Day of Awaking, 21st of Childwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): Awaking, not awakening. Awake, certainly not woke. I arose this morning to the first full day of the second Trump term, a feeling of dread and disappointment hanging over me. The crushing depression I felt from 2016 to 2020 was crouching at the foot of the bed, just waiting for the opportunity to jump back on my psyche again. 

It didn't help that on my clock radio, NPR was prattling on about President Biden's pardons to his family members. That supposed bastion of progressive liberalism was airing some pundit claiming that Biden had set the bar so low on preemptive pardons for his family members that Trump had nothing to lose by pardoning some 1,500 convicted January 6th rioters, including violent offenders who attacked, beat, and in some cases, killed, police officers. The whole world, certainly the media, seems to be aligning itself with the new brand of fascism taking hold of this country.

After a lot of consideration, I decided that instead of ignoring Trump and his shenanigans here, I will bear witness to what I believe is the end of the great American experiment in democracy, this last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams as William S. Burroughs once put it. But instead of exhausting myself by addressing each and every outrage through the endless 24-hour news cycles, I'm going to concentrate on the one area where I have some degree of knowledge and expertise, the environment. I'll let others, who can do the job much better than I, cover immigration, international affairs, abortion, LGBT etc. rights, women's right's, racial issues, the economy, and so on. And there's undoubtedly people who can cover, and are covering, the environment much better than I, and more power to them. But I'm still going to add my two cents here.

Not that this is a statement of intent that this is going to become some sort of anti-Trump environmentalist blog, though. You'll see plenty of those kind of posts, I imagine, but rest assured I'll still talk about my alternating-day walking-and-sitting routine, music, video games, and what have you. Zen and contemplative stoicism, too, I suppose.

But yesterday, in his first couple of hours following his swearing-in ceremony, Trump signed a Presidential Order taking the United States out of the Paris Agreement. The US joins Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only countries outside the global agreement, 

It's snowing outside right now in Atlanta, and I understand it snowed in New Orleans today and in lower Alabama and Mississippi, too. SoCal practically burned to the ground, and North Carolina is still struggling to recover from the catastrophic flooding last year. But Trump still believes that climate change is a hoax, a "Chinese hoax" to be more specific, and prioritized pulling out of the only global agreement to curb emissions. A third of the Arctic’s tundra, forests and wetlands, a vast global carbon sink, have now become a source of carbon emissions according to a recent study, as global warming ends thousands of years of Arctic carbon storage.

Project Drawdown Executive Director Jonathan Foley, Ph.D., said, "This short-sighted move shows  disregard for science and the well-being of people around the world, including Americans, who are already losing their homes, livelihoods, and loved ones as a result of climate change."   

Climate change will continue, and at the pace of the world's compliance, would have continued even if we hadn't pulled out of the Agreement. The appropriate response, however, isn't to stop limiting emissions but to limit them even more, and faster. Now we'll see more violent storms, more drought, more flooding, more intense hurricanes, and more wildfires. And also, for various other reasons, less infrastructure to help cope with the destruction and less relief and assistance to the victims.

On a positive note, however, the decision will mean even more profit for the CEO's of big oil and energy corporations, so there's that. The fossil fuel industry donated $75M to Trump’s campaign, but I'm sure that's not related to the Agreement decision.

We're off to a bad start, and I'm sure things will only get worse.