...Jim Hansen, a nasa physicist, said earlier this month that it’s possible that we’re now headed into climate territory not seen in a million years. While I was standing atop the castle, my phone pinged with an alert about widespread fires on the Greek island of Rhodes—which forced the hurried and chaotic evacuation of some nineteen thousand people. Rhodes has a long history of its own, dating back well before the Christian era, when its prosperity allowed its residents to erect the Colossus, a bronze statue of the sun god Helios, which was the size of the Statue of Liberty and collapsed decades later in an earthquake. But even the remnants were so mighty that ancient tourists came to stare at them, as I was staring at this wrecked castle. That’s history again. But here’s what History looks like: “According to the data, we will probably go through 16-17 days of a heatwave, which has never happened before in our country,” Kostas Lagouvardos, a director of research at Greece’s National Observatory, explained. The temperature is off the charts that track history; like the temperatures in so many other places, they’re increasingly on the charts which track History.
This doesn’t mean that our history is over yet. From the summit of the hill on which Hrad Devín sits, the view toward Austria encompasses dozens of windmills turning steadily in the summer breeze; they, and the solar panels that are our current tribute to the god Helios, give us a chance. Slovakia’s President at the moment is a woman named Zuzana Čaputová, who came to prominence leading a decade-long fight against a toxic landfill. Greenpeace rates Bratislava’s public-transit system as the fifth best in Europe, trailing only those of Tallinn, Luxembourg, Valletta, and Prague. But that’s not going to be enough. It’s going to take action on an entirely different scale to deal with what we’re facing at the moment, which is why campaigners in the U.S. are urging President Biden to declare a climate emergency, allowing him to restrict some trade in fossil fuels and make funds available so that states can build out renewable energy faster—maybe even fast enough to start catching up with the escalating velocity of global heating. Some kind of climate emergency declaration is a key demand of activists organizing a New York City march on September 17th, which seems to be gathering momentum.
But, of course, Republicans from Texas and West Virginia, two of the key historical hydrocarbon producers, are even now leading a push for legislation that would prevent Biden from taking such a step. (The two lead sponsors, unsurprisingly, have received campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry.) “Our legislation insures that President Biden does not abuse the power of his office to pursue his anti-American energy agenda against the will of the American people,” Representative August Pfluger explained. He went to high school in the West Texas town of San Angelo, right on the edge of the Permian Basin, one of the largest oil deposits in the world. That oil is the result of History; its power is driving our history, which now seems to be driving History again. Unless we intervene, the certain result is ruins.
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