The thing about climate? It’s literally everywhere. Our writers share their observations.

Environment: Climate Change

Despite ingesting the United Nations’ unbearable hypocrisy and nauseating doom-and-gloom propaganda, traveling to exotic locations around the world to cover its climate conferences as an accredited journalist has been among the most amusing experiences of my life. It’s difficult to put into words for somebody who has never seen it.

But the comic absurdity of it all is wild. It turns out, for instance, that saving the world from the evils of alleged man-made global warming—supposedly a result of that dangerous toxic pollutant exhaled by every living person on the planet (CO2)—is a never-ending quest. And ironically, it takes endless tons of CO2 emissions to accomplish.

Thus, every single year, tens of thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats, cheerleaders (they prefer to be called “journalists”) and tax-funded rent-a-mobs converge at the taxpayers’ expense somewhere to feast on gourmet meals and party. Almost all of them fly in on CO2-spewing airplanes, including hundreds or even thousands of private jets. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!

For some reason, the would-be saviors of Mother Earth never choose to do their heroic work from Lagos, Nigeria, Jakarta, Indonesia, or even Detroit, Michigan. Apparently, the climate gods can only be appeased from beautiful vacation destinations like Rio de Janeiro, Cancun, Sharm el-Sheikh, Paris and more. That suits me just fine, of course!

You think I’m kidding about the gods. I’m not. In Cancun, the head of the summit, Christiana Figueres, opened with a prayer to Ixchel, the supposed Mayan goddess of tapestries and creativity. Upon hearing the prayer, I whipped out my laptop to learn more. Ixchel, it turned out, was also a Mayan goddess of war and human sacrifice. Oops!

It was very appropriate, though, considering that the poor people of the world were being sacrificed on the altar of the climate gods in the war on prosperity and common sense. How dare they emit CO2 by having electricity or a vehicle! At least, that’s the attitude of the legions of hypocrites who take a break from their yachts and mega mansions to fly in on private jets.

“Let them drive Teslas,” the climate cabal says, oblivious to the cruelty of it all.

Climate Leaders Can't Tell They're Being Pranked

Despite U.N. and government efforts to silence, intimidate and sideline the opposition, there are always some pranksters who make the summits even more amusing—at least for those with a sense of humor. One year, for example, a group of young American activists 

 an endless parade of attendees to sign a petition banning a dangerous chemical known as dihydrogen monoxide—a substance associated with such evils as acid rain, drownings and even storms. Virtually everybody signed the petition, thinking they were saving humanity from some new demon molecule. Boy, did they feel stupid when they found out the petition was really supporting a ban on water! Yes, water. Good thing these people aren’t making global policy…oh wait!

Another year, this time in Qatar, a hilarious and brilliant British lord who has long been battling the climate alarmists impersonated a Burmese delegate. He snuck into the plenary session where diplomats were plotting how to save the world, and hilarity ensued. Lord Monckton 

 before they finally cut his mic. “Sorry, the last speaker is not a party,” the president of the summit said. Watching a British lord pretend to be a delegate to drop truth bombs on the climate summit and harangue the delegation was quite the spectacle.

Some years before that, in Copenhagen, journalist and filmmaker Phelim McAleer put on a polar bear suit and went around with a megaphone at the UN COP 15 summit looking for Phil Jones, the disgraced scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal. Watching the delegates flee and boo was too funny.

Later this year, I’ll be heading for Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, a beautiful Red Sea resort town on the Sinai Peninsula, to again expose these pretend world saviors as they devour taxpayer money living the good life. One thing I can tell you for sure: There will be a 

 of hot air and plenty of fun in the sun. Hold on to your wallet.

 I’ve been to plenty of U.N. climate conferences as a journalist. It’s time to call out their propaganda. 

The Glaring Hypocrisy of Climate Alarmists

Over the summer, my mother eagerly sat me down to watch 

, a documentary on the famous Los Angeles neighborhood during the golden age of rock music. Rather than sink into the hypnotizing romance of the '60s and '70s, I found myself growing increasingly bitter, my body curling into itself like a lemon peel left out to dry. My mother looked over at me, confused, wondering why my eyes welled up with angry tears when Joni Mitchell sweetly planted a kiss on Graham Nash.

As a child, I used to laugh at history books: 

Why would you treat your patients with leeches? That’s so stupid!

