Three years ago, I had a long conversation with Camille Parmesan, one of the world’s leading climate scientists. By then I had spent a couple years educating myself about the perils of our warming planet. Our visit gave me a chance to run my theory of climate change past an expert.
“My understanding is that the Earth has been warming much faster than scientists expected,” I said. “And if that is true, our window for taking necessary action to forestall the worst has gotten much narrower than it seemed 15 or 20 years ago. Is that fair?”
“Yes,” Parmesan said.
Then she offered a sobering primer on the state of the planet.
“The warming is much more than what climate scientists expected,” Parmesan told me then. “We weren’t expecting this level of impact at this time, the 2020s. It’s something that I really thought of as happening in the 2050s. We thought we had more time.”
I asked her about state of things a few decades from now if we didn’t act.
“It’s not the kind of world I would want to live in,” Parmesan said.
After our talk, there were some hopeful signs, chiefly the passage of federal legislation designed to jumpstart efforts to save the planet. As I understood them, the measures were a hopeful start, but still insufficient to prevent the worst.
Then came the last few weeks, and the Trump administration.
“He is abandoning efforts to reduce global warming, even as the world has reached record levels of heat that scientists say is driven largely by the burning of fossil fuels,” the New York Times wrote last week. “Every corner of the world is now experiencing the effects of these rising temperatures in the form of deadlier hurricanes, floods, wildfires and droughts, as well as species extinction.”
I thought about what Camille Parmesan had told me three years ago. As such, it seems certain that what is happening now will greatly increase the chances that our children and grandchildren will inherit a beautiful planet reduced to a chaotic hellscape. People in North Carolina, or Los Angeles, or, frankly, many people living along the Gulf of America, already know what that feels like.
Yet it says a lot about the current moment that the climate implications of this administration scarcely warrant a mention.
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The world still struggles to process what happened in the Oval Office last Friday, when the course of history seemed to shift on live TV. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Lech Walesa, the hero of Poland’s march to democracy, was still alive to sign a letter to Trump by former political prisoners in that country. Walesa and the others were filled with “horror and distaste” at how Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelenskyy was treated by the American president and vice president.
It was President George W. Bush who first used the term “axis of evil,” and in the ambush of Zelenskyy, as American leaders parroted the talking points of Vladimir Putin, it seemed as if the United States Government, (but not it’s people, more on that in a bit) had gone over to that side.
The Oval Office ambush of a courageous ally happened at roughly the same time that Elon Musk joined podcaster Joe Rogan to call Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” among other things. We have now seen where this kind of language leads. We have to take these people literally. Nothing is safe. The Republican House of Representatives has proposed $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid, which would deprive coverage to 16 million poor people. I’m sure Medicare is on the block, too.
A Texas child died in a measles outbreak, about the same time as a vaccine skeptic was sworn in as secretary for Health and Human Services. The stock market is tanking under the threat of needless tariffs and trade wars. Trump wants Greenland, then Canada, or is it vice versa? And on and on…and on. By now the insane litany is familiar. I feel sorry for the humorist Dave Barry, who at the end of every year, famously satirizes events of the previous 12 months. How do you satirize this?
But what bothers me as much as anything is the overt cruelty with which this administration has gone about its business. They have seemed positively gleeful about the suffering they have caused. The smirk of Vice President JD Vance and Musk wielding a chain saw are defining images of what’s going on.
My friend Fred Rogers, the historically beloved icon of children’s television, famously said, “There are three ways to ultimate success. The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.” What planet was he living on? What planet are we living on?
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This is one of the darkest moments in human history, but I remain hopeful, and here’s why. It has to do with a three-word phrase in a musty document kept in the National Archives. The three words pop up frequently at MAGA rallies, but I proudly repurpose them here.“We, the people.”
The United States is still a democracy and the people still have the power, the people still have the final say. But we have to exercise it. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” Edmund Burke said. There has been a lot of nothing happening these days.
That has to change, and I believe it will. In fact, I think that what’s coming will make the Tea Party Movement seem like a tempest in a teapot. This week I called the office of my Congressman, Rep. Craig Goldman of Fort Worth. (please substitute the name of your representative here.) When I asked, Goldman’s aide told me that they were trying to arrange a town hall meeting with constituents in Fort Worth. I didn’t really believe the aide, but he seemed like a nice young guy just doing his job so I played along.
A day later I learned that Republican leaders have told representatives to stop holding town halls, or to do virtual events with constituents, so they can weed out the rabble rousers. Unacceptable. We are going to be heard. And heard. And heard.
This is not how I want to be spending my days at this point in my life. But I will never forget my conversation with Camille Parmesan and what current events mean for generations to come. I refuse to forget the admonition of my friend, Fred Rogers. Kindness, compassion and love are still the truth and the way.
We are better than this, and we are about to show it.
One final thing.
Please share this.
