Lake Macbride drying around the edges on Sept. 17, 2023 due to an extended drought.
Contrary to what letters in this newspaper reported, the climate crisis remains. It is a crisis. It is peculiar to our time since the Industrial Revolution. Readers of the Gazette should know about it.
Media stories covering the impact of a changing climate continue to appear: Canadian wildfires, heated ocean temperatures off the Florida coast, abnormal melting sea ice, Hurricane Hilary in California, Maui wildfires, the Midwestern drought… you know the list. It is as if the Gazette was live blogging the end times with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse nearby.
Our community is at risk due to the changing climate. Our family conserves water from our public well on the Silurian Aquifer because it is faltering with increased usage. A deep and extended drought means surface waters have not been able to recharge the aquifer to meet demand. The water supply is not endless.
Society should do something to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Here’s the rub. People enjoy current life in society, and we don’t want to change, even when inconvenienced by extreme weather.
Environmental activism seems unlikely to solve the climate crisis. All the talk about climate change distracts us from the fundamental problem: the effect of unmitigated capitalist growth ravaging the resources and systems of the earth and its atmosphere.
Maybe we should forget about the climate crisis to focus on what matters more: conserving Earth’s resources for future generations. I’m on board.
Published on Sept. 21, 2023 in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
The climate crisis remains with us. A series of news articles reported stresses on Earth to which climate change contributed or caused: Canadian wildfires, heated ocean temperatures off the coast of Florida, the failure of a generation of Emperor Penguin fledglings to survive because of melting sea ice, Hurricane Hilary in California, Maui wildfires, and others come across our news feeds like we are live blogging the end times. Climate change made each of these disasters worse. These stories are likely the tip of the iceberg.
I don’t need a news feed to know our community is at risk due to climate change. Our subdivision is conserving water on our public well because the Silurian Aquifer is faltering with increased usage. A deep and extended drought, combined with a lack of rainfall means surface waters have not been able to recharge the aquifer to keep up with water demand. I don’t mind conserving water. There is not an endless supply. It’s worse when generational expectations are not met.
Local environmental activists continue to remind us there is a climate crisis and the time for action to mitigate its worst effects is now. It will take all of us to address the climate crisis, especially our elected officials.
Here’s the rub. People enjoy our current life in society so much we don’t want to change it, even when inconvenienced by the impact of the climate crisis. Even when the inconvenience takes the form of the current extended drought and we don’t have access to the same amount of water coming from our faucet we did a few months ago.
In his 2017 book, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and other Essays, Paul Kingsnorth captured this notion:
For most of my twenties, I had put a lot of my energy into environmental activism, because I thought that activism could save, or at least change the world. By 2008 I had stopped believing this. Now I felt that resistance was futile, at least on the grand, global scale on which I’d always assumed it would occur. I knew what was already up in the atmosphere and in the oceans, working its way through the mysterious connections of the living Earth, beginning to change everything. I saw that the momentum of the human machine — all its cogs and wheels, its production and consumption, the way it turned nature into money and called the process growth — was not going to be turned around now. Most people didn’t want it to be, they were enjoying it.
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and other Essays, Paul Kingsnorth.
Kirkpatrick Sale lays bare the connection between climate and society in a recent issue of Counterpunch, “All the talk about ‘climate change’ directs the world’s attention away from what is the real central problem: the effect of unmitigated capitalist growth ravaging the resources and systems of the earth and its atmosphere.”
They both make a point.
I can’t recall how many times I heard Al Gore mention the pollution we dump into the atmosphere. “Every day we’re continuing to pump 162 million tons of global warming pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, into the atmosphere, as if the atmosphere was an open sewer,” Gore said everywhere during the last ten years. While some of this is caused naturally, most of it is a result of humans, that is, the unmitigated capitalist growth and exploitation of resources and systems Sale mentioned.
I joined the Climate Reality Project in August 2013 in Chicago. Gore’s training came at a time I needed it. I had just retired from my big job in 2009, and had seen the film, An Inconvenient Truth. I intended to work on climate change during my retirement years. Gore explained the impact of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere and oceans in clear, concise terms. The training was more than useful. There are now 50,000 trained climate activists like me. It may not be enough.
The issue mostly omitted during discussion of climate change is how it permeates everything in society. In Iowa there is no going back to the way the land and water was before the Black Hawk War in 1832. The environment has been completely re-worked to accommodate what is now conventional farming. We take what has become known as industrial agriculture for granted.
Are we living in the end times? I don’t know, and don’t believe we can know. What is known is there are solutions to the climate crisis if only we would apply them to the problem. This can be done without major disruption to our way of life.