 Grateful to exist at the same time as the microwave, penicillin and Nintendo Wii, I was convinced that modern people simply had it better. As I watched these young people onscreen create era-defining music so freely, without the vein-bulging grip of late-stage capitalism and looming imminence of climate change, I was suddenly overwhelmed with how hellacious it is to live in the beginning of the end of the Anthropocene.

Born on the Precipice of the Climate Crisis

I arrived on this planet just in time to get accustomed to its green trees and blue skies, but late enough to understand that I will likely live to see Laurel Canyon swallowed up by the ocean, after uncontrollable wildfires raze it to the ground. Life as we know it will die, and a majority of today’s people are likely to die alongside it. And it’s already begun.

For a while, I’ve tried to combat my fears and worries and anxieties and anger by prudently stoking the embers of what little optimism I had left. But with every “hottest year on record” you read about, year after year, you get more completely overcome with the intense desire to tear your hair out of your head, follicle by follicle, as corporations responsible for most of the irreversible changes to climate harp on about the importance of reusable water bottles.

To say that no progress is being made is to discredit the thousands of researchers, scientists and activists all over the world that work tirelessly every day to implement change. However, the systemic upheaval that needs to happen in order to drastically change the fate of our world feels less and less like an attainable reality. Despair mutates into a sickly refuge, both cocoon and prison alike, enveloping everything like a dark shroud. When all you are left with is the crippling sense of inescapable doom, the only thing left to do is to make peace with it.

Perhaps it was the communal grief that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, or my own personal grief from losing two important family members last year, or, even more likely, a combination of the two, from which my growing acceptance of the environment’s death stemmed from. From funeral to funeral, I was confronted with my own mortality, my personal inescapable doom. The fear used to creep up on me out of nowhere, spoiling pleasant afternoons that manifested itself as a deep pit in my stomach and made my blood run cold.

For better or for worse, one of the main lessons I’ve taken away from the grieving process is that life goes on. Life becomes different, and it will never go back to what it once was, but it goes on. As I had more time to think on the matter, thanks to quarantine, I realized how my fear of climate change was fundamentally the same as my fear of death. Just as I had to let go of my family members and even myself, I had to let go of the world. But letting go of the world is a daunting task when there are so many lives to be lost. It’s a form of meditation—the practice of giving up worldly possessions, of giving up the world as a possession.

There are billions of years of evidence that show how, inexplicably, life continues. We are the progeny of a rich history of mass extinction events, descended from the fiery meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs as well as the ice ages that froze the planet over. Millions of years after our passing a new, unrecognizable kind of life will emerge and thrive. My death is an extension of evolution, and proof of the ever-continuing cycle of life.

However, just because something ends does not mean that its own existence ceases to matter. Yes, the future looks bleak, but that cannot deter us from fighting for a better world. As long as there are people around, there is compassion. Poorer regions will be disproportionately more affected by environmental degradation, and climate justice is an essential tool to ease global suffering.

If my fear of my own passing is fundamentally the same as my fear of environmental collapse, then the earth is a body. Like any other living creature, it will try to live as long as possible, despite the indomitable imminence of death. There’s a mysterious force in all of us—some call it survival—that ensures that we all take our vitamins and exercise. It’s why we still fight climate change, even as we inch closer and closer to our bleak and unremarkable end.

Death is not a case for inaction, but a resounding endorsement of action, as finality drives change. Fulfillment isn’t necessarily achieving everything you wanted to achieve in life, but rather the comfort of knowing that you did everything in your power to change the world for the better, regardless of outcome. Death provides urgency and meaning to all of our actions. How will we spend our last generations on Earth? Only time can tell.

What it's like to grow up at the end of life as we know it.

I'm Coming to Terms With the Climate Catastrophe

My parents have lived in Sonoma County, California, since 2015, and have nearly lost their home—and their lives—to wildfires multiple times.

The closest they came to total devastation was in October of 2017, when the Tubbs fire scorched much of the region. Around 2 a.m., they were awakened by a firefighter banging at their front door, telling them they had minutes to leave before flames arrived. They fled with the few belongings they could toss into bags, grabbed the family dog—abandoned their elderly cat, Ally—and sped down their two-lane road to safety as flames chased them from behind. Many of their neighbors had their homes decimated. My parents were lucky to escape alive.

