It's hot. Too hot.

We have been relatively lucky here in the mountains of North Carolina. It has only been in the upper 80’s. My friend Kevin who lives near Ft. Worth, Texas has had multiple days with the temperature edging towards 120 degrees. There are other places that are even hotter and are staying hot longer.

I found this on social media. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Why it may seem a clever thing to be able to bake bread in your mailbox, we all know that it is not really a good thing at all. That is too hot. We humans are not built to withstand this type of heat.

I almost wept when I read Bill McKibben’s most recent Substack post in The Crucial Years:

I wrote the first book on what we now call the climate crisis way back in 1989, and it feels like I’ve spent the subsequent three-and-a-half decades warning that eventually we’d get to this particular July: the hottest day and week and month on record. And long before records too: it seems almost certain that this is the hottest weather on our planet in 125,000 years; Jim Hansen made a quite reasonable case Friday that it is already or soon will be hotter than it’s been for a million years, which is to say before the evolution of homo sapiens.

Hotter than it’s been for a million years.

Think about that. Think about those who still make a habit of denying that we have a climate crisis at all.

I remember going out to Warren Wilson College over 15 years ago to hear Bill McKibben speak about the climate crisis. The auditorium was packed, standing room only. He spoke with hope that we would all wake up and start to make changes then. This is not a new crisis. The need for action made sense then and it makes sense now, yet it seems there are still those who refuse to listen and, even more frightening, refuse to act.

I wonder why we are not moving forward more rapidly on solar and geothermal projects here in the community where I live. All I have heard is “it’s too expensive”… “it isn’t cost effective.” I personally doubt those financial statistics (I think the quoted cost estimates are way outdated) but I also wonder when we will stop thinking that a price tag is all that matters.

I am happy to see charging stations for electric vehicles installed on the campus of the retirement community where we live. It is a good step and I hope it is only the first step towards being more mindful of the climate crisis that is barreling towards us all.

I have also heard the comment “…but solar panels and wind turbines are just so ugly.” Hmmm. You know what is ugly? People dying from the heat. Is the climate crisis like gun control—just one more issue we will foolishly ignore even at the cost of human life?

It seems that each of us has to make some choices on what we can do and what we can encourage our communities to do. Lamentation only moves us so far—and not very far at that. We have to act.

Just because it has not been 120 degrees where we live does not mean we have the luxury to not care.