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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Last January’s fires were the direct result of climate change. Driven by less than 0.3 inches of water in the previous eight months along with some of the highest temps on record, their financial impact is on track to surpass Katrina as the most expensive “natural” disaster to hit the United States.
Even Governor Newsom, who generally takes stands pandering to the oil and gas industry executives that have bought and paid for his foot-dragging on global warming issues, came right out about their scope saying California no longer has fire seasons, it has fire years.
A cascade of climate change-augmented weather disasters continues to create chaos across the country – floods and hail in Texas, tornadoes in the central states, severe storms on the east coast. Over $100 BILLION in losses just through June.
Yet many politicos in the United States keep wringing their hands over huge expenses expected in converting to green energy. But what exactly are those costs?
Are they real? Or a figment of the fossil fuel industries’ feverish marketing and lobbyist teams’ imaginations in trying to divert decision-makers attention away from the true factors and failings driving energy expenditures?
The real bottom-line according to the International Monetary Fund is that around the world today the coal, oil, and gas industries are being subsidized to the tune of $7 trillion.
That’s $7 trillion a year.
And that’s not counting their savings from continuing to use the planet’s atmosphere and water resources as open sewers – for free. Ditto poorer communities as convenient places to operate their polluting refineries and ditch toxic waste.
Furthermore, the challenge to the fossil fuel monopoly by the “miracle” of nuclear energy spun off from the horrors of Hiroshima, in attempting to justify its existence and repay military investments has had to face exorbitant costs for disposal of spent fuel and end-of-life plant decommissioning.
And that was before the reputational ravages of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. But, to paraphrase Bertholt Brecht, the bitch that bore it is in heat again.
For years, governments, shareholders and corporate lobbyists have laughed off the suggestion that fossil fuel or nuclear companies be forced to shell out sufficient monetary deposits to cover the worst of the damage from those industries’ failures to protect people, the land, and the water.
Meantime industrialized nations are on the cusp of reneging on the $300 billion a year promised to developing countries by 2035 as agreed to at the 2024 climate talks.
The schemers of sleight-of-hard capitalism continue to draw the curtains around their emerald city by obfuscating known perils, fiscal and existential. Instead, they pushed for solar installers to plunk down a substantial bond to cover removal of panels when they are no longer needed.
Despite the fact a significant number of these are still in service a quarter century after installation.
Long after fossil fuels of the time have burned to noxious fumes. Long after taxpayer dollars have been flushed down the drain paying and paying for carbon and nuclear energy red ink.
In fact, the superiority of solar energy keeps expanding and projections for its use keep growing even if the lump of coal in the White House today, bought and paid for by fossil fuel interests, is doing his best to deny that times they are a’changing.
Most Americans today are not Luddites like Ronald Reagan, and even the panels he removed from the White House in 1986 had an afterlife at Maine’s environmentally oriented Unity College and are now proudly displayed in a number of museums attesting to Jimmy Carter’s environmental foresight.
Today, while spectacularly failing to deliver on healthcare and inflation, the Climate-Change-Is-A-Hoax president continues to berate leaders of over a hundred other countries who are working hard to slash pollution and reverse global warming.
Today, Bill Gates is also downplaying the long-term dangers of cataclysmic climate change to focus on his pet anti-poverty agenda, concerned that prioritizing potential disaster in the distant future is taking resources away from ways to improve human suffering like poverty and hunger in the present.
A present in which he will be glorified, a future he will not live to see. Or so he trusts.
Truth (un)Social Trump lauded Gates: “I (WE!) just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax. Bill Gates has finally admitted that he was completely WRONG on the issue. It took courage to do so, and for that we are all grateful.”
Not.
The gazillionaire philanthropist bluntly repudiated Trump’s take, saying it was a “giant misreading” of his position. Given that if the president’s attention span was adult-length, a few paragraphs further on in the Microsoft mogul’s memo he would have read: “To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved… Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.”
Climate change is indeed a key contributor to the very worldwide poverty Gates seeks to alleviate. It is the underlying cause of a majority of circumstances impeding the bettering of the quality of life for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.
Why install improved infrastructure when ever-stronger hurricanes will continue to destroy whatever is built? Floods, famine, fires – all aggravate war and disease which in turn exacerbate migration and the loss of arable land, groaning up even more grinding poverty.
And who can prioritize education in the Gazan genocide or the holocausts plaguing Sudan when flood displacements and severe heatwaves no longer are restricted to third world countries but are playing out in Europe and the United States.
In places where, again, the poor can’t afford air conditioning and secure housing and are the most likely to be impacted.
Agreed, poverty, hunger, education, and disease all deserve the attention Gates brings… but not at the expense of stepping back on full scale confrontation of the climate change crisis using all the tools we can command.
Achieving even a modicum of success against global warming would be a game-changer for the multitude of predicaments of its own making that humanity must tackle in the near future.
We know the financial, physical, and emotional costs of climate catastrophes today.
With the current administration’s policies aggressively accelerating environmental degradation, these will only get exponentially worse unless we as individuals, as communities and as countries don’t prioritize drastic countermeasures on behalf of all humanity.