If you are interested in a just and sustainable future that addresses the climate crisis, visit The Climate Reality Project at this website.
President Joe Biden at the signing ceremony for creation of Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni national monument.
On Tuesday, Aug. 8, President Joe Biden created Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, a national monument encompassing almost a million acres surrounding the Grand Canyon. At the signing ceremony, Biden said,
America’s natural wonders are our nation’s heart and soul. That’s not hyperbole; that’s a fact. They unite us. They inspire us. A birthright we pass down from generation to generation.
In part, the three-state trip to Arizona, New Mexico and Utah was to promote the Inflation Reduction Act, a piece of necessary campaign work.
On August 16, 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, marking the most significant action Congress has taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history. With the stroke of his pen, the President redefined American leadership in confronting the existential threat of the climate crisis and set forth a new era of American innovation and ingenuity to lower consumer costs and drive the global clean energy economy forward.
We, as a society, must act to address the human causes of the climate crisis, and Joe Biden is doing the work.
The risk we have in establishing this national monument is another president with differing views could undo this work as Donald J. Trump did with Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, created by President Obama a year prior to Trump assuming office. Fact is there is no consensus about creating national monuments which in turn, steers the rudder toward partisanship. Biden’s lofty remarks on Aug. 8 sound universal, yet are not commonly enough believed for Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni to endure when political seas shift.
There are characteristics of the new national monument that make them ripe to be overturned, at least in part. The first is grazing rights on public lands. According to the White House, “(The) monument designation protects these sacred places for cultural and spiritual uses, while respecting existing livestock grazing permits and preserving access for hunting and fishing.” It seems clear that won’t be good enough for ranchers and herders who rely on public lands to feed their livestock at low or no cost.
More significantly, the new national monument is home to some of the most easily accessible deposits of uranium in the country.
The Grand Canyon is too important to not protect. And yet there are hundreds of mining claims, and several active uranium mines in the proposed monument area that threaten to poison the landscape and destroy this sacred land. We know from firsthand experience the damage that can be caused by yellow dirt contaminating our water and poisoning our animals and our children. We are thankful to President Biden and the Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition for their efforts in pushing this initiative to protect our people from the adverse effects of uranium mining.
Navajo Nation President Nygren, Grand Canyon Tribal Coalition Celebrates Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument Designation Aug. 8, 2023
The hope among tribal leaders is the national monument designation is permanent. It is hard to believe that mining interests won’t exploit their political power to gain access to uranium deposits there. They have already begun framing arguments that uranium will be needed to power the displacement of fossil fuels in our energy grid. As I’ve written on several occasions, nuclear power is not the answer to addressing climate change.
We should celebrate the moment of creating this national monument. Local groups have been working on its designation for decades and we should stop, take a breath, and appreciate what determined, long-range political action can accomplish. We must also be vigilant of those who would undo Biden’s work.
It has been ten years since I first attended former vice president Al Gore’s training on the climate crisis. Since then, the organization surpassed 50,000 trained climate leaders located in 190 countries. Every one of them will be needed because there is so much to be done to solve the climate crisis.
July 2023 was the hottest month on Earth since we began keeping records in the modern era. The year 2023 is also tracking to be the hottest. We, as a civilization, must do something to mitigate the human causes of this excess heat by achieving net-zero emissions. The words “achieving true net-zero” are important and there is misinformation about what they mean.True net-zero includes reducing the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced on Earth. Climate Reality works toward achieving true net-zero because once it can be achieved, global temperatures will begin to decline within a few years. Society can avoid the worst effects of the climate crisis by achieving this goal.
Climate Reality has a strategy to achieve true net-zero emissions by 2030 in four primary campaigns with working groups. They are:
Reducing Emissions
This campaign focuses on building a clean energy future by cutting or avoiding emissions and opposing new fossil fuel infrastructure.
Calling Out Greenwashing
This campaign works to expose the lies fossil fuel companies tell and counter with the truth about the energy transition we need.
Financing A Just Transition
This campaign focuses on mobilizing global finance to build thriving clean energy economies.
Strengthening International Cooperation on Climate
This campaign supports climate action through the Conference of the Parties (COP) which hosts international gatherings to agree to approaches to the climate crisis. The 2015 Paris Agreement is a work-product of the COP.
There is plenty of work for individuals to do to address the climate crisis and avoid the worse effects of increasing global atmospheric and oceanic temperatures. If you would like to learn more about The Climate Reality Project, click here. Not ready to get involved? Here is an inspiring poem by Amanda Gorman suggesting why you should consider it, if not with this organization, then one near you that is working on solving the climate crisis.
