We All Live in Paradise (California) Now
We all live in Paradise now. Paradise, California. With over 80 wildfires currently raging in California and the West, the plumes of smoke have blown over 2,000 miles to the Eastern seaboard, blanketing NYC and other cities in a toxic haze. New York authorities are warning people to stay indoors and avoid outdoor activity -- public health restrictions which residents of California and the Pacific Northwest have been forced to live under for several fire seasons in a row.
This is the new abnormal now for people all over planet Earth. And it did not have to come to this dire place. As I've been banging on about for a LONG time, the climate crisis -- which is now displacing and killing millions of people around the world -- must be criminalized. The executives and politicians who knowingly lied about the growing climate emergency for decades must be prosecuted for their crimes against nature and humanity. And the energy industry must be brought under public control. The energy industry is too essential -- and too dangerous to public health -- to be allowed to operate solely on the profit motive in the private sector. Fortunately, led by Covering Climate Now and the Guardian, an international consortium of media organizations is now covering the climate crisis like crime beat, naming the corporations and power players who are responsible for this global disaster.
Now we need to take the next step and bring legal action against these criminals, to prevent further damage to our suffering environment.
The conversion to clean energy is now an existential imperative for the human race. At current rates of global warming, a significant percentage of the world's population will be exterminated. There is no way to sugarcoat this mass die-off, which has been set in motion by Exxon, Chevron and other energy giants, even though their top executives were warned long ago by their own scientists of the dire consequences of increasing the carbon load in the environment.
Even now, with the world on fire, and plagued by drought and and poisonous smoke, our leaders continue to dither and take half measures because of the continued sway of the energy sector. Enough. For the sake of our own lives -- and those of our children and grandchildren -- we need to take emergency action today.
