The Retreat from Global Warming and Environmental Protection

By Mel Gurtov

July 18, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Walking It Back

We once took for granted that everyone concerned with global warming outside the Trump administration’s orbit accepted the scientists’ conclusion that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming was the critical threshold. Following on its pullout from the Paris Accords, the administration has ignored climate scientists’ overwhelming findings on the human causes of global warming and stifled publication of their research. 

It has fired numerous government scientists for being environmental “activists,” sought to dismantle federally funded research centers, and eliminated the Environmental Protection Agency’s longstanding “endangerment finding” on threats to health posed by climate change—all in order to promote the interests of the fossil fuel industry.

Yet we thought we could rely on influential outsiders not tied to oil, gas, and coal to stand firm on combating climate change. But as Leah Aronowsky writes for Foreign Policy magazine: 

“climate elites have walked back their previously hawkish positions. Bill Gates, for whom climate change has long been a signature issue, published a memo last October in the lead-up to the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Brazil, or COP30, criticizing the ‘doomsday outlook’ of the climate community. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who as governor of the Bank of England described climate change as a ‘defining issue for financial stability,’ is… aggressively fast-tracking permits for liquefied natural gas export terminals. The same banks that once promised to no longer provide financing for new coal projects or drilling in the Arctic in the name of supporting net-zero goals have recently begun issuing forecasts about the business opportunities that 3 degrees of warming could bring. Even the European Union—long the world’s self-styled leader on climate—has recently retreated from its most ambitious policies, abandoning a planned ban on new internal combustion engine vehicles and watering down its emissions reductions targets in the name of maintaining economic competitiveness.’ 

Taking advantage of these retreats, China has become the “clean energy superpower.”

The West and the US Leap Backwards, China Leaps Forward

What that shift means is that the Western model for mitigating climate change, built around the 1987 ozone treaty (the Montreal Protocol), has failed—a model, Aronowsky writes, that said “establish a scientific consensus about the nature of the threat, cultivate international political concern, and then negotiate a treaty organized around binding targets and timetables that included carve-outs for the developing world.” 

The universally approved ozone treaty has never been followed by any other. Instead of pledges by governments and international conferences, China has presented a model that emphasizes green technology—batteries, EVs, solar panels, wind farms—available for purchase or as foreign aid. Aronowsky concludes: “It turns out . . . that the West was merely inventing a market for the products China now sells to the world.”

Meanwhile, the US continues to leap backwards on the environment. Just last week, the Trump administration discarded a longstanding rule that protected the habitats of endangered animals. 

It is now legal for farmers, fossil fuel companies, and land developers to destroy these species’ nests. This new ruling comes on the heels of another, in March, that exempted oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico from measures to protect endangered species such as whales.

A second administration step last week was the appointment of yet another climate denier to a key post. Matthew M. Wielicki, a former professor without any background in climate science but plenty of podcasts that question it, will lead the US Global Change Research Program, which compiles the National Climate Assessment. 

Hundreds of experts who had worked on this report were fired last spring. Expect that the next NCA will have little if anything to say about drought, wildfires, or other critical events impacted by climate change.

And how about investigating microplastics in seas? The EPA had planned last year to require fish farms in federal waters to monitor microplastics, which can harm public health in numerous ways. But officials recently decided otherwise—and fired one of their own who had dared question the reversal. 

After all, if a fish farm company were required to investigate microplastics, other industries might be required too. Ridiculous. The fired employee is appealing the firing, arguing that removing the monitoring of microplastics was “unscientific, politically motivated, unethical, and an abuse of authority.”

Finally, speaking of retreats, how about the turnabout in the auto industry on battery-powered SUVs and trucks? The New York Times reported July 15 on the sudden move away from those EVs by virtually every auto maker, thanks in no small part to the Trump administration’s elimination of the tax credit on EVs and gutting of emission standards. The Times writes that “the combined cost of this industry about-face remains nothing short of staggering.” But that doesn’t compare with the long-term impact. “We pulled a U-turn while the rest of the world was pushing forward,” an auto journalist says. By “the rest of the world,” he mainly means China, which accounts for about three-quarters of all EVs sold worldwide.

