When a new study shows “the Arctic has entered an ‘unprecedented state’ that threatens the entire planet” and it’s “a massive conglomeration of nearly 50 years of research,” it’s difficult to feel optimistic.
Nearly 50 years. The first Earth Day will be a half century ago come next year. I expected that things would be better, way better, on the planet, certainly not appreciably worse. “Because the Arctic atmosphere is warming faster than the rest of the world, weather patterns across Europe, North America and Asia are becoming more persistent, leading to extreme weather conditions.”
It’s easy to think planting a tree, bringing your reusable bags to the grocery store, or forgoing a plastic straw is meaningless. Yet my family does it anyway. Maybe (probably) it’s a certain arrogance but we are trying for the destruction of the planet to be less “on us.” So we have our hybrid car. We compost. We reuse.
But even as the Midwest US braced for a major, long-lasting blizzard called a “bomb cyclone” AGAIN this month, the regime was signing executive orders designed to further roll back energy and environmental regulations and promote the fossil fuel industry, apparently to meet his goal of making global warming worse.
Andrew Wheeler, the the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has said that human-caused climate change is not his top priority.
This despite a new study by EPA scientists “published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The paper urges action on climate change, declaring the urgency of the issue and pushing for strategies to address the potential effects.”
Earlier this year, EPA scientists priced out the cost of climate change. “By the end of the century, the manifold consequences… will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
“Those costs will come in multiple forms, including water shortages [Wheeler’s purported top priority], crippled infrastructure and polluted air that shortens lives, according to the study… No part of the country will be untouched, the EPA researchers warned.”
Happy Earth Day. This is probably NOT the only mention of the topic this week.
Yeah, you can’t rule the world but you can always clean up your own act a little bit and set an example for others. It doesn’t make a major difference but makes more of a difference than you might think it does.
This from someone who’s generally more pessimistic than I! Of course, we keep trying to do the right thing!