connect. We grow and learn in connection, and the industrial growth society forgot about that because you can’t build connection in a factory.”
In closing, it seems strange I must go to the U. S.’s main economic and ideological competitor China to get the “250 Trillion Dollar” point online from U. S. assistant professor and climate writer Tad DeLay. At the end of my September 11, 2019 post, I included a quote from Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders in the free 29-minute film Earthrise, “When I hear people chanting that we ought to go on to Mars, I’m thinking [. . . .] why don’t we get our act together here on Earth first, and go to Mars as human beings, not as jingoistic Americans or Chinese or Russians or Indians. Let’s just do it as human beings.” In that post I added, “To do otherwise risks war and decreases our chance for survival.”
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