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My Own Backyard [1]
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Date: 2022-07-16
Not the Smokies, but we’ve had two like this in as many years, one of which reached the main drag in Gatlinburg.
It would have been hard to have avoided the torrent of bad environmental news we‘ve been exposed to over the past week; dozens of cities in China experiencing 40 degree Celsius + temperatures, southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece) experiencing similar temps and raging wildfires, and the UK declaring its first ever red alert, with fears of perhaps 42 Celsius readings over the next few days, and fears of perhaps thousands of deaths. Pakalolo, who regularly keeps us abreast of such developments, has reported that the Arctic is heating at 4 times the estimated rate of the rest of the world.
I suppose that we will all grow accustomed to this seemingly inevitable runaway train that is our feckless and electoral powerlessness (we don’t elect corporate ceo’s, and we don’t prosecute pac money bribery). What hit me personally for the first time, this week, is that I can no longer be assured that I won’t be around to see the worst of this. At seventy-three years of age, it’s beginning to look as if within a mere ten to fifteen years, I may well be still alive to see the major portion of our planet become unlivable.
There is also a chance that my wife and I could very well succumb to heat related health crises, power outages, water contamination, flooding, and wildfire dangers. All of these problems have surfaced just within the last month in our own backyard of East Tennessee. And it is not even August. I need not even mention the the big FU the house Republicans just gave a modest climate bill. It seems that I really am living in the end times. And it is a time in which I really would not care to dwell.
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