A few nights back, I attended a talk on climate change, the extent of it, and how we might yet bail ourselves out from the inevitable disaster that awaits if we don’t change our wasteful ways.

Sponsoring the event was the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that during any other period in American history would be viewed as non-partisan. That, they still are, except that the federal government is now run by an administration that is openly and aggressively anti-science. That leaves scientists no choice but to contradict the federal agencies that, under any other president, would have depended on them. By default, that allies them with the only nationally viable political party that has not turned itself into a cult of personality.

Granted, the Reagan Administration dismissed solar power and the electric car, favoring an economy that favored Republican donors. However, the debate was always open, and scientists were not publicly demonized as anti-American and “woke.” Moreover, medical and other scientific research funds were not slashed as they were last year. Back then, the label “conservative” and the concept of “conservation” were as compatible as the words themselves. It was the Nixon Administration, after all, that initiated the Environmental Protection Agency following a State of the Union Address that warned:

We have been too tolerant [i.e. careless] of our surroundings and too willing to leave it to others to clean up our environment. It is time for those who make massive demands on society to make some minimal demands on themselves.

Sounds like a call for regulation to me, and the early ’70s were noted by the UCS speaker as a hopeful time for environmentalists. Beaches at lakes across America were reopened for swimming, including Lake Erie that had been declared dead in what may have been network television’s first expose. Ugly orange-brown clouds disappeared from cities from New York to Denver and to the West Coast where Jimmy Buffett “spent four lonely days in a brown LA haze.”

Before us the other night, tracking the advances and set-backs of the environmental movement since the first “Earth Day” in 1970 was Erika Spanger, UCS’s Director of Strategic Climate Analytics. I knew her before she was born, and now there she is with slightly graying hair atop her tall, elegant posture, telling me and an audience more my age than hers about a crisis that her kids and my grandkids will be left to solve.

Amazing how she resembles both of her parents. Both friends of mine back at Salem State, they were likely in the gathering with me when that first Earth Day was observed in the year of her birth, as they were in various anti-war demonstrations. And it was likely the next summer that she was with several of us on a camping trip up by Mount Chocorua, carried along in a picnic basket as we moved between lake and campground. Her dad and I challenged each other to a race up a tree, the same tree, the two of us on opposite sides. Erika’s mom and my girlfriend looked up in horror, while between them the little face in the wicker basket grew smaller and smaller. Chuck and I didn’t stop until we remembered that we were already high.

The talk was as informative as it was sobering. She spoke of a 2030 deadline for a significant reduction in emissions, but that was already established when we still had ten years left to meet it. Little has happened to help the cause. To the contrary, the anti-science government of the USA has taken us out of the Paris Accords and gutted most all regulations of the energy industry. Now, she holds out hope for a strategy ironically called “overshoot,” but she realizes that we are stuck, for at least another year, with a government that will not shoot at all.*

My apologies for the lack of quotes, but the swoon of nostalgia didn’t allow me to take notes. Whitman famously wandered out of a talk on astronomy to behold the night sky’s stars; my mind wandered from a talk on our future to go living in the past. Not just Erika standing before me, but her uncle seated next to me, a ringer for his late-brother, and my cousin’s high school basketball coach at Pentucket High School where he also taught Earth Sciences. Could say that stewardship of the Earth runs in the Spanger family.

But I can offer a good idea of her talk by quoting last July’s entry in her UCS-endorsed blog, “The Equation,” in which she declares:

“If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen” loses its bite when the whole planet is the kitchen, and we’re just starting to cook. 

Yes, she’s one of those writers I’d much rather plagiarize than quote, but science, her long suit, is nowhere in my hand, so here’s the conclusion of her blog which serves as a fair summary of her talk last week, a conclusion titled, “If you can’t take the heat, organize the kitchen”:

What can we do? The list is long and—let’s be clear—needs to be part of a longer-term transformation of our society and economy. But there are things we can do today:

• Practice heat safety for yourself and those around you.
• Protect vulnerable people by pushing Congress to pass legislation to protect workers from dangerous heat.
• Defend and restore federal climate science by holding members of Congress accountable…
• Stop the climate gaslighting. We are already struggling to cope with climate change. When people with power deny and downplay the dangers of climate change—while we’re suffering from those very dangers—don’t let them get away with it. Don’t refute the bogus science that they point to, that only gives their bogus science attention. Just point out what they’re trying to do: distract, deny, delay, and keep on profiting.

We’ll obviously need to get ourselves some worthy, qualified leaders first chance we get, lean hard into mitigating and building resilience to climate change, and do more, better, faster.

Ah, there’s that attempt at impartiality when it just isn’t possible to be impartial. Those who are undoing all of our climate agreements and regulations for clean air and water are on one side of the Congressional aisle. They call themselves “the Republican Party,” but they are far from anything that ever included Lincoln, Eisenhower, or either George Bush–nor are they a party, but a cult.

If by “worthy” and “qualified” she means those willing to consider the Green New Deal in whole or even in part, and if the verb “need to get” means candidates who have a chance to win elections, then that leaves the one remaining, viable, national party.

Am I not “impartial” enough to forecast what we need after we get through what will likely be yet another record-breaking hot summer? We’ll see. As Erika Spanger writes:

In the meantime, try to stay cool.

-775-

*A Primer on “overshoot”: