Climate Crisis Deepens, When Will We Get It?

This past June 23, I awoke with a thought I often have on this date. This was the day in 1988 that Jim Hansen went up to Capitol Hill to announce that human-caused global warming had arrived.

“The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” the then director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies told the U.S. Senate Energy  Committee. It made national headlines, only to be met with a deluge of disinformation from the fossil fuel industry, whose scientists decades before accurately projected the global temperature increase from burning fossil fuels, and which was funding climate change research as early as 1954. Thirty-six years after Hansen made that statement, the world seems little closer to getting it, thanks in huge part to that fossil industry campaign, by far the greatest corporate crime in history.

The June 23rd anniversary coincided with a heat wave that over the days from June 16-24 roasted 5 billion people in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe. Much of the U.S. was sweltering under heat advisories. Climate Central reported that the global heatwave was on average 3 times more likely to happen because of climate change, and across wide regions up to 5 times more likely. In Mexico and the Southwest U.S., a heatwave that happened in prior weeks was 35 times more likely to happen due to global heating, World Weather Attribution reported. On June 21 Mexico tied its hottest day on record at 125.6°F, while over the course of this year 70% of days in that nation have been extraordinarily hot. Saudi Arabia reported 1,300 heat deaths during this years Hajj pilgrimage, it was reported June 23.

Two key passages:

• …fossil fuel use hit record levels in 2023, growing 1.5% over the previous year to release 40 billion tonnes of CO2 for the first time. The share of global primary energy coming from coal, oil and gas was 81.5% barely budging from 2022’s 82%, despite 13% growth in wind and solar energy. That is the story. Certainly wind and solar have been expanding at rapid rates, but are still only a sliver of world primary energy usage, and not enough to keep up with overall growth in world energy demand, particularly in India and China.
• But it is clear there is only one way to begin stabilizing the climate, massive and rapid reductions in fossil fuel use. Of course, an end to deforestation and a reform of agriculture are also necessary. Yet without significant cuts in burning coal, oil and gas, climate extremes will only intensify. It is also clear that human society is far from making this change. It would involve major restructurings of industry and transportation, and a change in assumptions about consumption and lifestyles. The level of economic disruption that it would cause would necessitate something like a guaranteed basic income. That would involve enormous redistribution of the wealth that has accumulated at the top via a just taxation system.

Read the full post at CounterPunch.