Long Ago Tomorrow

A climate medley

Author

Brad Johnson
February 10, 2023

PRESENTED BY BURT BACHARACH

This afternoon at 5:30 pm at DC’s Creative Grounds coffeeshop, the Climate and Community Project is hosting a briefing and happy hour with Dr. Thea Riofrancos, lead author of the report Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility with Less Mining.

The report envisions a decarbonized transportation sector much better than President Joe Biden’s world of electric Hummers, which would be dependent on rapacious mining for minerals like lithium and copper to build.

If you’re not in DC, definitely check out David Roberts’ recent podcast with Thea.

New Zealand is bracing for Gabrielle, its most intense tropical cyclone since the 1990s. Freezing weather is adding to despair as the Turkey earthquake toll passes 22,000. Storms and heavy rain have flooded the city of Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. After January’s storms, California communities are looking for long-term flood solutions. Fifteen million people are at risk of severe floods from melting glaciers. Seven northeastern states saw their warmest January on record.

With the support of climate scientist Rose Abramoff, who was fired for her climate activism, youth climate activists with Climate Defiance are planning to blockade the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 29th. Comedian Roy Wood Jr. is this year’s host of the gala; in 2019 he filed a Daily Show piece arguing that “it’s time for everyone to be over-the-top about climate change.”

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) continues to live in his fossil-fuel fantasyland, lashing out at Democrats who accept that the climate crisis requires the world to stop burning fossil fuels:

“This is bullshit. So they’re gonna basically starve us out of energy that we have a tremendous, abundant supply of because of their aspirational thoughts? I will continue to fight and I’ll do everything I can to make sure the public knows what they’re doing and what it will do to you and your economy and your lifestyle.”

At Wednesday’s Senate Democratic retreat, Manchin passed around a flyer branding the Inflation Reduction Act not as climate-friendly, green-investment legislation, but as a pro-fossil-fuel bill (which admittedly puts him in agreement with many climate-justice advocates).

In a must-read, science fiction author Jeff Vandermeer ruminates on the lessons of Ursula K. LeGuin’s seminal work Left Hand of Darkness as the Anthropocene takes hold:

By some estimates, fifty percent of terrestrial wildlife on this planet has been liquidated by human actions since I was born in 1968, one year before publication of Left Hand of Darkness. . . We must be able to imagine our own end to find our way to the light. We must be able to articulate the fragile joys of this age as well as the tragedies. We must hold onto what is important to preserve even as part of that will fall away, as inevitably as ice sheets crashing into the sea in the Arctic. . . .
“Alone, I cannot change your world,” Genly says to Estraven, “But I can be changed by it.”

Alleen Brown and John McCracken uncover the $8.6 million paid by the oil giant Enbridge to Minnesota law enforcement to crack down on Line 3 pipeline protesters from 2020 to 2021.

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