Earth Day 2021
Well, here we go again: my annual Earth Day Diatribe. There’s not that much more substantive to say about the science of it all, other than it’s been another year and the climate crisis just gets exponentially worse.
It’s been 51 Earth Days now, and we’ve understood exactly what was going to happen well longer than that. But you have to actually listen to scientists and act on their warnings, and we as a country have failed miserably to do that consistently or effectively.
Yes, I am well aware that I am repeating myself here again this year on many of these points and the manner in which they are expressed. Therein lies the rub.
And so, here we are, witnessing every day and facing the escalation of climate crisis related cataclysmic weather and ecological disasters and the attendant human misery and economic destruction. The main thing to remember here is that the suffering is selective.
The suffering preferentially afflicts the poor, people of color, indigenous people, children, the elderly and the infirm. This is always the case. Wealthy, privileged and powerful people can protect themselves. Vulnerable people cannot.
So, our failure to address the climate crisis is fundamentally indifferent, cruel and racist, and a case can be made that crimes against humanity are being committed against classes of people that do not have the capacity or capabilities to safeguard themselves from genocide. That’s the bottom line here. The vulnerable are the targets, as they always are, and it sucks.
Sure, there is more reason today than there was a year ago to be hopeful that the United States will move into a leadership role and help save the planet’s failing ecosystem. Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris totally get it, and they are rapidly reversing the idiotic, backward and breathtakingly destructive environmental policies of the last administration.
But the damage that was done to EPA and other administrative agencies like OSHA whose job it is to protect the public was wholesale and it will take time to fix it. With just three and a half years left until the next Presidential election, we better get a lot busier a lot faster.
Thankfully, the greedy crony capitalists that were installed as agency caretakers are being unceremoniously tossed out, but the brain drain of scientific experts that fled the madness perpetrated on the agencies is going to be difficult to undo. Nonetheless, with superstars like John Kerry, Gina McCarthy and Michael Regan leading the charge, we do have reason to be hopeful and even excited.
If you are unfamiliar with the new EPA Administrator Regan, do check him out. He is simply an awesome presence at EPA and precisely the right person for the job right now.
We all need to be clear as to how we got here, and nothing could be better documented or more precisely understood. We see the evidence right before our very eyes each day right now.
A significant slice of our population refused to wear masks during COVID. Now they are the anti-vaxxers, with their obstinate selfishness. Their inability to understand and refusal to listen to the science and their maddening addiction to spreading misinformation just makes more people sick, kills people and prolongs the economic destruction caused by the pandemic.
The very same know-nothing, anti-science, fear mongering, conspiracy theorizing DEPLORABLES make up the 35–40% of the population in this country that have rabidly given power to a morally bankrupt political party that has for the last 50 years taken the fossil fuel industry’s dirty money and done everything conceivable to stall action on climate change.
This cabal of privilege and self-interest is predominantly white, overwhelmingly protestant, strongly evangelical and mostly male. Right now as you read this, it is white Republican males that are holding down the vaccination numbers in Red states, and quite frankly that is about all you need to know to understand clearly why we have failed miserably in the U.S. in combating climate change and why we are now in a climate crisis headed to a climate catastrophe.
It is tyranny by a powerful, advantaged political minority, led by Senator Mitch McConnell in the Senate. The tyranny is fueled by capitalist oligarch money and influence and by a mind-controlled cult of racist, undereducated, middle to lower income whites.
Their fear and loathing of people of color, immigrants, women and anyone or anything culturally unlike them has instigated a culture war for the last 50 years that prevents the majority of Americans from realizing the powerful potential to do social good we as a nation possess.
The hang-up now is the undemocratic Senate. The Republican Party has 50% of the seats but represents 40 million less people than the Democrats from an aggregation of smaller, more rural states that have far more cows, chickens and pigs living there than people.
But they wield inordinate and inappropriate power and vote robotically as a block. Unfortunately one Democrat routinely leans in their direction (Joe Manchin of West Virginia) and refuses to help dismantle the racist motivated filibuster that gives Republicans their ability to frustrate the will of the great majority of the American people.
We the People must increasingly make political life intensely uncomfortable for those Republicans and any Democrats that stymie gun control legislation, want to dismantle the social safety net, bleat scarily about democratic socialism and have for over 50 years made it impossible to combat the existential threat that is human activity caused climate change.
They have packed the courts with right wing judges, done only the bidding of big business and have continued a racist tradition of white privilege and supremacy that was an underlying precept for the evil economic model that stole land from indigenous people, plundered natural resources, befouled the environment and enslaved people, treating them as property.
How do we combat this? We do more. We do a lot more. We write letters to the editor and op-eds, we send emails to politicians, we speak out, we flood social media with facts and the truth, we give money, we volunteer, we vote, we legally protest and we daily get in the face in an uncompromising and non-violent way of anyone who espouses racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, religiously intolerant or fascist doctrines.
Every day. Passionately. No stopping.
Eventually We the People can put enough compassionate, decent, trustworthy, credible, honest and public service-oriented people in positions of authority in government and in private sector institutions to see progress on the climate crisis…and domestic terrorism…and police violence…and equal rights…and gun violence…and systemic racism…and clean water, land and air…and poverty…and income inequality…and voter suppression…and wage stagnation…and affordable healthcare…and infrastructure…and the high cost of a college education…and… and…and…
This is what We the People can do.