A Few Victories

At the federal level, the environmental protection community has occasionally fought back successfully against the Trumpian anti-science, pro-industry agenda. For example, the administration’s attempted dismantling of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, an indispensable source of weather research, was blocked by a federal judge in June in a lawsuit brought by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the nonprofit organization that oversees the center. The judge issued a temporary injunction. 

In another win, former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recreated a website that Trump had closed down to quash its climate data. The administration had fired hundreds of NOAA employees, several of them resurrected climate.gov as climate.us.

But let’s face it: a government whose leader decides that climate change is a “hoax,” whose political fortunes are tied to the fossil fuel industry, and who holds sway in both Congress and the Supreme Court, has enormous power to turn scientific findings on their head. As the few victories against this tidal wave make clear, it is up to courageous scientists and judges to resist—just as is true for doctors, forest rangers, and whistleblowers who cannot sit idly by while this administration acts against the public interest on vaccines, national forests, and official corruption. 

Fortunately, their efforts are fortified by countless state and local organizations that are protecting watersheds, air, animals, land, and the rights of nature itself.Email

Mel Gurtov

Mel Gurtov is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University.

 

Researchers identify class of 'oddball' meteorite that killed the dinosaurs

University of British Columbia

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Dr. Philippe Claeys, a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia, in front of an exhibit at the Pacific Museum of Earth.

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Credit: Credit: University of British Columbia.

A rare CO chondrite meteorite was the probable impactor that struck Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out 75 per cent of Earth's species, including non-avian dinosaurs.

The findings, published today in Science Advances by researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Paris, Brussels and Vienna, used advanced nickel isotope analysis of samples to narrow down the composition of the deadly Cretaceous-Palaeogene meteorite.

“Carbonaceous chondrites of the Ornans class are definitely not like the typical meteors you find in museum collections,” says Dr. Philippe Claeys, who worked on the study as a visiting professor at UBC.  

“A CO contains much less volatile elements—like carbon, zinc, water and particularly sulphur—than other classes of meteorites we’ve discovered so far on Earth. It doesn’t alter our theory of what caused the extinction event—but it makes it less likely that sulphur contained in the impactor was the smoking gun. The fine debris thrown into the atmosphere would have the primary factor.”

Researchers from Institut de Physique du Globe and Université de Paris conducted high-precision nickel isotope measurements of samples collected over years from a thin layer of clay created across the globe by the impact.

“This is challenging work,” adds Dr. Claeys, a professor with Vrije Universiteit Brussel currently visiting the Pacific Centre for Isotopic and Geochemical Research with Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences at UBC. “Only a minute fraction of the projectile is preserved in the planet’s KT clay layer because the entire meteorite vaporized upon impact.”

Many questions remain about the origins of the world-shattering meteorite. Potential sources include distant, debris-rich regions of the outer Solar System or even the outer area of the asteroid belt near Jupiter.

A rare impactor

Carbonaceous chondrites make up only five per cent of meteorites so far sampled on Earth. Carbonaceous chondrites of the Ornans class — CO chondrites — make up a tiny fraction of that group. They are some of the most primitive and untouched materials in the solar system.

“Being impacted by such a rare, distant projectile really underscores how unlucky the dinosaurs were,” says Dr. Claeys.

The Cretaceous-Paleogene impactor was roughly 10 to 15 kilometres or six miles wide. It hit at an estimated 64,000 km/h forming the massive Chicxulub crater. The impact zone is buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aef4858 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

The origin of Cretaceous-Palaeogene impactor revealed by nickel isotopes

Article Publication Date

17-Jul-2026

 

Dr. Philippe Claeys, a visiting professor at the University of British Columbia, in front of an exhibit at the Pacific Museum of Earth.

Credit

Credit: University of British Columbia.

 

Residue of the Cretaceous-Paleogene impact. Dark clay-rich KT boundary layer in Stevn’s Klint, Denmark used in the study.

Credit

Credit: Dr. Philippe Claeys.

An asteroid doomed the dinosaurs. But did it drive tuna evolution?

Yale University

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A long-held theory suggests that the asteroid strike that killed off non-avian dinosaurs — and most large marine predators — 66 million years ago created an ecological opportunity that spurred the rapid evolution of tunas, and other large, fast, and warm-blooded predators. 

