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It's the weather on top of everything else

Who will decide the fate of our swiftly tilting planet?

Author

Brad Johnson
December 07, 2021

PRESENTED BY MAHLER’S HAMMERSCHLAG

Yesterday morning, I was fortunate to sit down and chat with Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a progressive, rural climate hawk challenging the conservative and widely disliked Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) in Oregon’s newly drawn Fifth Congressional District, a swing district in the wildfire-ravaged center of the state, connecting Portland to Bend. Jamie is, in my mind, quite frankly wildly overqualified for Congress, but she believes that public service and our democracy are necessary work.

In the afternoon, the fossil-heated front that shattered records in the West began to settle in, bringing weird blobs of semitropical heat to mix in with the cold air in the valley of Rock Creek Park. In the evening, the trailing edge of the front swept through my neighborhood, strong, sultry winds stripping leaves off the trees and whipping them into eerie swirls, opening the doors of my memory to A Wrinkle in Time’s opening lines:

It was a dark and stormy night.

In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraith-like shadows that raced along the ground.

The house shook.

Wrapped in her quilt, Meg shook.

She wasn’t usually afraid of weather. – It’s not just the weather, she thought. – It’s the weather on top of everything else.

As I mentioned yesterday, today activists are swarming the streets around the Capitol in the Deadline for Democracy protests to challenge our elected leaders to deliver on their promises. Bravery is the fact of action.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan is visiting our nation’s toxic sites of environmental injustice. The Navy found out it was leaching oil into Hawaii’s water supply this summer, but forgot to tell residents. The AP’s Michelle Chapman rewrote an ExxonMobil press release, ABC News tweeted it out, and voila: Journalism!

Next Monday, scientists and journalists convened by New York Communities for Change, 350 NYC, and Fridays for Future NYC are holding a panel on ABC News’ coverage of the climate emergency.

Today in Hill Hearings:

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Thanks to all who have subscribed. Love is the only weapon which works against IT. —@climatebrad

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