I’ve always liked environment activist Bill McKibben, longtime prof at Middlebury College and prolific writer, though sometimes I disagree.
For example, he recently parried a reader’s hint that just maybe overpopulation poses our greatest challenge in mitigating the exponential fallout of climate change by saying he didn’t think so, given that where population is rising most, Africa, there’s little contribution to carbon discharge .
While that may presently hold true, the reason for this is Africa’s falling short on Western amenities that along with their comfort and convenience, foster carbon discharge.
The fact is Africa is incipiently engaged in catching-up to the follies of more advanced economies in adopting technologies promoting carbon discharge, especially with regard to excavating industries in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As Africa’s clamor for meat likewise grows with surging population, more deforestation is occurring, and we know that spells diminished carbon sinks, fostering destabilization of weather patterns.
As I write, prolonged drought plagues Africa, creating a vast risk of starvation and malnutrition. What it doesn’t need are more mouths to feed.
In game refuges, elephants and even rhinos, seen as competitors for flora and landscape, are being slaughtered to feed a growing population in Angola, Zimbabwe and, yes, in Bechuanaland, Africa’s last great elephant sanctuary.
McKibben entangles himself similarly in joining the chorus advocating more wind turbines, despite emerging evidence of their dire consequences, at least for seabirds and whales, according to the recent 600 page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).
On the other hand, he’s right about so much of our climate morass.
This year was the hottest on record, with next year unpromising. Phoenix, our fastest America growth city, endured 31 days of 110F temperatures, its emergency rooms overflowing with the burned and dying.
And he’s right—there’s no safe place to move. Vermont, where he lives, sheltered by its mountains, suffered an atmospheric river this past summer, resulting in unprecedented downpours inflicting catastrophic flooding.
Last night, I learned of America’s new housing crisis, this one weather related. It seems 30-year mortgages can’t withstand climate change, natural disasters occurring not only more frequently, but with accelerating violence.
Take Florida, for example, where home insurers are pulling out. Where they remain, and I mean across the nation, annual premiums increases are eroding many homeowners’ ability to pay.
Currently, 9% of the world’s population, or 600 million of us, lives outside what’s known as “the climate niche,” meaning safety zone. By century’s end, an estimated one third of us will fall into this doughnut hole.
Now comes the orange hair threat assuming office, January 20, 2025. Denying climate change as a hoax, he pledges “drill, baby, drill.”
Fasten your seatbelts everyone. Turbulence ahead!
–rj
Brimmings: up from the well 