The idea is that tunas and their carnivorous counterparts filled a niche left by their massive, predatory predecessors, much like how mammals replaced the world’s non-avian dinosaurs after the K-Pg extinction event. 

But that theory doesn’t quite hold water, according to a new Yale study that provides new insights into how these economically important fishes evolved their imposing size, speed, and ability to regulate their body temperatures in cold seas. 

For the study, researchers combined genetic data with fossil specimens to create the most complete time-calibrated evolutionary tree available for Scombridae, a family that includes tunas and mackerels along with about half of living warm-blooded, ray-finned fish species.  

Their analysis placed the origins of Scombridae near the time of the asteroid strike. However, it also showed that tunas, mackerels, and related predatory fishes independently evolved large body sizes and endothermy — the ability to regulate body temperature — long after the K-Pg extinction.  

“Our results demonstrate the K-Pg extinction did not trigger the evolution of tunas and related large, endothermic predators,” said Chase Brownstein, a graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the study’s lead author. “We show that the body plans of these predators evolved over tens of millions of years and that there is no connection between the origins of endothermy and large body sizes in these lineages. More broadly, this paper highlights the need to be cautious when interpreting the evolution of species’ body plans directly from evolutionary trees.” 

The study published on July 8 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Thomas Near, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), is the study’s senior author.  

According to their findings, differing types of endothermy — a trait that helps tunas and other predatory fish swim fast — evolved independently three times in Scombridae lineages, with at least two of the three occurring 10 to 15 million years after the asteroid strike. Endothermy and the animals’ large body sizes were thought to be linked, but the study showed that there is little evidence for this. Instead, increases in body size occurred sporadically throughout the evolution of tunas and other Scombridae lineages. All told, the body plans of today’s tunas and mackerel evolved over the course of 50 million years, the researchers said.  

The dataset for the time-calibrated evolutionary tree included tissue and DNA samples collected from several institutions, including the Yale Peabody Museum.   

The study of Earth’s biodiversity and this specific research, is a key part of Yale Planetary Solutions — a campuswide initiative that unites leaders and innovators across disciplines to catalyze solutions to the most critical threats facing people and the planet, Near said.   

Better understanding the evolutionary biology of tunas, a nutrient-rich food source for people worldwide, can support conservation efforts, he added. Populations of the commercially important Atlantic bluefin tuna, he noted, have dramatically declined over the last several decades due to overfishing.  

It also has potential implications for the study of human health, he said.  

“Understanding that endothermy independently evolved multiple times in tunas and mackerels provides insight into the fundamental machinery underlying metabolism and thermoregulation,” said Near, who is also the Bingham Oceanographic Curator of Ichthyology at the Peabody Museum. “These are systems that are central to disease and health conditions in humans, such as obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. To be clear, there is no explicit connection here, but studying how our biodiversity has dealt with similar challenges over the long sweep of time is relevant to better understanding human health.” 

Coauthors of the study are Laura R.V. Alencar of Yale, Holly K. Kindsvater of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Christine E. Thacker of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Dylan K. Wainwright of Purdue University, and Richard C. Harrington of the Marine Resources Institute at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. 

The research was supported by the Yale Training Program in Genetics, the Bingham Oceanographic Fund of the Yale Peabody Museum, and the National Science Foundation. 

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DOI

10.1098/rspb.2026.1257 

Article Title

The prolonged reemergence of megapredatory pelagic fishes

Article Publication Date

8-Jul-2026

 

The Permian Analogy: Climate Literacy and the Urgency We Cannot Grasp

By Phil Wilson

July 14, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Eugene Kaspersky/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

The Permian period ended about 250 million years ago with the largest recorded mass extinction in Earth’s history, when a series of massive volcanic eruptions is believed to have triggered global climate change that ultimately wiped out 96 percent of marine species in an event known as the “Great Dying.”

