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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: Extrapolations [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-01

Has anyone been watching the Apple TV series Extrapolations? I just finished it last night and for the first time experienced what an apocalyptic future brought about by climate change might be like. It’s a terrifying picture, depicting how humans adjust as the global temperatures continue to creep higher, sea levels rise, and the air becomes unsafe to breathe because of rampant fires. Yet still, humans hold onto hope that they will somehow be able to heal the earth.

“Extrapolations” is a bracing drama from writer, director and executive producer Scott Z. Burns that introduces a near future where the chaotic effects of climate change have become embedded into our everyday lives. Eight interwoven stories about love, work, faith and family from across the globe will explore the intimate, life-altering choices that must be made when the planet is changing faster than the population. Every story is different, but the fight for our future is universal. And when the fate of humanity is up against a ticking clock, the battle between courage and complacency has never been more urgent. Are we brave enough to become the solution to our own undoing before it’s too late?

"We wanted to focus on what we call the 'messy middle,' " series creator Scott Burns told NPR in an interview. "Because before we get to the end, there's a lot of life that we're all gonna have to go through."

Burns, whose first episode launches at a UNFCCC climate conference in the 2050’s, consulted with Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and James Hansen for Extrapolation. The series was inspired by Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement.

Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements.

The show focuses on twenty years between the 2050s and the 2070s, showing how conditions worsen and how people adapt. One of the recurring characters, Ezra Haddad, suffers summer heart, a congenital condition brought about by a mother’s inhaling too much smoke. Later in the series, when he reappears, he is battling dementia, a consequence of summer heart, and is losing the ability to remember his dead wife. He has to discontinue storage of most of his memories. Ezra works for Pack whose employees pretend to be loved ones who have died so that people can reconnect with their presence. One of his clients is Natasha.

Episode 6 talks about the importance of letting go and not letting the past hold up the present. Ezra begins to live in the now and enjoy the love of a little child who loves him like a father, finds companionship in Natasha, and realizes happiness is what we make it.

There is an advertisement in the 2037 episode for a genome technology company working to save animals from extinction; by 2046, researchers are communicating with the last known surviving humpback whale, playing the sounds of a male humpback to ensure she has the will to survive.

There are curfews, wet bulb experiences, fake child bots, and personal oxygen tanks. AI is omnipresent. The financial system is built upon carbon credits rather than money. In one powerful show, a rabbi holds services in a temple. As the camera pans out we see that all the congregants are wearing boots because the temple is flooding. The rabbi is able to negotiate to have the building earmarked as one that will be saved, when he learns this means sacrificing a refuge for the homeless, he abandons the temple and his position.

The episode in India is the most populated one. Citizens are forced to remain inside during daylight hours and vehicles are equipped with thermostats which warn of wetbulb conditions.

There is one show towards the end in which the main character has cashed in her carbon credits to throw a New Year’s Eve party. Her husband, Forrest Whitaker, tells her just before the party that he has decided to totally digitize his life to a data cloud and wait to resume living when the earth is healed. He will disappear from real life the next day.

Amazon Workers Walk Over Failure To Address Climate Change: Hundreds of Amazon workers told executives to “strive harder” as they walked out in protest over the company’s failure to achieve its climate goals, an inequitable return to working in an office policy, and recent layoffs of around 27,000 people. After announcing a climate pledge in 2019, the massive company’s emissions profile rose 40 percent, as it continues to rely on fossil fuels in its massive supply chain of cargo ships, warehouses, trucks, and other distribution channels. “The climate crisis is here now, and this is a real chance to stand together in solidarity to save every last slice of earth that we can,” the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice said in a news release. The NewClimate Institute, a nonprofit that assesses corporate climate pledges, gave Amazon a poor rating earlier this year because their strategy is heavily reliant on carbon credits and offsets.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/1/2172498/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-Extrapolations

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