Smoke was everywhere on Tuesday. The aroma was distinct, constant, and originated in Canadian wildfires. The haze was not bad, yet the smell filled the air. Smoke was a constant reminder of how little we progressed in our advocacy to do something about the climate crisis. Our lack of education, in the need to address the climate crisis, covers us like a shroud.
June was the hottest month on Earth since we began keeping records. July looks to be worse. I tried to function with outdoor ambient temperatures in the low nineties. Functioning meant using air conditioning to mitigate the heat most of the day.
The world just sweltered through its hottest June in the 174-year global climate record.
Additionally, Earth’s ocean surface temperature anomaly — which indicates how much warmer or cooler temperatures are from the long-term average — were the highest ever recorded, according to scientists from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, July 13, 2023.
I don’t mean to slight the efforts of teachers, many of whom I know to be decent people. Yet, the fact is too many young people arriving to power in the 2020s don’t understand the reasoned need to act on our deteriorating climate. While we recognize a long procession of extreme weather events and conditions, we view them as a live blog of the end times over which we have no control. How did we get to this place?
In part, with electronic communications and social media, we are more aware of the pockets of culture that reject common sense to pursue tribal interests. They receive undue amplification. A reader of history knows this segment of the population has been present for multiple millennia. More than “pocket,” though, the amplification in social media presents an idea there is an organized movement. I’d call it the “know-nothing movement” yet that term has already been used. It’s not that people are dumb. It’s that they don’t know how uneducated they are. There is a name for this: the Dunning Kruger effect.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge.
I am part of the Climate Reality Project whose mission includes:
We train and mobilize people worldwide with four global campaigns to unlock transformational change this decade and help us reach true net-zero by 2050 – the point where global warming can stop in as little as three-to-five years and the Earth begins to heal.
The Climate Reality plan is to reduce emissions, call out greenwashing, end financial support for using fossil fuels, and support international cooperation using the Conference of the Parties framework that brought us the Paris Agreement on climate. There is hope these things can be accomplished, according to former Vice President Al Gore last night. None of it will be easy. The fact that we need organizations like Climate Reality and others to educate, lobby and advocate for action to address the climate crisis is a sign of how far our education system has deteriorated. These topics should be front and center in our schools and in career development for students coming up. There are many obstacles to training the coming generation of Americans to take up the climate crisis as a main stage endeavor.
We do what we can. The trouble is we don’t always realize how much potential we possess to address the climate crisis. Its time to figure that out.
Lake Macbride State Park covered in a thin haze of smoke from Canadian wildland fires, June 28, 2023.
On Tuesday, June 27, there were 66 wildland fires being tracked across parts of Ontario Province in Canada. As a result, smoke and particulate matter is spreading over much of the United States, and across the Atlantic Ocean to multiple European countries. It has rendered the air quality “very unhealthy.” What is there to do at this point but monitor our local air quality and moderate our time and activities outdoors? The underlying science and human behavior which favor conditions for the fires have been ignored so long, we transitioned to a mode of acceptance and now focus on coping with the disaster.
At least the scenery on the state park trail is nice.
I got into something while working in the yard. I believe the ailment is contact dermatitis and the little spot where I got it itches constantly. I put some ointment on it a couple times a day and should be fine after two to four weeks, according to the Mayo Clinic. I don’t know what I contacted, although I found some nettles out by the composter. I harvested the nettles and hung them in the garage to dry. There is a cup of nettle tea in my future.
The garden is really coming in. The freezer and refrigerator are almost full. I am much closer to the garden this year than previously. I never fail to marvel at what it can produce. For now, life on Earth is pretty good, despite the contact dermatitis.
Lake Macbride from the North Shore Trail, May 27, 2023
Morning light illuminated this peninsula on Lake Macbride during my walk. One never knows how a multi-function mobile device will capture a photograph. I’m pleased with the results of this one.
The hard part is breaking away from preoccupations on a trail walk, to be aware of our surroundings enough to notice how light falls on the landscape. The results can be liberating. If the image comes out well, it’s a bonus. Increasingly, I seek the light on excursions off property.
Five of seven garden plots are planted, meaning I am running behind. Reasons have to do with weather, and with the pace at which I work. A five or six-hour shift with breaks every hour is what I can muster. Progress is steady, yet slow. Gardening is a tolerant activity and whatever one can do is better than the alternative. I do what I can.
