Hotter and Hotter

Climate change is accelerating faster than we thought - everything bad always turns out to be worse than we think, it seems - and we have less and less time to reverse course and prevent the absolute worst long-term effects of climate change.  Many of those effects have already happened.  You'd be hard pressed to find any bayshore beaches thanks to rising sea levels, and rainstorms flood low-lying areas of coastal cities (Miami is one big low-lying coastal city in and of itself) much more frequently.  And of course we are getting more wildfires, droughts and hurricanes doing more and more damage and laying out beautiful planet of ours to waste.

But as long as the ways out of this mess are to avoid eating beef three times a week, use public transportation (in a pandemic?) or at least drive smaller cars, and cut back on energy-inefficient entertainment like indoor ski slopes, no one is interested in changing their behavior.

Oh yeah, and July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded.  To be replaced by August 2021, no doubt.

In Washington, Democrats are desperately trying to get some sort of carbon regulations in place to address the problems, and Republicans are finally beginning to acknowledge the problem of climate change but only pushing piecemeal policies that would not be to hard on the fossil-fuel industries, whose lobbying budgets are probably bigger than the national budget of Slovenia.  Now, I'm not one to "doom scroll," that is, look for negative news on the Internet, but I still come across a lot of it by looking for positive news.  I'll Google the words "climate change" and "optimism" and end up being led to articles with sentences like, "Anyone who thinks people are ready to get serious about climate change is displaying unwarranted optimism."

There's still some optimism out there, though.  In addition to activists like Greta Thunberg and massive environmentalist demonstrations, we have President Biden pushing environmentalism-related jobs to show voters that we can save the planet and build our economy, as well as special climate envoy John Kerry, who is hell-bent on making up for lost time in getting the United States to lead on climate change after four years of Donald Trump.  In fact, a column from Joyce McMillan of The Scotsman about Biden and Kerry actually offers, despite all of the gloom and doom on climate, cause for hope in the prelude to the climate conference coming this November.