By Jon Ullman
In my last column, I concluded despite four million deaths in a year and a half, Climate Change was a monster far more dangerous and harder to defeat than Covid-19.
It seemed then we were in the last throws of the pandemic, and it was time to refocus on the challenge of our lifetime – a warming world. But then came Delta.
Many of us are back to masks, back to fear, back to frustration. Even though two-shot vaccinations do a great job at protecting us from the worst, the virus continues to be more transmissible and is exploiting any weakness in our defenses it can.
Climate change is surprising us too. We are seeing so many effects we didn’t think would come so soon. The roller coaster jet stream is producing all-time high temperatures in Canada, bursting the British Columbian town that recorded it into oblivion. The West’s wildfires eastbound smoke plumes are affecting Maine and North Carolina, while our skies are ironically clear. We know this is just the prelude. And the floods, I can’t keep track of them. They pour through my Twitter feed, Asia, Europe, South America, Arizona. I put the phone away.
I used to think that if I just talked about the upcoming disasters loud enough, people would wake up. I walked around in a polar bear outfit in Miami Beach for Sierra Club when sunny-day flooding shut down an intersection. I trained to be an Al Gore slide show presenter – scrolling through global disasters, uploaded each month. I took a job in a part of the country that knew climate effects firsthand – through the Thomas fire and a deadly mudslide and deeper droughts and heat records each year. Surely with all this evidence in hand, the world would wake up.
But now, I’m not so sure that warnings and disasters are enough. If you can see 611,000 of your fellow countrymen fall to COVID and not take a vaccine to save your life, what will you do to stop climate change if your leaders say it’s a hoax? We are hopelessly divided into teams. Stuck. Unable to fix the sinking ship.
But maybe, they will change if we lead by example. In our Chapter’s two counties, we are working hard to sharply reduce the supply and demand for oil and gas. The Sierra Club has joined in the fight against SoCalGas’ dangerous and unjustified capacity increases in Westside Ventura with a broad coalition including CAUSE, CFROG, Food and Water Watch and Patagonia. We are coordinating with allies against rollbacks of recent oil reforms in the Ventura.
In Santa Barbara County, we are fighting the restart of three offshore oil and gas platforms this fall at Refugio Beach via 70 tanker trucks and/or a with a destructive pipeline to Kern County, with Center for Biological Diversity and a coalition of health, safety and wildlife defenders. We just won an all-electric ordinance on new buildings in the City of Santa Barbara partnering with Community Environmental Council, the American Institute of Architects, clean energy and health and safety advocates, and we are ready for more victories.
We are pushing hard to expand solar and wind energy stored by batteries to run electric cars and buildings, more efficient appliances and just consume LESS. We are paving the way for reliable clean power, like the recent battery storage facility named the Saticoy Project near Oxnard.
Our outings, public lands and wildlife leaders are now taking you out to beautiful places in the Los Padres Forest that were saved and helping to save more.
We cannot give up this fight locally or globally. The rise of Delta and the pandemic that lingers of our own making is telling us how we must unify to fight climate change. This is our warning. This is our lesson. This is our hope.