My son was on the phone from a suburb of Denver, driving to an appointment, frantic suddenly for directions.
I know that area well. My answer was calm, knowing where he was: “Turn to the mountains.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t see the mountains.”
For those who’ve not been in eyeshot of the Rocky Mountains, they’re a lot to hide. Gray’s Peak, the biggest bulge on our Front Range, is 14,276 feet.
Ah, but all of the region is simmering in condensed mushroom soup — smoke from out-of-control forest fires.
Is it from the cataclysm in Canada? From Washington State? Or from the half dozen fires burning in our state? It doesn’t matter. All are part of the same brittle template, and global warming is the cause.
How sadly comic it was for America’s joke of a president to blast Canada for its eco-catastrophe and threaten new tariffs.
If there’s any single cause of the smoke circling the planet, it is him — and fellow Republicans who not only deny humanity’s role but who are blocking any and all measures to combat strains on our environment.
Tucked up against the jagged, slate-gray Flatirons outside of Boulder is an entity that would convince anyone of the problem and the human causes if one were inclined to hear: the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Its supercomputers and researchers track and analyze what’s happening around us. Coloradans know it as NCAR. I remember touring it in middle school.
This administration, heeding its Big Carbon puppeteers, doesn’t want to hear what NCAR has to say. It is pushing to dismantle the center, asserting that it promotes a culture of “climate alarmism.”
Recently Colorado District Judge Robert Brooke Jackson blocked the move, calling it arbitrary and capricious. Politically driven? Oh, yes. Under the administration’s order, NCAR operations the White House deems worth continuing would be transferred from our blue state to the redness of Wyoming – Wyo U.
Should voters award control of the House to the Democrats in the fall, punitive decisions against states that did not vote for the Pumpkin Man should be among articles of impeachment.
But back to the climate.
Eighteen years ago, in a book provocatively titled, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” on how communities arose from climate disasters, Rebecca Solnit predicted the future if “cynicism and naivete” ruled the day. Throw in hucksterism by a spray-tanned man in the White House.
Writes Solnit today: “I saw what climate chaos was going to bring: more and worse disasters, and I thought we needed to know how disasters unfold. And here we are in the summer of a thousand fires.”
Here we are, as well, in an energy crisis — gasoline prices at the mercy of a foreign foe.
Jimmy Carter faced such a situation. He preached conservation and energy alternatives.
By contrast, this president cripples the electric car industry, bribes producers of solar and wind operations to shut down, and orders smelly old coal plants to get busy again.
Recently Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse issued a stirring condemnation of Republicans’ willing blindness about the costs of doing what this president promotes – and what he demotes.
The Democrat from Rhode Island showed his colleagues an alarming chart of the rapid spike in billion-dollar weather disasters.
The progression on the senator’s bar graph takes one from the near flatness of the ‘80s to what looks like the Matterhorn of now.
It’s all so abstract. Just numbers.
To put it in concrete terms — and no pun is meant — 80,000 homes in greater New York City may be lost to flooding from sea-level rise in the next 15 years according to a study by regional planners.
Again, no joke. Superstorm Sandy destroyed 650,000 homes.
We know this president’s response: Buy a high-rise.
Back where I live, we are holding our breaths, literally and figuratively, amid the smoke and unprecedented heat. This likely will be the hottest year in our state’s history.
NCAR has certified the truth about this — truth today’s Republican Party chooses not to hear.
Coloradans don’t need supercomputers to know things are amiss. All we have to do here is look to see where the smoke of naivete and cynicism obscures our mountains.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
