Why is the world ignoring Acapulco? | Will Bunch Newsletter

Boo! What? ... No, that had nothing to do with Halloween. That was meant to be my commentary on Philadelphia sports fandom, which seems to have reverted to its normal, soul-crushing state of affairs as embodied historically by Mitch Williams, Chico Ruiz, and Ronde Barber. Since all five teams are mostly cursed most of the time, there’s no need to “wait ‘til next year.” You can start rooting for the Sixers or Eagles to break your heart right now!

📮 It’s quite the commentary on today’s Republican Party that I got few responses for a sane alternative to the new House Speaker, Christian nationalist Mike Johnson. Tom Ferkler suggested Bucks County’s moderate GOP Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick: “He has shown a willingness to be nonpartisan, and is someone the Democrats could work with to move the business of running the country forward. Of course, this would never happen, but I’m dreaming the American Dream.” Exactly.

This week’s question: Philadelphia’s likely next mayor, Cherelle Parker, has suggested the National Guard could help straighten out the drug-ridden Kensington neighborhood. A good idea, or a dangerous overreach? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

If someone forwarded you this email, sign up for free here.

Nearly a week after Hurricane Otis blew up like an atomic bomb and then slammed into Mexico’s iconic Pacific resort city of Acapulco with 165-mile-per-hour winds, grief-stricken residents are still pulling dead bodies from the city’s main harbor.

“It was really horrible,” Luis Alberto Medina, a fisherman, told the Reuters news service. “We’ve already found the bodies of others.” But six other people that Medina knew or worked with on the waterfront are still lost, as authorities now concede the toll of the dead or missing on the Mexican coast is nearing 100 and could go higher, as thousands continue to suffer without power or provisions.

In normal times, such death and destruction in a North American city that’s long been a hugely popular tourist destination for U.S. citizens would be a Page 1, top-of-the-hour story. But in a crazy, mixed-up world from Maine to the Middle East to Capitol Hill, Hurricane Otis barely dented American news media. And that’s a shame — not only because of the human tragedy getting ignored, but because the massive storm may have been nature’s most powerful warning yet that climate change has quickly shifted from a scientific theory to a five-alarm emergency.

Less than a day out, weather forecasters were describing Otis as a tropical storm that might bring heavy rain to Acapulco, but little more. But in the course of 12 hours over the overheated Pacific waters — in what some meteorologists are calling the most extreme example of “rapid intensification” they’ve ever seen — Otis gained an astonishing 115 mph in wind speed to become a major hurricane, in what National Hurricane Center forecaster Eric Blake called “a nightmare scenario.”

“Something like this was bound to happen,” Michael Mann, director of Philadelphia’s Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, told me, as he noted that the Pacific Ocean near Acapulco was unusually warm for this time of year, the result of both record temperatures linked to fossil-fuel pollution as well as the El Niño weather pattern. “It’s going to happen to Miami. It’s going to happen to Tampa,” Mann said.

Remarkably, the Hurricane Otis catastrophe happened less than a week after publication of a major report from New Jersey climate scientist Andra Garner of Rowan University, which found that instances of rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin have doubled over the last half-century, and manmade climate change is almost certainly the culprit. In releasing her paper, Garner noted that oceans have absorbed some 90% of global warming.

With so much more work to do on governmental and societal changes to drastically curb greenhouse-gas pollution, you might think Hurricane Otis and its assault on Acapulco would be a tipping point. But then you might have thought that about the Maui wildfire, or the choking wildfire smoke that darkened the eastern U.S., or any of the other floods or calamities that struck in the summer of 2023, as Planet Earth shattered all-time temperature records.

Instead, the status-quo, big money fossil fuel interests who care more about quarterly profits than your grandchildren have been taking advantage of a distracted world. ExxonMobil just spent a whopping $60 billion to buy a major U.S. shale oil producer, Pioneer, in a deal that is doubling down on fossil fuels as scientists plead for them to be phased out. The new U.S. Speaker of the House, Louisiana GOPer Mike Johnson (who believes the earth is only 6,000 years old), is a climate-change denier who’s received about $240,000 in campaign cash from Big Oil and Gas since 2018 — meaning that ignorance will continue to hold sway over science in Congress.

