“Our collective tendency is to wait until big problems become catastrophic before dealing with them. Most of the time we’d rather not pay attention. We have all we can do to make a living, bring up our kids decently, save a bit for retirement, hopefully have a bit of fun along the way. We assume others will take care of the biggest threats. …
“Americans speak a lot about ‘revolution’. We’re a nation born of revolution. What we don’t talk about enough is a revolution in our thinking and behavior – realizing that we are not above and outside the natural world but part of it, that we cannot continue to exploit and plunder for profit, that there is something called the common good that requires personal sacrifice, and that those of us who are better off have a moral duty to sacrifice the most.”
Belize, Fiji and Mozambique (among many other countries) “owe staggering amounts of money to various foreign lenders. They face staggering climate risks, too. And now, with the coronavirus pandemic pummeling their economies, there is a growing recognition that their debt obligations stand in the way of meeting the immediate needs of their people — not to mention the investments required to protect them from climate disasters.”
“Electric grids can be engineered to handle a wide range of severe conditions — as long as grid operators can reliably predict the dangers ahead. But as climate change accelerates, many electric grids will face extreme weather events that go far beyond the historical conditions those systems were designed for, putting them at risk of catastrophic failure. …
“[U]nless grid planners start planning for increasingly wild and unpredictable climate conditions, grid failures will happen again and again.”
“It could have been a lot worse.” Indeed.
I usually don’t post things a month and a half old but Yikes!
