frightening future

can we finally act?

I planned to write about the breach of the Ukrainian dam or the golf debacle announced yesterday but instead I am left asking when we will finally address climate change after what we are living through today in much of the northeast and Canada? The air we are seeing today is the future. This is not a joke, hyperbole or a one-time deal. This is our future.

I am in Philadelphia for several days. I thought I was seeing a late afternoon summer thunderstorm on the horizon yesterday as I drove a couple of miles. The sky was extremely dark rather than the yellow we are seeing the Philly’s air now but it was decidedly blocking the sun. I finally realised about 7 pm that no rain ever arrived, a common problem this entire calendar year along the eastern seaboard. I was seeing the smoke of fires.

Philadelphia is not yet suffering the worst of this week; that will arrive tomorrow through the weekend as will be true for Baltimore and Washington, along with various pockets further south.

I imagine Chinese leaders are thrilled to see America focused on this problem after our embassy established the air pollution monitoring station in Beijing about a decade ago. The people of China knew their air was pretty bad as they lived in it but it was cheeky for the United States to document and offer the statistics to Beijing citizens. No government likes to lose face but Beijing is so sensitive to anyone ‘humiliating’ them by pointing out their poor behaviour.

Over the past several years, Beijing’s air quality improved somewhat. The city sits in a bowl so air inversions are a regular affliction but the expanding Gobi desert injects more sand into the air to exacerbate air quality problems. As I noted several weeks ago, China experienced pretty bad heat much earlier than the terrible drought and dangerous temperatures of July and August 2022. Lack of water, heat, and spreading dust or sand are bad things for the air.

We have been focusing on cleaning up our air pollution problems in this country for fifty years. The Environmental Protection Agency and air pollution remediation requirements and policies began in the early 1970s as demands for change escalated along with environmental awareness. We have not solved everything but no question that the smoggy air in Los Angeles, Denver, New York, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh improved, leaving us in better shape than many parts of the world.

The current threatening air traces directly to fires in Quebec, fully eight hundred miles north of New York. The fires in May and June rather than September or August correlate to considerably less rainfall and snowfall (the Buffalo snowmageddon of Christmas, aside) than average this calendar year mean the everything is so dry. Those beautiful trees of Quebec ignite into wildfires as storms pass across the region allowing lightening strikes to cause wide swathes of burning. Heat exacerbates the natural phenomenon of thunderstorms which ignite wildfires.

In Annapolis, we are fully 10 inches below the average amount for the first week in June: 10 inches. We thought we exited drought a few weeks ago after a particulary wet few days but that is a distant memory now. As we enter the prime ‘outdoor’ period, Annapolitans cannot legally grill outside, as I understand it, for fear of setting off local fires.

Quebec is not the only part of the North American continent already confronting these devastating fires. Western Canada, from Manitoba through Saskatchewan and Alberta into British Columbia, also suffer from fires which are driving smoke to the border with the United States, though attracting less attention.

But, insufficient rain will continue to dry conditions across North America as temperatures reach their increasingly high levels confronting us most years recently. Perhaps we will have a somewhat cooler year but we hear the likelihood of another El Nino which raises the risk of higher temperatures, according to climatologists.

There remain some who reject the science of climate deterioration. The value of science, again, is that it is replicable so we have many, many, many studies supporting the hypothesis that climate change caused by our behaviours. I would argue the argument now is less about whether climate change results from human activity than about why we should change our behaviour when China and India refuse to alter their acitons.

They are wrong. The grit that is in people’s mouths in Xi’an, Albany, or Agra doesn’t stop at national boundaries; it circulates around the world. The stiffling heat that baked the Pacific Northwest and western Canada in June 2021 was not the same heat that roasted China last summer/earlier this year, or scorch South Asia annually will continue to escalate. None of the countries have sufficient water on a regular basis for crops or people. Droughts accelerate and spread as temperatures rise.

I don’t pretend to have easy answers on how we get our leaders, much less those elsewhere, to adopt more restrictive environmental policies to begin bringing down the temperatures globally. I don’t pretend it will be easy; it will be bloody hard as actions create consequences. We will have to sacrifice some things to achieve this. if we spend more federal resources on the environment, we will have fewer to spend on others. We need links between the private and public sectors rather than simply diagnosing problems; we need coordination and cooperation in providing solutions.

Yes, the globe is most definitely interrelated. China has an appalling record of using coal-fired power plants which contribute daily to the worsening conditions. But Beijing can no longer pretend its population is unaffected by climate change. The CCP has no more solutions than we do for the increasingly brutal natural conditions appearing in their country, thus endangering their own population, but China’s infrastructure is less able to cope than we are.

Additionally, as we spend so many resources on military preparations for perfectly understandable reasons, we must commit appropriate financial resources for finding solutions here and abroad to address climate change now. To do otherwise will be hopeless, even if we prefer to ignore it, as climate change affects Americans more often annually.

The deteriorating bilateral ties between Washington and Beijing make this considerably harder. We tend to drop topics in negotiations after a while but we must repeatedly hammer this home to Beijing for our national interest. If we believe Beijing’s behaviour on climate is paramount to assisting our own efforts to rollback climate problems, then why are we surrendering our opportunities to beat up on China in face-to-face discussions on the topic? Or why would we surrender our voice to Beijing’s central role in organisations addressing these problems?

Even as bad as things are, it will take years to make changes. That is reality of climate as it is with population growth, another major topic Beijing now realises it cannot ignore to prevent domestic upheaval. But, China addresses things as they would cross a river by feeling the stones. They respond to the most immediate problem they cannot avoid before they do anything else. They rarely sustain all policies at a pace we would endorse but it behooves us to press hard and to remind Chinese citizens of what their pain was last summer and earlier this year. We must force them to address it now by hitting them repeatedly and reminding the rest of the world, especially our European allies, how irreponsible Beijing is.

We can offer more incentives to India. This would be an option for dealing with Modi but we need be ready to help India rather than draw lines against non-military spending. We cannot ignore India’s role in this problem, either.

The website http://www.Airnow.gov reports air pollution levels to Americans in any location in real time; New Yorkers will find their air is worse than New Delhi right now, a city generally worse than Chinese areas these days. It is not merely the aging and the newborns hit by these conditions; it’s dangerous for all in many parts of the east as will continue through the weekend. The air problems are not merely when one is running a marathon in New York or Syracuse; the pervasiveness of the air danger now circulates in our homes as well. And, again, this is spreading across the nation as the summer continues.

Do we want our kids to grow up with this air we breathe deteriorate further year in and year old? Do we want to assume we can continue to spend the vast amounts of assistance it requires after massive wildfires overrun towns, villages, and ultimately cities in this country?

It’s the only globe we have. This is it. We cannot discard it by moving to Jupiter or elsewehre. So when are we going to begin protecting it?FIN