Around the world last month millions were displaced, hundreds of thousands lost their homes, thousands died and billions of creatures, large and small, drowned in the floods that have inundated cities, towns and farmland in Nepal, Turkey, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Marseilles, Milan, India, Wales, Guatemala, Morocco, Algeria, Vietnam, Croatia, Nigeria, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria. And yes, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. This collection of videos documents the flooding seen across the world in September.
Also last week, "Climate Week" in NYC, saw Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub hounded off stage by climate activists and a NY Times newsletter describing her interview, which was continued backstage, as follows: "She said she believed that the world should continue producing and burning oil and gas until every last molecule had been extracted from below the ground. When I asked her when the world should stop using oil and gas, she replied: “The day that should happen is the day when we run out of oil and gas.” She's still peddling the Carbon Capture lie, clutching the last flimsy excuse to continue unfettered drilling.
I am reminded of the term "desk killers, " a term coined by Dan Gretton in reference to the white-collar perpetrators of the Holocaust and other historical genocides who sit behind their desk and make corporate decisions that cause the deaths of millions, but rarely face prosecution.
Many other slightly less wealthy individuals have sought out places dubbed "climate havens," places like Asheville, North Carolina, where they hope they cannot be touched by the heat or the hurricanes.
But climate chaos will spare no one. It may come first for the poor, the unfortunate many who still rely on subsistence farming, the millions without the means to evacuate, protect their property, or afford homeowners insurance. But eventually every person will be impacted. When roads and cell phone service disappear, when mules are required for delivery of medicine, food and water, when grocery stores are empty, "Things get pre-modern very fast," as Bill McKibben so eloquently put it.
Even the desk killers will eventually feel the consequences of their short-sighted, quarterly shareholder report driven, insistence on producing and burning "every last molecule of oil and gas." In the meantime, the poor are paying the ultimate price all over the world.
AND RIGHT HERE AT HOME...
What can we do? We must take away their social license. Name names. Call out the climate criminals and those who take their money, and make them come out from behind those desks and face the consequences of their "financial" decisions. We must demand real change until the politicians and leaders fear us more than the loss of those oil and gas dollars.