According to Justin Penn, a doctoral student at the University of Washington (UW), the Permian extinction can help us understand the impacts of climate change in our own current era. — Mike Gaworecki , Mangabay, 2019

Looming Climate/Environmental extinction never quite rises to the immediacy of mass panic due, perhaps, to the way in which we digest the environmental story – in vague fragments, with no crescendo, no context and no imagined conclusion. In the US we are a nation of climate illiterates. We absolutely must be aware of the undeniable fact that our climate narratives have been significantly curated by filthy amounts of oil industry cash. The Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute – like all outposts of the Koch Network – have money to burn when it comes to public manipulation. Consequently, when the climate edges into our thoughts it has plenty of room to move, to squirm, to reinvent itself over and over again, and it slinks away on cool nights. Our innate propensity for denial compels us to reach for the false promise offered by natural moments of respite. Right now, as I write, the temperature lingers at about 65 degrees Fahrenheit on July 8th at 7AM. Trees frame my backyard, lush verdant and immortal – the reminder of natural resilience. I have almost forgotten the week of record breaking heat that tip-toed away three days ago.

When the weather heats to levels of unprecedented discomfort, right wing trolls crowd into online comment sections to write, “It’s summer!” with an air of triumph. Bear with me, there are ways for laymen like ourselves to contextualize our climate nightmare – to make it vivid, visceral and immediate. Climate literacy is absolutely critical to our political selves. When I claim that we fail to see climate as a reason for mass panic, I do not make any assertions about the validity of anyone’s personal emotional response regarding climate. I am simply saying that we are in a climate predicament that objectively represents a degree of stunning urgency that remains just beyond our conceptual grasp. The climate threat may be quantifiable, and concrete, but ultimately, we will live or die via the mechanisms of mass psychology and political organization. “We the people” will either react in adequate numbers to the threat of extinction or not.

The balance between hope and despair may concern some climate activists, but it is a non-issue for me. I follow the seam of fossil fuel industry propaganda that invariably seeks buoyant optimism about climate. If anything, we have been starved of life-giving despair. Despair is the precondition for resistance.

Climate ambiguity is always about “when,” never about “if” – natural/tectonic forces across geological time have destroyed life in episodic acts of extinction. CO2 is nature’s preferred weapon – given enough time and a limitless quantity of greenhouse gasses, heat has built to lethal and epic levels. All rational people understand that current levels of greenhouse buildup will (at some vaguely specified point in time) wipe us off the face of the earth if we don’t achieve the iconic net-zero. But can greenhouse gasses deliver natural/historical catastrophes in human time scales? Climate change has always, until quite recently, been tethered to geological time. We therefore have no historical analogies – climate change has no Hiroshima, no Nagasaki – its cautionary tales can only be studied in “deep time.” We, however, futilely measure the trajectory of climate with the feeble ruler of our own lifespans. Most scientific climate modeling fails to project beyond the year 2100 – 74 years into the future, barely less than an average human life span.

“When you talk to policymakers and stakeholders about sea-level rise, they mostly focus on what will happen up to 2100. There are very few studies beyond that,” says Hélène Seroussi, the study’s first author and an associate professor in Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.”

This 2024 study being referenced above warns of the overwhelming likelihood that Antarctica’s ice shelves will completely collapse, thus creating a five and a half foot rise in sea levels by the year 2200. In a culture that strains its moral scrutiny to envision a future more than a single lifespan over the horizon, how impossibly remote is the year 2200? As I walk about my home town of Northampton, Massachusetts, many of the stately houses were built at roughly that point in time aimed backwards – 174 years ago Emily Dickinson would have turned 22 in 1852. Emily Dickinson exists as a current and relatable feature of our local culture. We gaze into the recent past with immediate access to our history, but fail to form even the most tentative intimacy with the near future.

The climate will get us – (ourselves perhaps) our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren, and our great, great grandchildren have increasingly diminishing likelihoods of a decent quality of life at best, and of mere survival at worst. The question cannot rationally be posed about if, only about when the climate comes for our descendants. By the year 2300, scientists cannot rule out a fifty foot rise in sea level. That would put us on the trajectory to fill the low lying US mid-west corn-belt with Mesozoic Era style inland seas. But the Mesozoic departed 66 million years ago and we are talking about the US hinterland in less than 300 years. Geological time confuses us.

