Toys for Tots in a Hot Sandbox

 Two stories today that do not seem connected -- but ought to be. This morning in the skies above New Mexico, the billionaire Richard Branson became an astronaut, soaring more than 50 miles high on his rocket plane. He beat another fellow billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame (some would say shame) by nine days. Neither of these gentlemen went to explore or do science. These trips were for ego, narcissism, and the opening of space tourism for the ultra-wealthy to say that they, too, reached space. Their billionaire compadre Elon Musk has supplanted NASA in providing rockets to space, but at least he has partnered with them.

The second story is the weather on Earth this year. Heat domes over the western parts of North America have pummeled the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia (!!!) as well as the Great Basin and the Southwest. Death Valley officially reached 129.4 degrees Fahrenheit with “heat enthusiasts” in attendance cheering. Named storms are popping up in the Atlantic earlier and earlier. Hurricane Elsa delivered flooding rain across the East Coast with NYC subways becoming waterfalls. Some of us are baking, others are drowning.

So how do the two tie together? First, we seem to have become a people who love to be entertained. The space race of the billionaires is frankly theater. It is easier to watch and perhaps cheer as humans risk their lives than to work on the real problems that our species must confront, including climate change. Climate change is the driver of severe weather, fed by accumulating greenhouse gases that warm the planet with interesting effects. As the Washington Post article notes, even climate change has become a sort of entertainment for some people, with bragging rights (“I drove 500 miles to be in Death Valley when the record heat was recorded!”). 

Second, the resources dumped by billionaires into their vanity projects could certainly be better used. It would require a book to list how to do this and I am sure that I would be accused of being a socialist by the denizens of CPAC for listing them, but our children and grandchildren will face being baked and drowned and starved if climate change is not addressed. The solutions will require action at multiple levels but it certainly is insufficient to say, “Well, I recycle my plastic containers' ' and imagine that this is the road to salvation. It requires government and political will. Our time is running short and the media distraction of Branson’s stunt means -- another day’s delay in action.

Humans are their own worst enemies. Our tribalism and distrust of others may have worked well for our ancestors in prehistory but they are impediments today. By the way, I have not mentioned Covid-19 and the need to vaccinate the planet but that remains another disaster. The world did not look this way when I was a child. There were far fewer people and the intense effects of climate change were only just beginning their real acceleration in the fossil fuel age. I really wish that billionaires would be taxed fairly (they pay much less than wage earners in proportion to their wealth) and that resources would be redirected to protect humanity. Shiny toys that are meant only for the gratification of ids and immature egos are part of the problem.