imagine:
you’ve paid yr power bill, but the power company cuts you off – & you don’t know how long it will last. bottled water, candles, bagged ice & coolers – if you have them: thus, the sitch in n. calif.: p.g.&e. disempowers 1.5 m customers b/c heavy winds expected = high fire danger (they’re already happening anyway). the co. went bankrupt for starting the big fires last year and the year before: they say “customers might have to do without power for days after the winds subside because ‘every inch’ of the system must be inspected by helicopters & 1000s of workers and declared safe before the grid is reactivated.” states of emergency & curfews declared in the darkened towns, 1000s & 1000s of further ramifications. this seems like a new thing, not a gradual thing like tightening of water restrictions, but more of a big fat ‘whump!’ . . . mean- while, victims of the santa rosa fire (remember the santa rosa fire? the fires are harder to keep straight than the mass shootings), insurance policies are being cancelled: the law sez you have 24 mo. – but the county had to rebuild the bridges, roads, lines first, then the people rebuilding their homes had to contend w/ debris removal geotechnical surveys geotechnical engineering finding architects finding contractors getting permits – before building starts – then guess what? time’s up! which goes to show climate disasters can turn out a lot more complicated than you ever imagined . . . but . . . what do you imagine? anyway elsewhere, on the other side of the world, 30 homes burn up, people suffer burns in n.s.w. – a “cyclonic firestorm” during which “birds dropped dead out of the sky at the height of the blaze” – fires in queensland, too – & summer just started down there meanwhile meanwhile bad bad bad october storms wrack n. rockies & plains: 100 car crashes in 3 hrs in denver; interstates and highways shut down; 100 flights cancelled; > 30k homes without power (unplanned & unintentional, in this case) meanwhile, “a new report” sez “if the world procrastinates on a carbon price one more year, the damages would climb an additional $1 trillion, & waiting 10 yrs would put the price tag at $100 trillion. in other words, the time to act was yesterday (or, like the 1980s).” coming soon to a region near you: climate mayhem! you’ve read the stories, now live the reality! & what’s the reality? “the degree of nightmarishness depends on the amount of greenhouse gases we send into the atmosphere & how quickly and ferociously the planet responds w/ feedback loops that accelerate warming. the euphemism for this is ‘uncertainty.’” imagine that!
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |