It's Time to Look Up

Last weekend, Minneapolis canceled their annual marathon.

It was too hot.

We're talking about athletes who devote their lives to conditioning their bodies to perform under extreme conditions. We're talking about people who run 26 miles in the heat for fun. It was too hot for them.

The numbers are in. This year, the world blew right past the 1.5C target set by the world's governments. Climate cowards hem and haw. They say it's not permanent yet, just a bunch of temporary breaches.

In September, we approached 2C of warming above preindustrial averages. Instead of coming up with a better plan, the affluent and the elite clutched their pearls at doomsayers. They tried to blame everyone but themselves for the chaos and destruction unfolding.

Let's roll the highlights:

The summer started with staggering amounts of Canadian forests burning, more than 42 million acres, doubling the country's previous record. So much forest burned that it covered cities across the U.S. in smoke for weeks on end. It got so hot in July that the entire country of Iran shut down. In Arizona, people were winding up in the emergency room with third-degree burns from falling on the pavement. Cactuses slumped over dead.

Tourists in the Mediterranean got trapped by wildfires and had to be rescued by local emergency workers. Hailstorms battered Europe. Greece lost a quarter of their farmland to floods. In Libya, megafloods swept away 20,000 people. Off the coast of Florida, the ocean turned into a hot tub.

Antarctica failed to regrow its ice during its coldest, darkest months. Last month, it reached its lowest levels ever recorded. Penguins lost 90 percent of their babies. Polar bear moms are struggling to produce milk.

Across the world, shores fill with dead fish.

As we speak, saltwater is creeping up the Mississippi River for the second year in a row. It's starting to taint drinking supplies in New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers will barge in 36 million gallons of water a day. That's the only plan they have to keep residents from dying of thirst.

South America saw their first winter with temperatures routinely above 100F (38C). Scientists called it everything from "gobsmacking" to "absolutely terrifying." They're running out of words.

An entire town burned down overnight.

It's all right here:

How did the west respond?

British news anchors giggled at climate activists and told them to grow up. In Nevada, the tech elite called the police on climate protestors for trying to stop a festival with a carbon footprint of 100,000 tons. The police rammed their blockades with their cars and drew guns on them.

The president of the U.S. said he had "already declared" a climate emergency, while approving more fossil fuel projects than his far right predecessor, saying he apparently didn't have a choice. Then his administration argued that we don't have a constitutional right to a livable planet.

The world's richest man toured America's border. The world's richest philanthropist laughed at the idea of planting trees.

He called it "nonsense."

Newspapers ran op-eds about building up our tolerance to heat. Affluent so-called journalists told the world that climate doomers were overreacting and "going out of their way" to focus on doom instead of hope. Some climate scientists threw hissy fits online when newspapers confused ocean currents, ignoring the larger point. The larger point? Ocean currents, regardless of their name, could start shutting down at any point going forward.

Recently, we discovered that the British government accepted tens of millions in donations in order to derail green building regulations, resulting in tens of billions in losses to homeowners who now have to pay for retrofitting if they want homes that don't rely on a failing grid.

These are the reasonable minds, the adults in the room. The crazier ones are blaming wildfires on arsonists and space lasers. They believe there's secret supplies of limitless water underground. They think more CO2 in the atmosphere means that plants have more food.

We're in uncharted territory.

Every single optimistic prediction about the future was wrong. They weren't just a little bit off. They were decades off. We're now living through some of the worst-case scenarios predicted for 2050.

We haven't even seen the worst of it yet.

This is what the world really looks like with 1.5-2C of overheating. It means endless inflation for basic necessities. It means you can't insure your home against fires, floods, and storms. It means your most basic travel plans are constantly interrupted or canceled over extreme weather. It means more unexpected shortages. It means the loss of every luxury and comfort. It means job loss. It means living on the edge of bankruptcy. It means you're one power failure away from heat stroke. It means fighting with your neighbors over water, or even the last bag of rice at the store.

I think it's pretty clear.

Our governments aren't going to do anything to respond to climate change, at all. They're going to continue preaching about solar panels and windmills. Green energy has yet to displace a single barrel of oil. Our allegedly sustainable grid projects have done nothing but whet the elite's appetite for limitless energy. They need it to fuel increasingly ridiculous projects like cryptocurrencies and AI girlfriends that tell men to kill themselves.

Corporations latched onto a vague promise to reach net zero emissions by 2050. They turned it into a marketing campaign. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies made secret plans to surge their emissions. They're currently making plans to decimate our climate infrastructure in 2025. They're working overtime to sell disposable plastics to the developing world.

It was all a scam.

