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We’re going to change the lighting in this room. It’s time to make it darker, to reflect the long dark night ahead.

Even someone as old as I am has a good chance of living long enough to see most of old Boston slip into the sea as Greenland empties itself of ice.

Before we see 2030 we will sail quickly and quietly past a committed 1.5°C global average temperature increase relative to pre-industrial society. Will make 2°C by morning. Your children will die of this.

The Conference of Parties at the U.N., the world climate meeting at which Joe Jim-Crow Biden’s delegates will smile and glad-hand while announcing their intention to do nothing and thereby slaughter billions is happening soon. I can not find a climate scientist who doesn’t believe this meeting is the last hope for political solutions – and that it will fail. 

Your children are going to die in a hot, thirsty, violent future from which there will be no human recovery. This is the climate emergency. It is that bad. I’m not even being dramatic. I am speaking literally. 

Of course there is a way to turn things around. Hell, you even lived through a test run in April 2020 when enough of the economy simply shut down to bring emissions down something like 7%, overnight. The only drawbacks? They won’t let people have food without a paycheck (for no good reason) and there was a slight delay and shortage of some essential commodities like toilet paper while the kinks were worked. Emissions must fall to near 0 over the next few years. A lot more has to be turned off than just the lights in a room you aren’t occupying. 

But like morons we rushed to reopen. Analogous to the time early in the pandemic when our Mayor Arreguín and then vice Mayor Sophie Hahn tried to draw a crowd to a downtown restaurant in spite of the completely obvious insane risk to public health, our society simply demands like petulant children screaming and lying down on the grocery store floor not to step even a bit away from the political and economic order that will within just this decade put the final nail in the coffin of its own children. 

At this week’s city council meeting council will vote a 2nd time to surround the remaining Black people in Berkeley with 24/7 surveillance cameras. Or maybe they’ll pass a fake public safety measure against so-called ghost guns, protecting gun profit and the prison industry and not preventing any actual violence. 

It’s funny to listen to them try to sound important and knowledgeable. They will rubber-stamp a bunch of contracts the City Manager has doled out. They will try to sound like what they think important people are supposed to sound like. 

There is nothing on Tuesday’s agenda to suggest any member of council even knows there is a climate emergency. Nothing about how the people of a town might survive the abrupt cut off of fossil fuel supply now needed. 

Your children are going to die in a hot, thirsty, violent future from which there will be no human recovery. This is the climate emergency. It is that bad. I’m not even being dramatic. Their fate will be sealed this decade. We can’t “just act cool” our way out of it.