I reached out last week to Penn’s Mann in part because he’s just published an important new book, Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis (check it out or buy it here), that’s meant to remind us that humans have faced climate crises before and survived by adapting. In noting that Earth has outlasted everything from a massive, volcano-induced temperature spike 56 million years ago to a Mesopotamian drought that led to a border wall to halt migrants (sound familiar?), Mann is ultimately making the case that there’s still time to address the current crisis — but not a lot of time.

“Is it too late?” Mann asked. “The most important lesson from the record of earth’s climate thus far is its duality — its resilience and fragility.” The scientist said that humans have developed the technology and knowhow to prevent Earth’s temperature from a dangerous additional rise of three degrees Fahrenheit — but what’s needed is political willpower, because what the climate history of our planet “tells us is that if you push it a little too hard, it can spin out of control.”

Mann’s optimism is truly uplifting — but you have to worry when a hurricane lands in Acapulco and it doesn’t make a sound.

Question: Among all the bad GOP candidates, was [Mike] Pence the most tone deaf? — Via Harlan S. (@harspector) on X/Twitter

Answer: (Note: I went to bed Monday night planning to answer a question about James Harden, who was traded at 2 a.m. ... whew!) Harlan, there’s no doubt that the former vice president, who dropped out Saturday in Las Vegas declaring “this is not my time,” should have realized that observation from the start. Pence’s brand of Republicanism, with fiscal conservatism and muscular foreign interventions, died and was buried along with Ronald Reagan on a hilltop in Simi Valley. The latest poll from Iowa strongly suggests that a) Nikki Haley is the emerging choice of anti-Donald-Trump GOP primary voters, and b) that she still lacks the juice to pass the Dear Leader of a former political party that has become an authoritarian cult.

Another day, another presidential candidate in what is shaping up as America’s most muddled race for the White House since 1968. Minnesota Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips — maybe the only member of Congress less well known than wackadoodle new House Speaker Mike Johnson — last week announced a long-shot primary challenge to his own party’s incumbent president, Joe Biden. With lots of cash in his pockets but seemingly next to nothing in his brain, the “centrist” Phillips will not be our 47th president, but he does raise a fair question. As the oldest POTUS in American history seeks another term, where is the next generation of leadership coming from?

The cleverest, most effective leader in America right now isn’t one of the dozen or so folks currently seeking the Oval Office. He’s not even an elected official, although I’d argue he’s already a heck of a politician. That would be Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, who capped a remarkable two months on Monday by announcing that the UAW’s targeted strikes against Ford, Stellantis, and GM have resulted in the biggest raises and best contracts for auto workers since organized labor’s former heyday in the 20th century. Most labor pundits thought what Fain and the UAW accomplished — a roughly 25% pay raise over four and a half years, with cost-of-living adjustments and other perks — wasn’t possible, but the union leader had a plan and, more importantly, a vision.

“This contract is about more than just economic gains for auto workers,” Fain said Monday in announcing the final tentative deal, with GM. “This a turning point in the class war that’s been raging in this country for the past 40 years.” Fain is now turning his gaze not just toward organizing non-union shops like Elon Musk’s Tesla, but toward cooperation with other unions that would reverse the long decline of the American middle class. With his penchant for quoting Bible verses and his humble Indiana origins, Fain, now in his mid-50s, is the leader we need right now. You could almost call him presidential.

Sigh. This time last year, the Phillies were in the World Series. They were also in the World Series on Oct. 31, 2009 — defending their then-world championship against the hated Yankees. That’s when I wrote my opus about Philadelphia and its sports fans, and how we went from self-hating battery throwers to the kind of folks who (some 14 years later) would save Trea Turner with a standing ovation. I credited one pivotal moment — the day in 2007 in Denver when Phillies’ players rushed out during a hellstorm to rescue workers trapped under a windblown tarp. “This incarnation of a once-woeful baseball franchise seemed to carry none of the old baggage of the [20th] Century. Philadelphia began to take a closer look at itself.” Read the rest (typos and all): “The day Philly stopped being a joke.”