'No time for delay and no room for excuses'
| 'The unequal battle with nature'  "There is no time for delay and no room for excuses," said Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Monday, after the latest United Nations climate report painted a grim picture of a swiftly warming world and cascading environmental disasters. Experience however suggests that delay and excuses are exactly what will happen -- even as wildfires and other natural disasters make clear the effects of climate change.
If the world cannot effectively mobilize to fight a current pandemic, how will it muster the political will to battle a crisis whose worst effects may still be decades in the future?
The report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides the most sweeping and up-to-date science on global warming. It validates decades of scientific predictions about the human contribution to climate change and diagnoses already severe impacts all over the planet. Brace for more extreme heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes.
The report was big news this morning in the United States but -- as is often the case -- soon got overtaken by partisan noise on Capitol Hill and the latest revelations about ex-President Donald Trump's coup attempt. His successor Joe Biden actually believes in science, but even with the US on board, geopolitical complications and the magnitude of the vast economic upheaval involved in fighting climate change mean global pledges to ease planetary warming are often tough to fulfill.
There are some signs Washington is getting serious. A new bipartisan infrastructure plan and a $3.5 trillion Democratic spending package bristle with incentives for clean energy, electric vehicles and the building of a green economy. But many Republicans are as dismissive of the science of global warming as they are of epidemiology and slam Democratic plans to cut carbon emissions as a symptom of rampaging "socialism." As with Covid-19 and Trump's false claims of election fraud, it's easy for skeptics to just choose an alternative reality in which climate change doesn't exist.
The same politically paralyzing battle between individual freedoms and the collective good that hampered the US on masking and vaccination also makes the US an unreliable partner in saving the planet. The world and America Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba fired an employee accused of sexual assault.
The Taliban seized a fifth provincial capital city in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile in America, fewer than 0.001% of vaccinated people have died from breakthrough Covid-19.
And Puerto Rico is girding for another potential tropical storm.  'The unequal battle with nature' Wildfires raging around the world this summer have highlighted mankind's vulnerability to natural disaster despite our technological advances, with firefighters from California to Turkey struggling to contain the flames. "It is obvious that the climate crisis is affecting the whole planet," said Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece, where over 60 communities have had to be evacuated due to fires. "That is the explanation, but not an excuse, or an alibi. We may have done everything that was humanly possible (to fight the fires), but in many cases this did not seem to be enough in the unequal battle with nature."  Firefighters battled a massive forest fire over the weekend in southern Peru. (Cesar Zapata, Cusco Regional Government) The fire consumed more than a thousand hectares since it started last Thursday, according to a statement from the Peruvian National Institute of Civilian Defense.
 Smoke and flames surrounded a village on Sunday in Evia Island, Greece. (Zougla.gr). More than 580 wildfires are currently raging across the country, creating "a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions," Mitsotakis said Monday.
 California's unrelenting Dixie Fire wiped out most of the town of Greenville last week and is still burning. "Within two hours, our town was gone," Greenville resident Teresa Clark, who left before the fire swept through, told local station KXTV. "We were sitting outside town about a mile away, and you could hear propane tanks just exploding."
 And Turkey continues to combat the worst wildfires in its history, with smoke blanketing its southern coastal provinces and flames destroying livelihoods. "The animals are on fire," 56-year-old resident, Muzeyyan Kacar, told CNN. "Everything is going to burn. Our land, our animals and our house. What else do we have anyway?" (Turkish Regional Directorate of Forestry) Thanks for reading. On Tuesday, India's Supreme Court will hear allegations of the government's involvement with Pegasus spyware. South Korea and the US will begin preliminary joint military exercises. And the US Senate is expected to vote on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. View in browser | All CNN Newsletters
Want to easily manage your newsletter subscriptions?
Copyright © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Want to change how you receive these emails?
| |||||||||||||||||
