As world burns, a weak America’s climate fail makes us prey for monsters like Manchin, MBS
As Europe swelters, a weak-looking Joe Biden is played by Joe Manchin at home and MBS in Saudi Arabia. It didn't have to be this way.
In England, the place that invented the railroad and mastered the subway with London’s majestic Underground, the government is telling folks to stay off trains in the capital for the next couple of days. That’s because they can’t guarantee that the rails won’t buckle or melt in an extreme heat wave — the worst ever recorded in the nation’s long history.
How hot is it? Temperatures in scorching southern England are predicted to hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius (the old record of 101 degrees F was set in 2019). In addition to the railroad warnings, British workers are spreading grit on roads that also might give way in the extreme heat, and schools are going remote so English kids don’t have to go out like mad dogs in the midday sun.
At least no one has died ... yet. The same cannot be said for continental Europe, which has already been broiling for several days — just the latest in a rolling barrage of heat waves to strike France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece that climatologists say are more frequent, longer, and more intense because of the greenhouse-gas pollution that causes climate change.
In Portugal, officials logged 238 excess deaths in a just-ended one week period. True, it’s difficult to link specific fatalities to global warming, but that’s small solace to the sanitation worker in sweltering Madrid who suffered a heat stroke and died, or the Portuguese pilot who was killed in a crash while battling the wildfires ravaging his homeland.
The European heat wave is nature’s latest sign that not only are we behind the 8-ball on reducing the fossil-fuel pollution that’s causing this hellstorm of fire and death, but now we’re trying to solve the climate crisis while it’s already well underway. So far 2022 is shaping up as an epic year for climate disasters; currently, an abnormally large percentage of the planet is seeing hotter temperatures than usual, on top of more powerful storms like the recent flooding that devastated Yellowstone National Park.
“I wish everyone on Earth knew how genuinely ‘off the charts’ key planetary trends are right now, and how abnormal and critical it is,” Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, wrote on Twitter this weekend. “Things like atmospheric CO2 fraction, heat extremes on land and ocean, biodiversity loss and extinction rates. All alarms should be going off.”
As Americans, the story we’ve always told ourselves in order to live is that the United States is the essential nation that always rises up to meet those global alarm bells, from World War II straight through to the current crisis in Ukraine. But our nation’s military and diplomatic might (for better or worse) looks nothing like America’s long-running addiction to oil, which is turning us into a pitiful helpless giant.
It all came to a head on Friday as President Biden pulled a rare “double Neville Chamberlain,” as his country’s need for an immediate fix of cheap, planet-destroying crude oil made America’s commander-in-chief look hopelessly weak in two places at once. That America just can’t quit fossil fuels caused POTUS 46 to kowtow to a murderous dictator in the Middle East, even as events in Washington showed the Biden administration is held back by shortsighted greed on Capitol Hill from doing much of anything to end our oil oligarchy at home.
As a U.S journalist who holds the press freedoms of the First Amendment sacred, I have never been as disappointed and demoralized by Biden as the moment Friday that he fist-bumped Saudi Arabia de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the vile monarch who personally ordered the violent death of a critical Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, feared to have been dismembered with a bone saw after his body was never found.
One of a number of reasons that Biden rallied just enough voters to oust Donald Trump in 2020 was his proper moral outrage over the killing of a U.S.-based journalist, as he branded the Saudis “a pariah” state. Apparently American morality is only valid when gas prices are under $4 a gallon, though. Biden’s flipflop — to travel halfway around the globe to hand a stone-cold killer a photo op to restore his global credibility — shows that America is still held hostage by Middle East dictators’ ability to manipulate world oil prices.
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Ever since the 1970s, Americans have been warned about the political dangers of failing to end our dependence on foreign oil from unstable, antidemocratic regions like the Middle East. Biden’s willingness in 2022 to chuck the Bill of Rights out the window for an ounce of black gold was exactly what they were talking about. But while I believe Biden’s actions in the present are shortsighted, self-serving and will be judged badly by history, I also have to acknowledge that he’s playing the horrible hand he was dealt by a generation of faux leaders that came before him.
It was just over 34 years ago — June 24, 1988, to be exact, in the last year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency — when the New York Times carried the front-page headline, “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate.” That expert, the NASA climate scientist James Hansen, said at a Senate hearing that “[i]t is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.’’
Instead, there has been so much waffling.
Writing for the New Yorker on Saturday, the climate activist and writer Bill McKibben offered an excellent history of congressional cowardice and inaction on climate that long predates last week’s news that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — a multimillionaire from continued coal royalties — is so far using his veto power as the fulcrum of a 50-50 Senate to prevent any environmental legislation from passing in 2022.
McKibben reminds us that every single Republican and Democratic member of the Senate’s “millionaires’ club” voted 95-0 in 1997 to urge then-President Bill Clinton not to join the rest of the world in signing the Kyoto Protocols to reduce fossil-fuel pollution, and that Republicans cowed by the newly formed Tea Party (which got “Astroturf” funding from the oil billionaire Koch brothers) killed 2009′s “cap and trade” plan to curb pollution.
But the legacy of failure that starts with blowing off that 1988 early warning and leads directly to this weekend’s conflagrations in Europe has many fathers — the greedy oil companies whose lies about climate science really launched today’s disinformation culture; the weak leaders in both parties, including George W. Bush who warned that America is “addicted to oil” only after invading oil-rich Iraq on a mountain of lies, but also Barack “All of the above” Obama embracing fracking; and senators who care more about this quarter’s campaign contributions than their own grandchildren. Joe Biden didn’t start the fire. He was just the poor sap who was handed a water pistol and told to put it out.
America could have spent these 34 years displaying our strengths as a nation — becoming a world leader in clean, alternative energy and cutting politically smart deals to place a lot of these new, decent jobs in places like Manchin’s West Virginia to ease the difficult transition out of long-standing obsolete industries like coal. Instead, get-me-through-the-next-election politicians thought it was smarter to send some of those kids from Appalachia off to fight deadly wars in the Middle East, to keep prices at the pump a few pennies lower. That incurable chemical dependence on oil is what made the so-called leader of the free world look like a 98-pound weakling, wilting in the Jeddah heat.
Meanwhile, Manchin’s pro-polluter insurrection on Capitol Hill will be long remembered as the last stand of a dying regime determined to take all of us down with them. The irony is that — as you watch hundreds of Europeans drop inside their sweltering flats or succumb from heat stroke this week — Manchin’s legacy will probably involve causing even more deaths than the Butcher of Riyadh. The West Virginian’s pride and greed — the first two of the seven deadly sins — has made him a Maserati-driving multimillionaire while allegedly working as a public servant. But if the Bible that they glorify every Sunday in the hollers around Farmington, W.Va., is accurate, the senator’s sins will ultimately bring him to a place much, much hotter than 104 in the shade.
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