King Coal

Any chance of getting a climate package through Congress this year is probably dead.   Any chance of getting a climate package through Congress next year or in 2024 is probably dead as well, because the House will likely be under Republican control and will likely impeach Joe Biden while investigating Hunter Biden rather than doing anything about a problem they believe is a hoax.

As usual, everyone's favorite Republican, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, is the reason for it.  Manchin has said he won't support the climate package because the cost will add to inflationary pressures but added he'd likely support it later after reviewing the cost factors.  The real reason, most likely, is depicted in the picture below.

Coal.  West Virginia produces a lot of it.  Joe Manchin is heavily invested in it.  Need I say more?

What's the matter with Manchin, anyway?  The West is in its worst drought in twelve centuries.  Europe is undergoing its fourth major heat wave in as many years - including Britain, where a heat wave is usually considered a stretch of days of 79 degrees Fahrenheit - while Paris may not be burning but the forests in France are. Parts of China are over 100, while other parts of China are.

Of course, Manchin is 74 and so won't live to see the worst effects of climate change, and those effects, ironically, are the reason his grandchildren might not live as long as he. 😠

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.

Climate Catastrophe

A huge storm is meandering across the midsection of the United States, and even though the Northeast won't get rain or snow from this storm.  We'll get the winds -about 20 mph sustained, with up to 40 mph gusts.  It might not only be enough to cancel the balloons for the New York Thanksgiving parade, it might even cause power outages and tree damage.

And that's not to mention the next storm, which could bring rain and snow to the Northeast and maybe flooding and beach erosion on Sunday.  This all comes after a big storm that affected the Northeast this past Sundae (November 24) .

All of these storms are indicative of how climate change has affected the weather for the worse, making storms more extreme and more frequent.  And this happens just as the United Nations reports that the climate crisis is worse than we thought, while the European Union does little about it, the United States does absolutely nothing, and China is doing even less than that.  Be prepared for even worse weather going into 2020 and beyond.

Did I happen to mention that both major almanacs say that there is a strong hurricane threat this coming fall for the Northeast? :O :-(     

Forget Paris

Remember when the United States signed the Paris Agreement to combat climate change?  Well, now you can forget it.  You can really forget it.

Trump made good on his promise from June 2017 to withdraw the United States from the accord by starting the process of quitting the second he was allowed to do so, this past Monday.  America now stands alone as the one country that officially does not care about the future of the planet.  Once again, I call for the United States to be swiftly and severely punished for its great ecological sins.

And don't start talking about the "WASICs" - the We Are Still In Coalition members of American businesses and governors who plan to implement the Paris Agreement as if we were still in it.  Trump and his stooge Mike Pompeo are likely working overtime on how to stop companies like Ford or governors such as Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo of New York, or Gavin Newsom of California - or even Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis, who recently came to the realization that taking climate change seriously in Trump's newly adopted home state is good for Florida and good for business - from following the rest of the world.  Corporate rights and states' rights don't apply when they contradict Republican administrations.

And don't start saying that we're only 4 percent of the population and the rest of the world can save the planet without us.  The truth is, we're the second-largest carbon emitter after China, and we have - no, had! - the most influence in getting the rest of the world to act in response to a crisis.  The Paris Agreement will go the way of the Kyoto Protocol of twenty years ago - in the dustbin of history, along with several international accords that flopped because American interests were against them.

But remember whom not to vote for when a hurricane hits the Northeast next Columbus Day, as one almanac has predicted.  Oh, that's right - the northeastern states already vote Democratic (except Pennsylvania, which hasn't been hit by a hurricane in over 45 years!), and Sandy Mark Two will be seen by Pat Robertson as divine retribution for people who cross Dr. Sinister in the White House.

Did I happen to mention that the greater New York area could get a big snowstorm next week - in the middle of fall?  More proof that the climate is being disrupted.  But hey, who cares as long as there's a booming stock market?

Oh, well, maybe another hurricane will whack the Carolinas in time for the election.  But the Southeast will probably still vote Republican, especially if the Democratic nominee is Mayor Pete.

And this is why I support a global economic and cultural boycott against the United States to make us change our evil ways, baby.  Economic and cultural boycotts always work.  Look what they did to apartheid in South Africa.

Short of that, though . . . war's over, man.  The Paris Agreement is dead. So is the planet. And where the planet is going, America will get there . . . first!

How ironic.

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

August has been an impossibly rainy month in my area so far, with flooding so bad even indoor events are getting rained out.

How bad is it?  As I reported here back in 2013, the undevelopable wooded lot in my neighborhood with a brook running down the middle of it was taken over by the neighborhood and developed into a sitting park with flower gardens and a bench and called Waverly Park after an adjacent street (Waverly Place).  I'd hoped to take some pictures of it after having helped get it into shape this year.

Unfortunately, these aren't the sort of pictures I had planned to take.

This is the park viewed from the south after a flash flood hit it on Saturday, August 11 (yesterday).

Here is is again, viewed from the west.

I have never seen it this bad before.  A rain storm in my area usually means that this brook becomes a whitewater rapid.  But not a lake!

The streets adjacent to the park were not affected, and when I went by later in the evening, the flood waters had receded to the point where the bench was accessible.  By the morning, the flood had completely subsided. Fortunately, none of the gardens we planted this year were flooded out.  But there was still foam on the water where the brook enters the culvert under the bench.

Twenty eighteen is turning out to be some year, isn't it?  Four winter nor'easters in as many weeks, a derecho in May knocking out my power for seven hours and change, now this!  And in the outside world there are fires in California and in Sweden above the Arctic Circle while the Iberian peninsula bakes in 116-Fahrenheit-degree heat.  

I tried to stop talking about the weather on my blog for the past few months, but I couldn't contain myself any longer.  Neither can the brook in our neighborhood contain itself.  And the only nation on the planet to razz the Paris Agreement on climate change can expect more of the same from sea to polluted sea.

Did I happen to mention that more flash flooding is possible tomorrow? 

Raining All Over The World

Or so it seems.

We in the metropolitan New York City area have gotten up to two inches of rain - in some areas three inches - and some of that rain fell at an inch an hour, which is like getting a foot of snow.  Not a nor'easter, not a line of  severe thunderstorms, but stormy enough to make people wonder what the hell is going on with this weather (*cough cough*, climate change, *cough cough*).

Oh yeah, the stormy weather we got is a by-product of a major April blizzard in the Plains that also handled the upper Great Lakes region and southeastern Ontario.

It may be spring, but the extreme weather that's been going on since late February is hardly over.  Thanks to a phenomenon no one can comprehend (*cough cough*, climate change, *cough cough*), this period of extreme weather is only just beginning.

And thanks to Scott Pruitt and his new coal-lobbyist deputy, it's not going to end. >:-(