Climate journalism has failed to conceptualize the urgency of our predicament. We are descending into Permian levels of biological misery at warp speed. The earth is heating up (in mere) centuries to levels of distress that, in the most catastrophic event in the earth’s 540 million year history of complex life, may have taken tens of thousands of years to transpire.

Climate overheating is a story – heretofore rooted in “deep time” – that requires basic geological historical literacy to nominally comprehend. The Permian “Great Dying” occurred 251.9 million years ago at the Permian/Triassic boundary. The Permian/Triassic extinction event provides the most analogous template to understand the present risks and probabilities of catastrophic climate heating. The mother of all mass extinctions provides us with missing context – the inevitable result of runaway CO2/greenhouse gas buildup will once again be the demise of species. What is missing from both the past Permian event, that resulted in the mass extinction of most living things, and the currently transpiring capitalist perpetrated, profit motivated extinction event, is the timeline. Scientists do not know how quickly the Permian extinction built up to lethal conditions, and obviously, we have little consensus regarding our current, suicidal act of bio-destruction. Are we doomed in a half century, or will it take many hundreds of years? Does the end Permian offer us a means to give our current extinction event familiar context? The parallels create a potential road map that requires an ability to see geological details as thematic, repeating events.

Human catastrophes cannot be siloed, for our predicament, however uniquely self-inflicted, follows the same laws of physics that determined the results of volcanism and other natural perpetrators of greenhouse buildup. The Permian “Great Dying” is believed to have resulted from two interacting events, the protracted outgassing from the Siberian Traps Large Igneous Province (whose remnants exist in present day Siberia) coupled with the volcanic ignition of adjacent coal fields. Coal fields sequester tens of millions of years of accumulating carbon, and the burning of massive quantities of stored carbon instantaneously (in both ancient and current examples), unites the end Permian with our present moment.

The Permian extinction has often been described as coming close to sterilizing the planet via an explosive rise in greenhouse gasses, and concomitant temperature rise. Oceans achieved the temperatures of hot tubs, anoxic and acidified waters destroyed coral reefs, and inland Pangea became a vast desert. Descriptions are speculative, but the study of end-Permian strata leaves little ambiguity. This from the geology text – Out of Thin Air: Dinosaurs, Birds, and Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere (2006) gives readers an image of our probable destiny if capitalism’s environmental program limitlessly rides on current momentum:

“A voyage 251 million years ago would put us at the very end of the Permian Period. Even at the poles there is no ice. The world is hot and desert-like. There is little plant life, so little, in fact, that soil erosion has caused great dune fields of sand to form. The river systems look like those we saw in our Cambrian voyage where there were no meandering rivers, only ephemeral braided streams—the kind of sheetwash and streamflow that today is found at the bottom of glaciers of alluvial fans—places without vegetation, for it is the roots of plants that allow rivers to have bank stability, which is required for meandering rivers. This place is akin to the time before land plants. Harsh, hot winds, filled with grit, only make the atmosphere seem hotter. And hot it is—a place of high carbon dioxide and low oxygen. And it reeks of rotten eggs. Great bubbles of hydrogen sulfide are periodically emerging from the sea and larger lakes, for we will find that both of these are filled with bacteria producing this deadly gas.”

Scientists have recently developed a more detailed, focused image of the end Permian – its time lines, its isotopic features of temperature and atmospheric composition. Previously we had imagined the Permian Extinction as an event wholly embedded in geological time scales. The Siberian Traps erupted in a series of pulses over the course of some two million years. The first eruptions preceded the extinction event by 300,000 years leading to the theory that atmospheric and oceanic conditions degraded gradually over an enormous time span. However, a recent paper out of MIT suggests that the fossil record fails to reinforce the theory of a protracted, incremental slide toward mass extinction. Species did not die out in an evenly dispersed sequence of volcanic events across hundreds of thousands of years – they exited the fossil record in a geological eye-blink, a sudden, monstrous event that gathered up even the most resilient and long lived members of the biosphere in a virtual moment of geological fury. Fish, Trilobites, Rugose Corals, Synapsida – all tumbled into a crevice in time:

“The end-Permian mass extinction, which took place 251.9 million years ago, killed off more than 96 percent of the planet’s marine species and 70 percent of its terrestrial life — a global annihilation that marked the end of the Permian Period.”

