In Case You Haven’t Been Watching the News
Just as climate scientists have predicted for the last 35 years, air pollution from burning fossil fuels has increased the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. In fact, these increases have been even more rapid than scientists predicted.
If you don’t acknowledge these facts now, you soon will. In the meantime, go jump in a lake. This shit isn’t debatable. It never was.
The only reason it appeared so was because of a decades-long, multi-million dollar campaign of disinformation run by oil companies. This is a crime of global scale because the inaction it engendered has caused enormous death and suffering around the world, and more importantly will cause countless deaths and the end of world civilization in the next 50 years, give or take.
I am not exaggerating. Human health and social prosperity depend upon a stable climate within a narrow range of temperatures. Humanity has flourished over the last 10,000 years due to just such a stable climate.
Those days are now gone.
Let Me Spell It Out
The harbinger of our new climate was unprecedented drought. Many regions around the world have been enduring a decade or more of drought. These are slow disasters that go under-reported.
Paradoxically, the second early signal was flooding. The planet’s warmer air holds more moisture, and warmer oceans generate larger storms. Coastal areas are experiencing more and larger hurricanes and cyclones. Inland areas are experiencing extreme rain events that dump a month’s worth of rain in a day or two.
The third and fourth signs are getting noticed this summer, forest fires and heat waves. Higher temperatures have dried forests and grasslands such that wildfires have increased around the world. Smoke from the fires can travel far. This year, major U.S. cities like New York and Chicago have experienced blankets of choking smoke and the dimmed, orange, midday skies that areas of BC, Alberta, Northern Ontario and Quebec have been coping with at different times over the last ten years.
In 2021, a heat wave in BC consisting of temperatures of 42°C and higher for over a week killed almost 600 people, most elderly and poor. Similar heat waves have beset Europe in the last 5 years with similar numbers of deaths. This summer the heat has settled over the southern United States. Phoenix, Arizona has experienced 26 consecutive days over 43°C. Several people who’ve fallen while outside there, have received third degree burns from contacting the ground.
This Is Just the Beginning
Stage two of the climate crisis is starting. Extreme heat events will soon start taking down whole cities. At first just poorer neighbourhoods will be hit. Those without air conditioning will die in large numbers. Later, when power grids fail, the rich and poor will perish together. Solar panels will save some, but the world will be shocked when such an event kills hundreds of thousands of people in one area over the course of a few days.
Stage two will include famine, again in poorer countries first. Extreme heat and drought will cause crop failure. As people flee uninhabitable zones, international borders will close. Wars over food, water, and territory will follow.
The final stage of the climate crisis will be the dissolution of the current international order. The world will atomize into tiny city states. Warlords will control the social deserts and literal deserts between the fortified cities.
Cognitive Dissonance and the F-Word
We’re on the way there already. The public’s faith in politics and institutions is at an all time low. People aren’t dumb. Behind the facade of climate change denial that we all participate in, exists a subconscious recognition of the deep shit we’re all in. I believe it’s making us all crazy, which only exacerbates the crisis. Exacerbates the worst in us, as we run ever faster on whatever hamster wheel we’re accustomed to.
The rich accelerate their accumulation of wealth, thinking that their money will somehow help them when the shit hits the fan. Dreams of private armies and domed cities dance in their heads. Politicians become even more Machiavellian in their pursuit of power. The downtrodden become even more suspicious of power and fall prey to ever wilder disinformation campaigns. The doughy middle of the bell curve, those of us largely content with the status quo, also lose faith and don’t know who to believe. Never that political in the first place, they become downright apolitical. In short, the body politic slides right, hard into fascism.
Again, I do not exaggerate. Extreme right wing governments are ascendant around the world. When they gain power they dismantle democratic safe guards. Strongman leaders abound. Trump, Putin, Orban, Bolsonaro to name but a few.
How Did We Get Here?
All this because a few large corporations wished to squeeze every last dollar from their operations, because governments everywhere allowed themselves to be captured by these vested interests, and because human beings lack the ability to appreciate future threats especially those that lack the characteristics of a tribal enemy.
This summary was written in 2023. It is not novel. The facts it contains have been understood for decades. In 1989, I heard Dr. David Suzuki talk about the dangers of global warming on CBC radio. In 1990, I joined an activist group and with ten others (Gavin Davidson, Richard Campbell, Grant Watson, Volker Bodegom, Marilyn Pollard, Su’zan Cook, Guy Wera, Malcolm DeMynn, Alison Davis, and Ann Aram) founded a tiny non-profit society we named Better Environmentally Sound Transportation. We made one of our key goals reducing the number of trips taken by car in the Lower Mainland by 50% by the year 2000. We did not achieve that goal.
However, in 1991 we organized a large event, Ride for the Environment, to promote cycling, recycling and other environmental initiatives. Vancouver’s mayor, Gordon Campbell opened the event and spoke. Ten years later, he became BC’s Premier, and seven years after that in 2008, his government implemented a revenue-neutral carbon tax in BC. It was truly progressive legislation that proved to other jurisdictions that a carbon tax was simple, effective and not an economic burden. Sadly, rightwing corporate lobbying kept the BC model from spreading.
I like to think that in some tiny tiny way, by getting Campbell to speak to the environment in 1991, we primed the pump for consideration of a carbon tax years later. Of course many more important factors were at play, for instance the Rio Summit in 1992, and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which went into effect in 2005.
We all know how that one turned out. After years of inaction on emissions reductions by successive Liberal Governments of Canada (the governments who adopted and ratified Kyoto), and years of undermining the agreement by Stephen Harper’s Conservative Government, Harper withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011.
The world’s action on global warming has been such a sad, sordid affair. Corruption and incompetence at every turn have literally doomed us, and future generations. And it was all avoidable.
Apology
I bowed out of climate activism in 1995. I had burned out. Many of my compatriots from those early days soldiered on. I don’t know how they did. I tried to get involved again in 2003, and again in 2012, but couldn’t act. I’ve come to believe that some kind of creeping PTSD took root in me as I watched the crisis unfold over the decades. Cassandra Syndrome.
I shifted into the selfish work of creating a climate resilient homestead for my family instead of organizing politically for high level change —industrial regulation, economic restructuring, infrastructure change. These were the only kinds of action that could have saved us.
I feel guilt and shame that I bailed on this work so early and didn’t try harder to persevere. For years, I've found it hard to engage with friends who have children because of the difficult years ahead that I know they'll experience. I turn 62 this year, so I will be spared the worst of it. The three generations alive younger than I will not.
Sincerely,
Jeff Hohner
July 28, 2023