Recently, I saw a man with a bright yellow raincoat fishing a clear river. On rivers where I regularly catch low-water steelhead trout, he could go daily for 50 years, and never hook one. The reason is that bright yellow raincoat tells fish, “BEWARE! I AM HERE TO EAT YOU!” If the angler is not humble enough to ask a local for help, he may never know.
Trusting poltical leaders in developed nations to solve the climate emergency in a timely manner is like wearing that yellow raincoat fishing. As others have noted, this strategy hasn’t worked since the first Conference of the Parties (COP) was held nearly 30 years ago 1995 in Berlin, Germany. Currently, not a single nation on Earth is “1.5°C PARIS AGREEMENT COMPATIBLE” according to Climate Action Tracker. I quoted their coordinator Bill Hare in my December 14, 2019 post about COP 25 in Madrid, Spain, “I’ve seen more tears at this COP than I’ve ever seen in the previous 24 COPS. This is the crying COP. We’re having people coming from small island states whose islands are going under absolutely devastated, almost panicking about the state of the threat they face. [. . . .] The Great Barrier Reef [. . .] on the west coast [. . .] and north [is] going under from coral bleaching. We’re seeing enormous problems happening with biodiversity. We have 400 kilometers of dead mangroves of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The scientists in my community are saying we’re beginning to see ecosystem collapse.” COP26, COP27, COP28 were similar disasters. Do you think COP29 November 11-24, 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan, or COP30, 2025, in Belém do Pará, Brazil near the Amazon forest, will take appropriate and timely action?
More recently, Maya Goodfellow interviewed Tad DeLay in The Guardian June 20, 2024, about his new book Future of Denial. Goodfellow noted DeLay used “psychoanalysis to explain the mechanisms behind [climate] denial.” DeLay said humanity “cannot stop the progress of the storm. This is too big, there is not a person on Earth who has the agency to stop this individually, it’s not even clear to me that anybody has much agency to stop this collectively … we might just be at the mercy of market logics where falling renewable prices eventually convert us over. At least that’s the hope, right, evidence is still kind of wanting.”
Instead of waiting for “falling renewable prices,” I like my idea from a March 31, 2019 post “to require by international law fossil fuel emissions in all countries be immediately colored purple the same way rotten egg scent is added to natural gas to alert homeowners to danger of leaks. This way people can see what humans are doing in local real time to build social, political, economic, and legal will necessary to reduce emissions and preserve a livable planet. The truth would no longer be silenced in some areas, with building catastrophic events in others, because it would be in everyone’s face every second of every day. [ par break] The less purple the sky gets, the closer humans will be to preserving a livable planet for all species. To increase albedo, make it a nearly white purple.”
Don’t want to make the sky purple? My December 14, 2023 post suggested, “incentivize ‘Saudi Arabia and allies’ with huge economic and social benefits to get a fossil fuel phase-out approved [ . . . . ].”
Can’t support that?
Then, as I noted in my May 15, 2024 post, “I’ll Make It Simple,”:
- Move to where you can better protect your family;
- Help the people and ecosystem there;
- “Find some way to make joy no matter what.”
The metaphor for the COP issue is a huge rowboat in a river trying to cross before going over the falls, which in this case, means loss of functioning socities. In my July 9, 2016 post Jason Box, Greenland ice climatologist and professor at The Geologic Survey of Denmark, gave me permission to include his comment that out of the ten possible scenarios on climate change, nine result in loss of society as we know it.
In my metaphor, 198 rowers (parties) must work in unison because, as my December 14, 2023 post noted, “If 197 parties say yes, and one says no, that means no deal.” Some rowers hate each other, and are at war. It matters less that the boat is going over the falls soon than the chance to kill enemies. Other rowers are bored, uninformed, distracted, or making huge amounts of money selling drugs (fossil fuels) to most other rowers. Rowers’ children clearly see and voice the insanity but lack enough political power and money to help. It would be great to leave the boat, but this is not an option for most, maybe for none eventually. This reminds me of Oregon poet William Stafford’s “Maybe” from his book A Glass Face in the Rain,: “What could they have done?/They could have tried harder./They could have become meaner./ [ . . . . ] The explorer turns over a stone./Maybe those who sang/were the lucky ones.”
My favorite recent climate item is Anna Pivovarchuk’s June 16, 2024, AlJAZEERA article, “‘Scared as hell’: Climate scientists risk jobs, jail to save dying planet.” Her article includes a quote from scientist Rose Abramoff, “fired from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee [for climate activism]” and now a research fellow “at the Ronin Institute and is completing a residency at the Sitka Center of Art and Ecology in Oregon.” Abramoff said, “I remember feeling the enormity of all of the Earth systems that were already being affected by climate change and how little time we had to avert more catastrophic effects.”
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