The MIT research summary quoted above goes on to emphasize the primary finding of the study:

“The new study, published today in the GSA Bulletin, reports that in the approximately 30,000 years leading up to the end-Permian extinction, there is no geologic evidence of species starting to die out. The researchers also found no signs of any big swings in ocean temperature or dramatic fluxes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When ocean and land species did die out, they did so en masse, over a period that was geologically instantaneous.”

It is well known that volcanic outgassing raised CO2 concentrations over eons of time leading up to the mass extinction, but the extinction itself did not take place in parallel fashion (according to the above linked paper) to the buildup – it struck “instantaneously.” In geological time frames instantaneous means, “give or take 31,000 years.” Stanford Geologist Jonathan Payne, after reading the MIT study, concluded, “It is even possible that the main pulse of Permian extinction occurred in just a few centuries.”

This speculative possibility points ominously toward our own era – a time of extinction level pulses that transpire at a velocity exponentially greater than at any time in geological history (including the Permian/Triassic event). In the past year, the CO2 atmospheric concentrations have jumped by 5 PPM while following a curved trajectory that has unfailingly seen escalating rates of CO2 concentration.

If the rate of C02 PPM grew statically at 5 PPM per year (it is, however, not static, but increasing, as the above chart proves) we would add 1,000 PPM in a mere two hundred years – replete with feedback loops, massive release of frozen methane stores, political turmoil and likely collapse of ocean currents and terrestrial food chains.

If the MIT study refines our understanding of the nuances of geological time scales regarding mass extinctions, another geological study out of the University of Leeds offers yet another warning. This study, focusing on ocean temperatures across the entire Phanerozoic, concluded that slow natural processes, particularly rock weathering that sequesters carbon in limestones, likely regulates earths temperatures and act as brakes in the form of a negative feedback loop. As temperatures increase, so does rock weathering and concomitant carbon sequestering. However, current CO2 and temperature buildups – transpiring at far faster velocities than those of the past, may not allow for natural regulating processes to catch up. The Leeds study warns:

“We shouldn’t be complacent when viewing ancient hot climates that supported diverse ecosystems, and we must understand that they were established extremely slowly, and may not have been as hot as recently proposed. Earth’s natural regulation systems are slow, and humans must perform our own climate regulation to keep the planet in a habitable range.”

The speed of human caused climate change is the key that makes natural systems of remediation and compensation inadequate. In addition, we cannot view our current environmental crises as a mere matter of greenhouse gasses. We have a host of toxic substances – PFAs, mercury, lead, micro-plastics and other neuro toxins that offer parallel methods of lethal assault, or that operate in tandem with overheating. The rise of fascism coincides with environmental destruction in ways that are complex and reinforcing. Extreme heat causes diminished cognitive/emotional functioning. Capitalist inflicted environmental destruction unquestionably impacts the human capacity to function politically – and this phenomenon remains almost completely unexplored by researchers.

Heat waves may alert us to our gathering apocalypse, but scientific study already tethers us to the Permian event. We are at the end game,with moth numbers already plummeting by 50%. The Permian was uniquely inhospitable to insects – a class comprised of thousands of species, each with such spectacular breeding velocity that only the most oppressive environmental circumstances can threaten their survival. Commercial bee colonies have collapsed catastrophically in the US – by 70% according to estimates. 32% of amphibian species are in danger of imminent extinction. North American bird populations have dropped by 29% since 1970. Freshwater fish populations have been reduced by 81% since 1970. The trajectory of our unravelling biosphere is hardly a secret, and yet we witness no mass mobilization, no frantic resistance commensurate with the statistical evidence regarding greenhouse buildup, increasing heat, escalating weather extremes and dying species.

Phil Wilson also writes at Nobody’s VoiceEmail

Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker and union member. His writing has been published in ZNetwork.org, Current Affairs, Counterpunch, Resilience, Mother Pelican, Common Dreams, The Hampshire Gazette, The Common Ground Review, The Future Fire and other publications. Phil's writings are posted regularly at Nobody's Voice (https://philmeow.substack.com/).