Wednesday January 6th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: Exceptionally Good Election Results For Our Climate
Dear Diary. Over the last four years, dear readers, you don’t know how close I’ve come to throwing up my hands, declaring that we as a species have no hope because broad action to stymie fossil fuel use won’t occur in time to save our livable climate. Circumstances stemming from the election of just two senators have kept me from changing my tune by just a proverbial hair or eyelash. I started this site in early 2017 at the dawn of the Trump years when it appeared that his administration would be a huge roadblock to get our environmental house in order. Indeed, the lack of world leadership coming from the U.S. has delayed efforts to meet 2030 deadlines to diminish carbon pollution such that we can stay below the recommended 1.5°C below preindustrial conditions.
I’ve written that we needed to cross many political hurdles in order to maintain hope. The first was winning back the U.S. House in 2018 in order to put a check on Trump. Done. The second was winning back the Presidency, ousting Trump while putting in a progressive, pro-environment commander in chief. Check. The third was winning back the U.S. Senate, which I thought would occur at the same time we dumped Trump in November. Now I’m glad to report that it appears as of the writing that both Reverend Warnock and Jon Ossoff have won their Georgia Senate races such that the Democrats will wrest control from the Senate, and the “Grimm Reaper,” Mitch McConnell, will no longer be Senate majority leader. If any of these events had gone south I would be writing that there is not much hope for our climate.
I’m so proud of my home state of Georgia I could burst due to the results of this election. I’m ashamed, though, about Georgia’s slave owning roots. All of my near sixty years Georgia has been a mostly conservative state. Of course, if you know your history, my state was prime real estate in the Confederacy, and my home town of Atlanta, which burned during the Civil War in 1864. After the Reconstruction period of the 1870s Georgia had a near 100 year period of participating in Jim Crow segregation. The 1960s finally saw integration here mainly due to the efforts of another Georgia native son, the Reverend Martin Luther King, and the recently departed Civil rights icon, John Lewis. The more liberal “New South” had a brief stint in Georgia mainly due to Jimmy Carter’s presidency during the late 1970s. Because of a big reaction against racial reforms, Georgia became a solid conservative state with the advent of Reagan in the 1980s and has been conservative ever since…until one Stacy Abrams and others began to turn things around in 2018.
Don’t get me wrong. After the Georgia election the world won’t be full of magical unicorns with a return to the Garden of Eden. The road ahead is still proverbially long and arduous with many potential pitfalls. Since 2018 all of the dominoes I’ve described on today’s post remain in place, but there are many more that might not properly fall. Biden needs to go all in on helping our climate, having only two years to do so before the 2022 election. Fossil fuel corruption needs to be exposed through hearings. We have a 50-50 tie in the Senate with Kamala Harris being the tying vote. At least Moscow Mitch will be gone, but it would take only one conservative Democrat, like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, to vote no on any climate bills, derailing Green New Deal initiatives. And yes…we could potentially loose both houses of Congress in November 2022 should the American public not like the direction that team Biden is taking the United States, especially if legislation does not produce positive economic results.
Anyway, let’s enjoy and celebrate today’s victories. Republicans will be wringing their hands the next two weeks with lots of protesting with some unfortunate violence. This will pass my friends:
When all is said and done, though, the way will be clear for those good dominoes to keep falling.
Here is more climate and weather news from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
Now here are some of today’s articles and notes on the horrid COVID-19 pandemic:
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Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”