There is no "away"
Until we change the systems that trap us in the ongoing climate crisis, there is no such thing.
Dear friends:
Like many of you, my week was full of heat. The prediction for a few hot days morphed into another “heat dome event,” with five or more days sequentially well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit (about forty degrees Celsius). I’m quite fortunate that the main impact on me were relatively simple schedule adjustments: outdoors early or late, indoors (in air conditioned structures) during the hot part of the day. Our local music festival shifted several performances from outdoors to in, or from a non-air conditioned space to one that is; our farmers’ markets started and ended early. I have plenty of clean water, good food, and other resources to “get through.”
This insulation from the worst impacts of our climate crisis is welcome, personally, but it is also treacherous. I could all too easily forget how my own personal choices, and our economic, political, and infrastructure systems, are significant contributors. I could all too easily experience sadness, but not urgency, about the lives significantly interrupted or ended by our ongoing climate crisis. This same week saw deaths from back-to-back 100-year floods, for example. Deaths from the heatwave in my state have already been recorded.
Astoundingly, this week we also learned of the record-shattering profits in the second quarter of 2022 recognized by the major fossil fuel companies, and their plans to “invest” much of that profit in stock buy-backs. Not in cushioning the impact of high gas prices on ordinary consumers, or in wages for workers, or even in research, development, or new production. In buying back stock, which simply raises the price (a guaranteed buyer tends to do that) and therefore the wealth of stockholders. (Sources for further reading about all this are after the photo below.)
The climate and tax package agreed to by Democratic Senators helps - and we can use all the help we can get - at the same time it is far short of what the urgency of our situation requires of us. Around here, while our events were being rescheduled and our community was opening cooling shelters? We were still driving our giant trucks and SUVs to those events, still tending our overly-watered, fertilized, and poisoned lawns with diesel-powered mowers and blowers, still filling the downtown garbage cans with single-use plastics that held the beverages sipped at the parties.
“Drink that water then throw the bottle away,” I overheard a well-intentioned vendor say, after providing a plastic bottle to a customer who looked overheated.
But there is no “away,” I thought. Everything we do circles around and comes back to us. Our garbage impacts our human family wherever it is dumped. Our addiction to fossil fuels creates fires and floods all over our planet. Our economic system exploits all of us.
As we navigate through the varying impacts of climate crisis (which, like all crises, overly burdens our least advantaged folk), we can imagine our problems going “away.”
Until we change the systems that trap us in this crisis, there is no such thing.
Thank you for your company on this journey.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/07/29/kentucky-stlouis-flood-climate-explainer/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/07/29/climate-deal-savings-ev-solar-home/
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/business/exxon-chevron-profit.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/business/oil-company-buybacks.html?