As New York is submerged under a blanket of smoke from devastating fires on the west coast, David Turnbull proceeds to direct his Twitter followers to Emma Marris’ Sept. 10, 2020 article in The Atlantic The West Has Never Felt So Small.
Some excerpts:
The West is on fire and there’s nowhere to run. Up and down Interstate 5, the artery connecting most of the major cities on the West Coast, a pall of thick smoke has turned the sun red. Millions of acres have burned. I’m calling and texting friends in communities across Oregon, Washington, California. A friend who lives in the Medford area of Oregon, where hundreds of homes have been destroyed, has evacuated; another lost her childhood home. Later today, another friend living in the path of uncontrolled flames is bringing some of her paintings to my house to keep them safe. My brother Alex, a sign installer in Seattle, is wearing a particulate respirator while he works in nearly 90-degree heat, but since it has an unfiltered exhalation valve, he has to switch to a cloth mask to interact with clients. He says that when he’s switching the masks out, he can feel the grit in his throat as he breathes in. The claustrophobia of this—of fire turning the entire West Coast dim with smoke, on top of the fear, isolation, and long-term lockdown imposed by the pandemic—is almost too much to bear.
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And yet it didn’t have to be this way. Fossil-fuel executives and their favorite politicians knew that their products were going to create the heat and the drought that set the stage for these fires. Their own scientists told them so. They could have guessed that poor folks without air-conditioning and modern tight-sealing windows and desk jobs were going to choke on the ashes. They just didn’t care. And Donald Trump knew that the coronavirus was going to kill Americans, but he “wanted to always play it down” to protect the stock market and his own reelection campaign.
Just three years ago, the IPCC released its 2018 report, highlighting the immediacy of the need for action on cutting carbon emissions and identifying the 2020s as ‘the decade’ in which nations needed to begin the challenge of cutting emissions “well before 2030.” Projections for what we needed to do to preserve our place on the planet shifted from a 2100 timeframe to a 2050 timeframe. That’s fifty years we could ill afford to lose, particularly right now when it appears as if we’ve perhaps fallen irreparably behind.
"It is honestly surreal to see your projections manifesting themselves in real-time, with all the suffering that accompanies them. It is heartbreaking," said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe.
For 26 years now, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has met to address the peril; they have come up with protocols, drafted documents, held plenaries, ratified agreements. The ‘parties’ (‘the nations’) have sent their negotiators who have regularly come to the table first and foremost to advance their nation’s political and financial needs. All of this, the travel, the logistics, the national security threats, yet the UNFCCC member states remain woefully unprepared to address the climate crisis. (The politics were obvious in Paris, when Secretary of State John Kerry scurried about to substitute the word ‘should’ for ‘shall’ in the Paris Agreement to ensure it would be acceptable to Republicans back home.)
It’s difficult right now we still have enough time to succeed even if we accomplish the sugggestion from Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for our Climate and Energy Program and coauthor of the 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II:
If the world started reducing emissions now, there would be more time to reach the 1. 5°C limit. That would make it more likely we could implement measures to reach net zero emissions no later than 2050 and then begin to remove more carbon than the amount we emit from that point going forward. We’re talking about net negative emissions. That’s a tall order. Ask a Scientist: 2030 or Bust? What is the Importance of the Year 2030 Climatewise?
UCS asks “what do nations around the world need to do—especially the United States and other countries that are primarily responsible for climate change?”
They have identified five UCS five interconnected steps (abbreviated below)
First, motors, appliances, infrastructure, industrial processes and all modes of transportation have to become more efficient. ..
Second, we need to “decarbonize” electricity generation by transitioning from coal and natural gas to low- and no-carbon sources, especially wind, solar, and geothermal...
Third, we have to “electrify” just about everything...
Fourth, we will have to suck carbon out of the atmosphere naturally—by planting trillions of trees, for example—and with technology...
Finally, we will have to dramatically reduce methane and other planet-warming gases besides carbon dioxide...
Is it already too late? Have we passed the tipping point? Is it possible that things might get better, that we might get some breathing room before the next onslaught?