JANUARY 9, 2020
Australia is ranked 54th out of 54 countries on Climate Action. They are a *very* right wing country with solid right wing "conservative" leadership. The kid in this boat is 9 years old.
Whole towns have been engulfed in flames and the Aussies have had to camp out on beaches knowing if the flames get much closer they'll have to jump into the water. Not everybody has boats.
The Climate Crisis spares no country. The immensely dangerous (and expensive it that's the only concern) record-breaking wildfires of Australia (and California before that) have all happened with just one~ish degrees of GLOBAL heating. The scientists told us in 2018 we can stop the bleeding at 1.5 degrees (so half a degree worse) by 2030 but only if we started acting immediately and in a big way. We've done almost nothing, in fact we're still pouring on the gas more than ever and 1.5 seems *extremely* unlikely now.
The next target would be 2 degrees, so seeking to limit GLOBAL heating at *twice* the level that has already fuelled climate disasters like Australia and California. It's worth mentioning that the increase in degrees of heating is not in a one-to-one relationship with the intensity, danger or cost of these inexorable, inevitable climate disasters. This all comes to a head not only in our children's lifetimes or even our own but over the next decade.
All of our kids/grandkids/nieces/nephews will one day find themselves in one metaphorical boat or another soon enough. It will be up to their mothers and fathers to explain why everything's burning. It will be good to have an answer prepared, if nothing else.
Sept 11, 2020
This THREAD got cut/pasted from a Jan 9 email I wrote to Uncle Alphonse who'd been fwding me fact-free junk about the #CarbonTax again. Here we are 9 months later on September 11th & it's California's turn to break records on a wildfire. Again.
Girl in the intro tweet of this THREAD is named Finn. 9 years old. We can now add little Hector of San Francisco, aged 6, to the ever-expansive list of children rendered homeless in our never-ending string of enormous Climate Crisis fire disasters.
Send me a movie image that looks *more* like the Apocalypse than this photo taken just a few days ago in San Francisco. Absent a legit mushroom cloud or alien hoard blowing up the Whitehouse you can't do it. Because this is what the Apocalypse looks like.
Throw in a global pandemic and it's what Dystopia looks like:
'Increasingly worse' is the only new normal on our horizon. Against the great many other crises coming to a head while late-stage Capitalism puts the finishing nails in Civilization as we know it, there'll always be a steady backdrop of larger, more frequent climate disasters.
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