“God, I hope our property values don’t plummet,” my mom told me over the phone, her voice quivering. “That house is supposed to be part of our retirement.”

There was no mention of the family cat left behind, nor of the traumatic near-death experience the night before. The fear, it seemed, was not of losing a home—a place of safety and security and shelter—but of losing capital.

“What about Ally?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“Oh, she’s fine. The firefighters told us they fed her. And if the house burns down, we’ll get the insurance money. It’s worth more than the house.”

Wildfires Have Always Been an Issue in California

California has always been a region prone to wildfires—the wildfire season is a predictable affair from May to October. Growing up in Marin County (just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco) in the 1990s and early 2000s, I knew that fires came annually, in the same way I knew baseball season began in April and ended in October, or mosquitoes arrived with the warming of spring.

I remember being eight years old watching the local news with my family at a Mexican restaurant as a brushfire engulfed Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick’s hillside home above Mill Valley. There was no hint of terror in the room. A few heads turned toward the flames on the grainy screen between mouthfuls of enchiladas and molé. It was almost a banal concern; a social obligation to look up and nod, feign compassion, and then return to our food. A mariachi band sang “Sabor a Mi” to a middle-aged couple holding hands under the table, and the news transitioned to box score of the game that day: Giants 1, Reds 0.

“God, I hope her house is okay,” someone said at a table across from us. The collective “mmm” and “mhmm’s” chorused momentarily before everyone returned to their food. Grace, it seemed, was of no concern.

Moving Is a Last-Ditch Effort to Avoid an Insecure Climate

“I think it’s time for us to finally get out of here,” Mom told me over the phone in August of 2020. “The sky is covered in ash, and we can’t go outside. It’s time to move to Idaho. Somewhere in the mountains. It will be calmer there. These fires are too intense.”

“Mom,” I said, “You know that climate change isn’t state-by-state. You’ll have to deal with it wherever you move.”

“We just want to make sure we can retire and not have to work until we’re 80,” she replied.

California’s fire season is now year-round

rapidly dropping homeowners who live in regions threatened by wildfires,

 upper-middle-class folks like my parents keep thinking they can skip to a new town, a new region, to escape the ravages of climate change. There’s little to no attention paid to the circumstances causing these fires or these devastating weather patterns. Moving becomes a sort of class-divided gamble, a last-ditch effort to maintain a sense of security in an increasingly insecure climate.

 sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, from Los Angeles to Boise to Santa Fe, due to historically low housing availability and an increase in remote work. But this migratory flood out of places like California and New York was already well underway years ago. My parents exist in the rare echelon of Americans who, within an era of tremendous inequality, actually have options. They can plan their mobility, while the cities and small towns currently being flipped by ravenous real estate prospectors get turned upside down.

It’s easy to blame the individuals gobbling up cheap housing like Pac-Man, but doing so overlooks the system (capitalism), which encourages and downright praises this Wild West mentality of consumption. When out-of-towners buy up small-town properties, local sellers see dollar signs and follow trends. Landlords see the market adjust and think, pragmatically, that it’s time to raise their rents, too. There’s little accountability for simply saying “that’s enough money for me.” The emphasis is almost always on property, not the ecology of the land they are living on. The result? Housing prices soar. Rents skyrocket. Homelessness increases. Inequality widens.

I try to explain this messaging—that following the quick fix patterns of cheap housing in new locations doesn’t change anything—to my parents, but it doesn’t stick. Their eyes are on dollar signs, on self-preservation, not on whether local water reservoirs are being depleted by a golf course development or how 

temperature increase is causing tick-born illnesses

There isn’t a collective approach, just an individual one. It’s part of the American ethos. It makes me wonder sometimes if, all those years ago, watching Grace Slick’s home burn down to the char, I should have stood up on that table and shouted. Screamed. Perhaps if I’d quieted the room enough—if the guitarists had ceased their strumming—we all would have looked up and seen that one celebrity’s devastation was actually our own. Perhaps we would’ve seen it as a warning, an omen of a not-so-distant future where skies would be blackened by ash, where emergency kits sat by the door year-round.

And yet, despite all this, dinner chatter remained the fluctuating voodoo of home prices. I’d have flipped the table, if I could. I’d have shattered glasses and tossed plates. 

Moving away from environmental disaster is a quick fix to a long-term and collective issue.