The Greatest Crisis Humanity Faces is the Crisis of Denial in the Age of "Global Boiling."
As I write this it's early morning. There are only a few swigs of July left in its bottle. The dregs of it- taste brackish. It's from all the crises we've met over the last while- that defeat us, one by one. Hypocrisy and the crisis of denial are the greatest crisis we face. The path we beat to our destruction won't alter until we make those in charge accept the responsibilities that come with leadership and extreme wealth.
We don't get the dog days of summer anymore, which could be cooled- with a garden hose outside and a box fan circulating air inside our four-bedroom suburban house. Now we have only heat dome days or violent weather days.
Get used to it- say the rich. "Climate change is here." But the entitled don't want to own it proudly as they do the wealth of our nations.
Below my living room window, the asphalt parking lot shimmers from the scorching temperature. I am one of the lucky ones; I have at least a 5000 BTU wall unit AC.
Weather reports on my phone say- today, like yesterday, will feel- as if it was 40 degrees.
"Stay hydrated" is the most available response from journalists on cable news networks to pernicious health symptoms created by the climate emergency. Predictably, there was lots of B roll of people in public pools and splash pads as if this was a heatwave in the 1970s rather than a catastrophic weather event brought upon by unregulated industrialisation that only profited the few. Too many boomers, despite all facts to the contrary, still say "It was ever thus, hot summers and cold winters."
My boomer generation has two speeds when it comes to self reflection. We either forget or reinvent the past to make the present environmental horrors seem normal. I am not sure whether that is human nature or groupthink produced by the billionaires and oligarchs who control our democracies. My money is on the entitled manipulating us to be complacent on this existential threat. The only way they can maintain power and prevent revolution is to desensitise us from our collective experiences of 21st-century environmental traumas.
But the breakdown of our planet's Goldilocks' climate over the last few years after 200 years of accelerated industrial abuse has made even the recent past a world far different than the one we now live in.
In 1975, my parents took my brother Peter and me on vacation to Alberta. That was the year Pierre Trudeau nationalised some of the nation's oil and gas industry and called the new corporation Petro Canada. It was done as a condition by the New Democratic Party to support his Liberal minority government. It was a forward-thinking strategy. But the rich didn't like it so much because nationalised state industries don't bring wealth to the 1%. Instead, they offer prosperity to the whole nation. The rich of the 1970s made the working and middle class hate it too- because they told them it was gone amok "socialism."
My dad drove us to Alberta in a Rideau 500 that pulled a Coleman camper trailer. It was a car of its time, an enormous dinosaur of an automobile with a V8 engine. Outside of excessive and unnecessary horsepower, it didn't come with much else except an AM radio and pushdown lighters on ashtrays located in the front and back of the vehicle for the convenience of smokers who rode in the automobile.
There was no AC because that was considered a superfluous luxury item in the 1970s. Our vacation to Canada's Western provinces occurred in July. There was a Lawrence of Arabia opening scene cinemagraphic quality to our drive across the Prairies on the TransCanada highway because the road undulated in the summer heat.
My brother and I cooled ourselves by putting ice chilled 7 oz glass bottles of coke to our faces before gulping them down until we burped loudly to the consternation of our mother, who sat in the front seat fanning herself with a road map.
After a week-long trek from Toronto, we arrived at Banff National Park and set up our trailer. We spent 5 days nestled between forests and the Rocky Mountains, hiking, joking, arguing and loving our alone a time as much as our family time.
Far from our camper trailer, the Tar Sands had just got underway as capitalism's response to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo.
My dad, who was a curious man, asked a camper on the lot beside us who was an Albertan and sat with us at our open fire one evening, what he thought of these new oil tar sands. "It's going to kill this land, he said, "and the only ones who will get rich from it are the already rich."
Almost fifty years later, that Albertan was not wrong. It changed Canada for the worst. It turned Canada into a Petro State and a giant among the giants of carbon polluters and contributors to climate change. Canada is the fourth largest oil and gas producer, following the USA, Russia and Saudi Arabia, making us a superpower in energy that pretends to be on the right side of environmental fair play. It isn’t though.
The oil sands release three times as much greenhouse gas pollution as run-of-the-mill crude oil. The filthy little secret that most Canadians don't know or don't want to know is they ceded their economy to oligarchs, corporations and the entitled, who will see millions of us dead before they do anything to stop climate change. Putting your plastics in recycling every week won't amount to a hill of beans for the planet's survival until you make the behemoth polluters of our economy pay for their crimes against humanity.
As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because I really need your help this month. Rent for August is coming up and I am fighting to make sure I have it. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John
So true