This year will go down in history as the moment when the public first started to become aware of their catastrophic mistakes. With every flood, with every month above 1.5C, the public is starting to realize we were conned. There was never any plan to stop or even slow down global warming.

This was the plan all along.

The plan was to make vague promises about limitless energy and downplay the growing number of heatwaves, droughts, and disasters. The plan was to distract us with fairytales about colonizing the galaxy while selling luxury space flights to fellow billionaires. The plan was to accelerate the extraction of raw resources while maximizing the extraction of human labor.

The plan was to build tunnels and bunkers. The plan was to build separate logistics and supply chains for the super-rich.

It wasn't a very organized plan. It wasn't top secret. It was more like convergent interests, aligned and coordinated at conferences in places like Davos. It was done through dark money funneled to our politicians. It was done through deals and meetups at the World Cup. It was hashed out over drinks at luxury hotels and ski resorts. The plan was simple. Lie. Obfuscate. Minimize. Make profits. Produce value for shareholders at all costs.

All these COP conferences and climate summits were a smokescreen to make it look like the rich and powerful were doing something.

It was done in the open.

It wasn't a very good plan, either. Like every other plan cooked up by the rich, it was blinded by its own shortsighted logic. It was blinded by its own greed and arrogance. It was destined to be hoist by its own petard. By screwing us over, the rich have also screwed themselves. They're stuck on this dying planet. There's no escape for them. All of their bunkers and utopian cities will last them a few extra years, in the absolute best case scenario.

What about the rest of us?

In the end, the planet always had its own plan to deal with climate change and runaway global warming. It would simply destroy our fossil fuel infrastructure. It would wipe out our grids. It would render us incapable of extracting more resources and doing more damage.

The planet would make us harmless. Unfortunately, it would destroy 90 percent of all other life in the process. The earth has time to start from scratch. It has done this before. It can do it again. Maybe next time, the planet will evolve reptile people with smaller brains and less ambition.

Anyway, now we're here.

It's all happening, and it's happening three decades ahead of schedule. Scientists are baffled. They're shocked.

For anyone who needs a neon flashing sign, this is it. This is the endgame. The government isn't going to declare a climate emergency. They should. They should be planning an evacuation of states like Arizona and Louisiana. They should halt development in the American desert. They should be incentivizing climate-proof communities full of tiny homes made out of bamboo.

They should be converting unused office buildings into vertical farms and building all the green spaces they can in cities.

They should be starting up agricultural and ecological vocation programs in high schools. Forget training more bankers and stock brokers. We should be getting kids ready for an entirely different way of life. We should be teaching them how to grow food and filter water, not forcing them to cram for standardized tests. We should be offering fast-track certificates in geoengineering and forestry. In just a few years, we could create an actual green workforce.

It would improve everyone's mental health.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there's going to be any major coordinated response at the federal or global level. Instead of trying to help, our politicians are shouting at each other. The only thing they can agree on is banning TikTok, building cop cities, and starting more wars. They can barely keep the government running for a few months at a time. No, the responsibility for all of this is falling to states, cities, and neighborhoods.

It's falling to us as individuals.

We often don't have all of the resources or support we need to get the job done. We often have to work against prevailing beliefs. We have to work against things like HOAs. Those of us who understand what's happening fall into different camps. Some of us want to keep trying. Some of us want to give up. Some of us want to tell the story of the collapse. Others are just along for the ride.

They're curious to see what happens next.

So, this is it. We've crossed the tipping point. It's not going to get better. The government probably won't help you.

If anything, they're going to make it harder.

If you possibly can, move to a safer place. There's nowhere completely safe from climate change, but there's places where you're in much more immediate danger. If you can't adapt to life in a scorching desert, then get out. Get out before whatever property you own becomes utterly useless.

When your lease comes up for renewal, get out.

Leave while you can.

Millions of people won't be able to leave. Millions won't want to leave. Millions more will move into harm's way.

Don't feel guilty about getting out. Don't feel guilty for prepping. You're not doing this because you want to. You're doing this because the leaders you trusted failed you. For your entire adult life, you paid a quarter of your income to them. So did your parents, and their parents.

In return, they gave themselves raises. They gave themselves premium healthcare. They gave themselves luxury vacations. They gave their billionaire friends hundreds of billions of dollars in forgivable loans. They gave the fossil fuel industry hundreds of billions in subsidies. They helped their frat buddies build companies that want to work you to death.

They sold your future to big oil, big pharma, and big corn. They took money out of your paycheck for your retirement, then they spent that money on almost everything else they could think of. Now they tell you the money is running out, and it's your fault. They call you entitled.

They tell you that you and your children don't have a right to a livable planet, because they don't know what that is.

You don't owe them anything.

We thought we had more time to get ready for this.

We don't.

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