I got out of bed this morning, staggered into the bathroom and flushed the toilet. It had stale pee in it from the night before. I washed my hands for 20 seconds. Then I went downstairs and turned on the tap and ran the water for maybe 30 seconds and sprayed a few coffee grounds down the disposal. Steve Scalise, the House Minority Whip, got up, several hours before me, and 5 minutes later flushed his toilet four times, three times more than necessary to make absolutely certain everything cleared. As it did, he chuckled thinking of a sailboat getting caught in a maelstrom. He was obsessed with the Coriolis Effect, even though he didn’t know what it was, being an anti-science God-fearing man. Then he let the sink water run for 2 minutes because the hot water felt good on his cold hands, but he keeps his home temperature to 72⁰.

About the same time as Steve, Joe Manchin, faux Democrat senator from West Virginia, also flushed and washed several times that morning and stopped at Mr. Car Wash to get his silver Maserati washed and polished on the way to the Dirksen Senate Building. At an interview that afternoon he said, “There is a balance between climate change and spending.” According to Andy Hirschfield of Salon magazine (10/2/2021), “Joe Manchin has made $5.2M from coal — and by blocking Biden’s climate change agenda, the senator continues to get rich, taking more fossil-fuel money than any other Democrat. This obviously allows him to feel comfortable owning a hot Maserati plus a $700,000 yacht to cruise down the Potomac, a river you can’t swim in but cleaner than most of the major rivers of the world. This is a balance?

Then I turned on the news. The news was coming from Madagascar. The United Nations was saying that over 1 million people are approaching starvation in southern Madagascar from several years of virtually no rain. This makes this famine to become the first in history to be caused solely by climate crisis (The Independent, 11/3/2021).   Fast shift to a bag of skin-wrapped bones that was a human baby in Afghanistan, hanging on to what is barely defined as life.  The report stated, “How inaction on climate change can worsen the crisis in Afghanistan.”

    The Maldives, Madagascar, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh produce a combined total of 3.46% of the world’s per capita carbon emissions. The U.S. produces 15.52%. The world average is 4.79%.  The Maldives and Bangladesh are drowning in unpotable water; Madagascar, Afghanistan, Western U.S., and Australia are turning to dust.   This is a balance?   

Steve and Joe’s cavalier, flippant attitude about climate change is not only irresponsible it is dangerously misinformed. Their comfortable, water-opulent lifestyle is riding on the premise that climate change is a balancing act between the forces of the natural world and the forces of the human world. And apparently, they believe the playing field is level. Joe believes food on the table for 14,000 coal miners in West Virginia and food for 1 million starving people in southern Madagascar cancel each other out. Climate change is determining the fates of the coal miners as much as the babies of Afghanistan and Madagascar. Steve believes, “Carbon emissions have been around since before man walked the earth … It gets warmer, it gets colder, that’s called Mother Nature.” Regardless, “Our rights come to us from God, not from lawmakers.” This is Joe and Steve’s idea of a balance, but Joe and Steve are horribly mistaken; we are living in a dangerous complex of accelerating imbalances pitting nature against human social justice. It is the new reality.

    On the surface of it, this sounds like the same, over-used, tired old dilemma between the rich of the world hording their trillions, while 9 million people die world-wide from starvation and dehydration every year. But the stakes have changed drastically, and any suggestion of a leveling off of the ratio between the haves and the have-nots is off the table. The climate change King Kong is loose and horrifying us into a reality of a world hurtling rapidly toward the very probable tipping point of 1.5⁰ C above preindustrial values. We have been bashing this knowledge around about as seriously as we do a tennis ball for decades, long after we knew the truth and the fate of Earth. Now, decades of inaction and being led far astray by the Scalises and Manchins of the world, we come to Saturday, November 13, 2021:

Glasgow

• Saturday’s agreement does not achieve the goal of limiting Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Delegations left Glasgow with the Earth still on track to blow past that threshold toward a future of escalating weather crises and irreversible damage to the natural world.
• In last-minute changes, India’s climate negotiator proposed that language calling for the “phaseout of unabated coal and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies” be changed to the “phase-down.”
• During an informal plenary, leaders from countries on the front lines of climate change noted the proposed deal does not do enough to help them. But at the end of two weeks of negotiations, most countries said the deal would at least put humanity on a path to meeting its collective goals.
• Climate activists held a “funeral” for COP26” at a Glasgow cemetery Saturday morning. About 100,000 people marched in a climate justice rally last weekend.

If there is any balance among the many facets of climate change, I’m not sure where it is. The much used term, “tipping point,” implies that a balance exists at some point in time between a correctable situation and an uncorrectable one, and that point may have been passed. It really doesn’t make any difference because there are two things we should be doing, rather than worrying about achieving a balance: 1) eliminating the use of carbon; and 2) preparation for repeated global disasters. Our hope is not to correct an unattainable old balance but create a new one that won’t be seen for many lifetimes. Given our short attention span, that would be difficult under normal circumstances but we will have plenty of frequent reminders as we move into the future.