Already there is a harvest. Leafy green vegetables, lettuce, spring onions, radishes, and herbs. I mixed fresh greens with last year’s frozen ones to make spring vegetable broth for canning. It is time to use up the freezer to make room for the new harvest. Spring broth is always best so I noted the month on the lids.
I forgot potatoes at the wholesale store so I drove to town on Saturday. My neighbor, who owns the grocery store, was there and he thanked me for the San Marzano tomato seedlings I gave him. I had extra. The grocery store wasn’t busy. Organized locals got their Memorial Day weekend shopping done by Friday. We had a good chat about tomatoes, gardening, and people in the community. The value of the trip was no small potatoes, although I got some of those, too.
My spouse is at her sister’s home for the week, so I’m on my own. As I age, I dislike being alone. While freedom to cook how I like is a perquisite of her absence, meal preparation takes only a small part of each day.
Today is the annual firefighters breakfast in town and I plan to open it up then move on to garden and yard tasks before the ambient temperature gets too hot. If all goes well, I’ll mulch tomatoes (which means mowing the lawn), build a brush pile, and trim around the foundation of the home to prepare the spot for the new air conditioner.
The flags are up at Oakland Cemetery, signifying local veterans who died. The Memorial Day service moved to the new veterans memorial in town. I’ll stop by the cemetery on my way to breakfast and see how light falls on the graves and flags. I know many of the names. I was active with many of them when they were living. That, too is part of aging in America.
Trail walking at Lake Macbride State Park on April 21, 2023.
There is an official Earth Day website which indicates how far the observance has come since 1970. In addition, there are proclamations by governing bodies, festivals supporting “Mother Earth,” and oil and gas companies touting their actions to capture CO2 emissions and recycle plastics. I’m not sure any of this helps reduce the impact of humans on our shared environment, yet it may be better than a stick in the eye.
Exploitation of the environment has been basic to civilization, especially in the settling of North America. In the early days, North America was about land speculation and extraction of wealth from the so-called “newly discovered” place. It began with production of sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco and indigo, which required cheap land and abundant labor in the form of slaves or indigent white folks forced to migrate from Britain. We had and continue to operate an extractive economy supporting exports and consumers. Few want to give up their handheld mobile device or other modern conveniences to help save the planet, so the extraction part of the economy may grow along with the burgeoning population. By 2100 there are projected to be 10.4 billion people on our blue-green sphere, according to the United Nations.
People should do more to improve the environment than what each of us can do individually. It seems obvious that everyone: every business, organization, government, and individual must pull together to solve the climate crisis. Importantly, our political system must take the lead in climate action, regardless of the political outlook of individual elected officials. This holds true in authoritarian regimes where there are no elected representatives. When I wrote “everyone,” that’s what I meant.
What should we do? That’s an easy answer: support large scale, organized actions that will make a difference. If regulators say we should reduce CO2 emissions in new automotive products, then support it. If the Gulf of Mexico dead zones are a problem, then regulate the chemicals and processes that dump into the Mississippi River watershed. If our air is polluted by emissions from coal and natural gas-powered electricity generation, then convert to wind and solar. Solutions exist to clean up our air, water and land pollution. There are processes to develop new and better solutions to the climate crisis.
Every day I do something small to help mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis. I reduce water usage, adjust the thermostat a few degrees, turn off lights when not in a room, and minimize the amount of driving I do in our personal vehicle. Every day is Earth Day in our home, so the annual remembrance is not that important to me. What matters more is finding common ground to enable more solutions, reduce pollution, and clean up our land, air and water.
Spend a few minutes reading the Earth Day website, located here. Then talk to someone you know about how important it is we take action today to rescue our much abused planet and make a livable home for our civilization going forward. It could make our lives better in the process.
It was 64 degrees at 3 a.m. Saturday morning. That’s weird.
A gardener contends with weather, so temperature anomalies come with the work. The vegetables I plant in my Midwestern garden have a wide range of tolerance to climate, moisture and light. They have been bred and propagated because of those qualities.
Potatoes and onions should be safe to plant now, and I did. I direct seeded spinach when putting in the onion sets. Garlic is doing fine after being uncovered from winter. There are many apple and pear blossoms in the early formation stage. Pollinators are already abundant, seeking the early purple flowers and dandelions in the lawn. The greenhouse is packed with seedlings. What could be wrong?
Regardless of weird weather, Spring has arrived and it would be difficult not to feel a part of it. I can see leaves on deciduous trees bud and burst into foliage in front of me. All is well in the garden, or at least as good as it gets.
