Gotta Maintain a Sense of Humor About U.S. Climate Disruption

In the ‘gee willikers’ department of today’s news, tucked away and mostly out of sight, a new analysis has provided the first measurement of a nations’ liability in stoking the climate crisis. Two centuries in to the Industrial Revolution, the bill has come due, accusing the US of inflicting more than $1.9tn in damage to other countries from the effects of its greenhouse gas emissions.

Whoops. That doesn’t even include a tip, nor does it tally up the damage done within America itself.

For those of you too young to recognize gee willikers, a word of explanation

The phrase goes back to the 1800s and is defined as “expressing or characterized by surprise, enthusiasm, or excitement. Frequently with the implication of naivety or childlike wonder.”

Coincidentally, that was the beginning of this whole climate own-goal and long before we were able to say ‘oh fuck’ either in print or at the dinner-table. Which begs the question, are there dinner-tables anymore? Do families actually sit down together to break bread in these scattered times?

No matter, it was with my own brand of childlike wonder that I read that a researcher at Dartmouth College--and lead author of the study--actually pulled his head out of his ass long enough to publish—and then get a full-blown article printed in the Guardian UK newspaper. We’ll leave the term ‘full blown’ alone for the moment, but there are implications.

We no longer concern ourselves with actual crises, but simply report on the current stage of our cumulative financial liabilities in that regard

You can’t get any closer to childlike wonder than that.

In an historic eye-wink, mankind has chosen to take the easy way out from actually trying to do something about our misbehavior on this loveliest of planets to simply keeping score. Good on us. A sports metaphor to the rescue—will Tom Brady actually quarterback a winning team into his fifties before the seas rise, America burns down, the equator becomes uninhabitable and Europe runs out of Russian gas?

Stay tuned.

America’s Supreme Court probably has an opinion on that, but its justices are distracted, cowering in the closets of their homes at the moment with the porch-light on.

But Chris Callahan, our man at Dartmouth, laid America’s cards on the table and it’s a busted-flush

In poker, a busted-flush is a hand containing four cards of the same suit and one of a different suit. It’s also a term for a promising person or thing that turns out to be unsuccessful. Think Boris Johnson in the UK, Joe Biden in America and the entire human species, sucking its thumb and toddling off toward the end-game.

According to Callahan, we Yankees are not only increasingly unpopular in the world, but our greatest accomplishments are now found to be poisoning our neighbors. Forget life expectancy (where we are 46th), education (6th), health care (30th), dental hygiene (3rd) and homelessness (2nd). Who is Callahan to point fingers? We occupants of the land of the free and the brave have the most guns, resulting in the most mass shootings, the highest rates of suicide and the world record for imprisoned citizens.

“For the first time,” say Callahan and Dartmouth, “we can show that a country’s emissions can be traced to specific harm”

Really? The first time?

200 years of this shit and we’re only now getting specific. Well, thank god for that. And here I’d thought only a few Polar bears were at risk here and there.

We knew we were poisoning the earth at the birthplace of the industrial revolution. That was, if you care to look it up, Manchester, England from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. More evidence that it was the Brit’s fault. Here’s what Hugh Miller, author of First Impressions of England and its People (1847) had to say:

“One receives one’s first intimation of Manchester’s existence from the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that overhangs it. There is a murky blot in one section of the sky, however clear the weather, which broadens and heightens as we approach. And now the innumerable chimneys come in view, tall and dim in the dun haze, each bearing atop its own pennon of darkness.”

Looked at more reasonably, it’s just another example of the crimes of Boris Johnson and those damned Tories. Pennons of darkness, indeed

Certainly America meant no harm. No harm, no foul, everyone knows that. For the past half-century or so, we’ve been off-shoring our industries as fast as our greedy little hands would allow. Sweat-shops in China and other Asian countries are certainly no longer any consideration of ours and, not to put too sharp a point on the pencil, if Joe Manchin had shown a bit more cooperation, we would be leading the world instead of falsely accused of dragging our feet.

Does the world not understand that the United States is exceptional?