Let’s Talk About Climate Change (10/12/21)

This week we are launching what we hope will be a year (or more) long focus on climate change with a discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson's novel, The Ministry For the Future, as part of our Obama Book Group (OBG), which meets to read books on President Obama's lists of recommended books.

Climate change has been happening around us for decades, and we've seen growing urgency to address it, particularly among our children and grandchildren, but this year, it became all but impossible to ignore. The heatwave in the Pacific Northwest; wildfires in California with smoke crossing the continent and making the air quality unsafe in the Upper Midwest; historic, devastating floods in Germany, and in our own backyard. This week, a letter signed by 450 organizations representing 45 million health workers laid out the health threat posed by climate change in stark terms: "The climate crisis is the single biggest health threat facing humanity."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that was issued in early August warned that climate change was "widespread, rapid, and intensifying" as well as unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years and that "some of the changes already set in motion -- such as continued sea-level rise -- are irreversible over hundreds of thousands of years." The IPCC Report prompted Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson to write: "The U.N.'s dire climate report confirms: We're out of time."

But, as Eugene Robinson, wrote in another column, "it is not too late to avert catastrophe. We have the means -- solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear -- to do so. All we need . . . is the will." And in order for world leaders, including our own, to start acting, we need an electorate, not just the young activists, that prioritizes policy to combat climate change and complacency. As Kim Stanley Robinson recently observed: "Of course there will be a pressing need to create political majorities that will push using our current imperfect system in effective ways to solve these problems as fast as we can. The need is urgent, and there are lots of good ideas and motivated people. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation."