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The Climate Is Making Us Pay for Being Stupid and Flawed
A friend from Boone, North Carolina, sent this photo of his beloved town. In his words, “The downtown is destroyed.” It does indeed look that way. In case no one was paying attention — but I think most people are — climate change is no longer a thing that might happen in a few years. It’s happening now, and the world is being burned (washed, blown, melted) away in a display of active verbs that used to be reserved for the pages of screenplays.
In autumn 2024, those verbs are some of the most common ones being used in news articles, on social media, and spoken by humans all over the planet:
“The Town of N burned to the ground, leaving 10,000 people homeless.”
“The community of N was washed away by raging rivers, resulting in billions of euros of damage.”
It is North Carolina and other parts of the southern East Coast of the United States; last week, fires raged in Portugal, and two weeks ago, central Europe was devastated by floods never before seen. We are taking small steps to build an energy infrastructure that could have staved off this devastation had we begun 30 years ago — today, those steps are too few and too hesitant. We are like toddlers at the starting blocks going against…
