As the world burns

At 85 years old, Dorothy Galliano – whom the New York Times described as “a vibrant fixture” in her neighborhood, the Seward Park section of Seattle – didn’t have air-conditioning. In the Pacific Northwest’s largest city, cooled most of the time by sea breezes and its frequent clouds, only 44 percent of homes do, the lowest of any metro area in the United States. In a few short hours last Tuesday, that conventional wisdom turned deadly.

Seattle firefighters found Galliano inside her overheated home after neighbors hadn’t seen her for a while. A window was open just a crack, and her TV set was on. She was one of at least 125 Americans, with the number still rising, whose deaths were attributed to a heat dome that settled over the Pacific Northwest and sent temperatures to levels once thought unimaginable, including a record 108 degrees in Seattle last Monday. In addition, authorities say hundreds more have died just across the border in Canada, where the scenic mountain town of Lytton burned to the ground.

But if Seattle’s sweltering residents turned their TVs to national news, they would have seen a lot more coverage of the sudden condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., where about 145 people have died or are missing in the rubble, than of the slow-motion tragedy in their opposite corner of the nation. As the crisis of a planet overheated by greenhouse-gas pollution intensifies every year, the media somehow struggle with telling this story – helping the general public to shrug about the dangers, and giving cover to elected officials who either want to deny the crisis or horse-trade as if this is just more politics-as-usual.

The sense that the world is on fire was only amplified with dramatic pictures from the Gulf of Mexico just off the coastline of our southern neighbor, where an undersea natural-gas pipeline exploded so that part of the sea was essentially ablaze. Surely now, with such powerful images, and with climate change contributing to so many weather-related deaths, America’s leaders would be compelled to take bold action, right?

In the reality-based world, the Senate moderates who negotiated a just-under $1 trillion infrastructure deal with President Biden – its final passage is anything but assured – made sure to strip out most of the administration’s original climate-related provisions. That included a national clean-electricity mandate that would have sped up the end of fossil-fuel-fired power plants, as well as tax incentives for wind and solar power and most of money proposed to spur more use of electric vehicles. Team Biden has assured angry progressives that the dollars will come in a second bill to be passed through budget reconciliation, which would just need the votes of all 50 Democrats (plus the tie breaker, Vice President Kamala Harris).

Excerpted: ‘As the World Burns, DC Slow-Walks on Climate’

Commondreams.org