A perilous warming world

Aware of one climate disaster after another, I’ve been
thinking a lot about the late, great Octavia Butler, who
foresaw the effects of climate change — and our failure to
forestall it — sooner than most of us. Parable of the
Sower, her first installment of what she had intended as a
trilogy, was published in 1993, long before the warnings
about a warming climate became routine. She not only
understood the ramifications for the planet but also, like
many brilliant writers, understood the follies of human
nature.
And what follies they are. Over the last month or so, news
outlets have delivered a daily barrage of terrifying
headlines about extreme weather events and their
consequences. Yet, powerful industries and their
conservative lackeys in Congress have responded by
trying to kill modest measures meant to combat climate
change.
Last year, a Democrat-controlled Congress passed the
Inflation Reduction Act, which included billions for climate
resilience and decarbonization. Not a single Republican
voted for it. Now, a Republican-controlled House is
determined to hack away at the plans to mitigate climate
change. They started by targeting those proposals in their
foolish hijacking of the debt ceiling.
While they were not able to do much damage, they are still
at it. Though the GOP almost always aims to cut taxes, no
matter the damage to the federal budget, House
Republicans have introduced bills that would revoke tax
credits to boost clean energy production and place new
limits on tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles.

As soon as they took the House in January, conservative
Republicans introduced a bill that would sharply increase
U.S. production of gas, oil and coal. It would also limit
restrictions on pipelines and refineries. Needless to say,
President Biden has said he would veto the bill should it
pass the Senate.
But that’s not even the craziest rightwing effort to heat the
planet faster. In January, Virginia’s GOP governor, Glenn
Youngkin, announced that he had rejected Ford Motor
Co.’s overtures about building an electric battery plant in
his state. That’s because Ford has partnerships with
Chinese companies, and, therefore, electric batteries must
be a Communist plot.
Republicans once accepted the validity of science, but as
they increasingly became the lap dogs of fossil-fuel
interests, they also became vocal skeptics of the science
of climate change. That skepticism — or hostility — has
been enthusiastically adopted by the GOP base.
Chris Gloninger, an Iowa TV meteorologist, has resigned
his job because of threats he has received in response to
his forecasts, which often cite the effects of a warming
planet. One asked for his address and warned of an
“Iowan welcome you will never forget.”
Yet, the consequences of climate change that Butler and
others — Marie Lu in Legend, the first of a young adult
trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson in The Ministry for the
Future — forecast are no longer speculative. They’re upon
us.
For days earlier this month, New York City was blanketed
by a haze of smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires.

Right now, Texas is enduring a severe heat wave that is
threatening its power grid. Temperatures in some parts of
the state have broken records, and heat indexes (what the
temperature feels like to the human body) has already
topped 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
Much of the South is in the grip of extreme weather. The
National Weather Service has issued heat alerts for not
only Texas but also Southern Louisiana and Mississippi.
The severe heat, combined with high humidity, has fueled
a series of thunderstorms and deadly tornadoes across
North Texas, Oklahoma and parts of the Lower Mississippi
Valley.
The state of Arizona has capped new housing
development around Phoenix, one of the nation’s fastest-
growing metropolitan areas, because there simply isn’t
enough water. The West has been in a severe drought for
years now, and the extraordinary snowfall of the last winter
won’t do enough to ensure a water supply. The Colorado
River Basin supplies water to 40 million people and fuels
hydropower in eight states; experts say the snowpack has
only provided a “year’s-worth of breathing room.”
Still, human folly could doom any effort to stave off
catastrophe. The artists among us have always
understood our capacity for self-destruction.