Living in a Nightmare

"Many describe living in a sort of waking, powerless nightmare where an obvious catastrophe is unfolding but society just blithely ignores it."

That's from this Guardian article from May 2022 that could have been written today, and possibly needs to be written every day to wake us up: 

"People have described it as like they are at a funeral but everyone else is treating it as a party. People are still going to college, planning for retirement, doing all theh things as if the future will look just like the past when we know that's not true. There's a delusion of normalcy. . . . Carbon emissions leapt globally last year . . . Wildfires are now a year-round menace to the US west. On Friday, it hit 51C in Pakistan, while India has baked in such extreme, record heat that dozens of people have died and birds are falling from the sky"

You'd think climate change and Covid happening right in front of our eyes would affect our behaviour more, wouldn't you! Denial is a powerful drug.

A new study found that, in the African countries studied, almost half of the population has Long Covid, and "prevalence of hospitalization and admission to ICU was high, respectively 56.38 and 51.56." That'll be the case here in a few years if we just keep ignoring the problem, and our hospitals are in crisis now! And remember when a company was called out when babies were affected by women taking Thalidomide during pregnancy in the 1960s? The company had been warned by a paediatrician, but hadn't acted on the warning. "The criminal trial of employees of Chemie-Grünenthal, the German company that created and marketed thalidomide . . . promised to be comparable in scale and emotional intensity to Nuremberg. . . . The nine men charged with intent to commit bodily harm and involuntary manslaughter went free". Of course they did. Another new study found that 20% of children exposed to covid in utero were diagnosed with neurodevelopmental impairment in their first year. Yet the IWO and CDC still downplay the risk to people. Nobody wants to alert pregnant people and their families to be extremely careful to avoid Covid. By comparison, about 0.1% of children are born with FASD, yet we go to town advertising that there is no safe amount of alcohol to ingest during pregnancy. There is absolutely no safe amount of Covid. And we know there will be no trial or even charges laid for the number of children affected by the lack of action to prevent a fifth of our newest generation from having profound cognitive impairment. 

And in climate news, Cop28 is being run by the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company who believes,

"A phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development 'unless you want to take the world back into caves'." Then he said that the people arguing for a phase-out of fossil fuels are "alarmist" and are "pointing fingers or contributing to the polarisation and the divide that is already happening in the world. . . . Stop  the pointing of fingers. Stop it." 

That last bit is eerily familiar. Any talk of bringing back masks is specifically called divisive because some people disagree with it. This is the new formula for shutting people up: since some people don't want to do the proposed solution, it's dividing the country, and, therefore, this solution should be silenced and the people perpetuating the problem must be allowed to continue without anyone calling them out for it. 

I find the sentiment unnerving. 

Scientifically, it has been made clear that records are being broken across numerous fronts:

"We are now in an uncharted territory. . . . We are seeing the manifestation of those prediction as an alarming and unprecedented succession of climate records are broking, causing profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity."

Jonathan Foley, in Scientific American, explains why the proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) solution won't work at any useable scale, citing cost, inefficiency, and lack of direct targeting. 

"They are largely a ploy by Big Oil to delay action to phase out fossil fuels. These projects give fossil fuel companies a greenwashing boost, cloaking pollution underneath fake environmental responsibility, helping them claim that they are taking serious climate action, all the while continuing to build out additional fossil fuel infrastructure and rake in trillions in profits. . . . Carbon capture is being used to distract the world from rapidly phasing out fossil fuels, all on the taxpayer's dime."

Peter Kalmus wrote in Newsweek: 

"Everyone on Earth needs to know that the meeting has been overrun by fossil fuel executives, making it a sick, planet-destroying joke. There's no real hope of stopping catastrophic global heating until we fix this. . . . If you want to help, and you should, forget recycling. Instead, fight the fossil fuel industry every way you can. . . . They clearly signaled to the world that they plan to blithely continue dishonestly destroying Earth's habitability for the sake of corporate greed. They are literal supervillains, stealing our future. . . . Things did get more cynical and more evil, with recent revelations that the UAE has been abusing its host role to strike side deals to expand fossil fuels. This stuff is straight out of the movie Don't Look Up. . . . The nations of the world obviously need to adopt a common-sense fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty that ramps down fossil fuels in a globally equitable way. This is not rocket science. But we will never get this so long as fossil fuel executives and lobbyists are in charge. . . . I am losing my faith in humanity. Everything here should be obvious to all. To have to write it down, again and again, is deeply painful." 

Absolutely. We have the tools; we know exactly what we need to do, and it is deeply, painful to watch people harmed while nothing is done to prevent it, both with climate and Covid. 

Cop28 runs until December 12. I don't have high hopes for change. But the CDC actually called for masks today!! It was last on her list, but at least she's saying the word (video here - and then check out Amanda's Hu parody of it). It must be bad out there!