What will weird weather mean this growing season? I don’t know. I am, however, both concerned, and getting used to it. The overall trend does not look good.
If you aren’t following Bill McKibben on the climate crisis, you likely should be. In yesterday’s edition of his substack, The Crucial Years, he wrote,
This week’s Fort Lauderdale rainstorm was, on the one hand, an utter freak of nature (storms ‘trained’ on the same small geography for hours on end, dropping 25 inches of rain in seven hours; the previous record for all of April was 19 inches) and on the other hand utterly predictable. Every degree Celsius that we warm the planet means the atmosphere holds more water vapor; as native Floridian and ace environmental reporter Dinah Voyles Pulver pointed out, “with temperatures in the Gulf running 3 to 4 degrees above normal recently, that’s at least 15% more rainfall piled up on top of a ‘normal’ storm.”
Get ready for far more of it; there are myriad scattered signs that we’re about to go into a phase of particularly steep climbs in global temperature. They’re likely to reach impressive new global records—and that’s certain to produce havoc we’ve not seen before.
The Crucial Years, We’re in for a stretch of heavy climate by Bill McKibben, April 15, 2023.
McKibben is not one to use hyperbole. He must realize the downside of doing so. In social media, instead of seeing McKibben’s work promoted, the right-wing spokesmodel for all things cultural was getting attention. Even climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann snarked about the Georgia congresswoman’s comments.
It is getting difficult to follow the scientific discussion of the climate crisis. Partly, major news media find it too dull a subject for headlines. Partly, the right-wing media noise machine drowns out serious topics in public discourse. Yet we notice temperature anomalies when they happen, and wonder for how long we can go on the way we are.
While we wonder, we’ll need onions, apples and spinach.
The overlooked part of President Joe Biden’s remarks about the January jobs report is this, “As my dad used to say, ‘A job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity.’”
Make no mistake that Democrats should tout the achievement in jobs growth accomplished during the Biden administration.
Next week, I’ll be reporting on the state of the Union. But today — today, I’m happy to report that the state of the Union and the state of our economy is strong.
We learned this morning that the economy has created 517,000 jobs just last month — more than half a million jobs in just the month of January.
And in addition, we also learned that we — there were half a million more jobs created last year than we thought, so the January report is updated. I mean, excuse me, the December report is updated.
Add that all up, it means we created 12 million — 12 million jobs since I took office. That means we have created more jobs in two years than any presidential term, than any time, in two years.
That’s the strongest two years of job growth in history by a longshot.
Remarks by President Biden on the January Jobs Report, Feb. 3, 2023.
I’m more restrained in my reaction to the jobs numbers because business continues to focus on deregulation, profit, and shareholders rather than employees. Having a job is good, yet what kind of work is it, and how long will it last? There are unresolved issues between capital and labor.
By the time I entered the workforce in 1968, the post-war economic boom was ending. We didn’t understand it at the time, yet business had resisted progress with workforce since the post-Civil War era when a few people — John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, E.H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, and others — tried to capture the entire economy to serve their own interests. While the Gilded Age capitalists, or Robber Barons as they are better known, were beat back through regulation, large corporate interests are again dominating the industrial landscape in today’s society. A small number of companies push the limits of anti-trust regulations to grow big and prosper anew. The same regulations that broke the monopolies.
After WWII, there was a business movement to create “good jobs.” Companies like General Electric, Kodak, General Motors and Coca-Cola were large scale employers who valued putting returning G.I.s back to work and created what today seems like exceptional benefits packages. Profit-sharing, bonuses, pensions, health care, and even a “guaranteed income” program were all part of generous perquisite packages for loyal employees. These actions were partly self-serving, i.e. to gain employee loyalty and support profitable business enterprises, yet these capitalists viewed employees differently than we do today. Growth in wage workers would fuel a consumer society bursting at the gills in the 1950s.
It is difficult to pinpoint one villain in the conflict between employers and employees in the post-Reagan era. In any case, I point to human resources management consultants. The 40th president set the tone by firing air traffic controllers during the PATCO strike. Much less flashy was the hiring of consultants and implementing ideas the main goal of which was to drive out human resource costs. Whatever romantic attachment to so-called “good jobs” persisted was underscored by the quiet changes by human resource consultants to remove the expense of employees from business operations large and small.
Yes, we should congratulate Joe Biden and company for the what they did to get people back to work after the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, we should encourage the administration to tax business fairly, act on the climate crisis, and do what’s right for employees and retirees in a rapidly changing business environment. Jobs aren’t the main issue in society today. Regulating business is.
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