A new study by the Copernicus Climate Change Service calculates that 2023 will go down in history as the hottest year on record, and the hottest year in 125,000 years! Not only did the earth experience its hottest consecutive days ever this July, but this October has now been found to have been the warmest October ever recorded. It estimates that nearly 7.3 billion people, the vast majority of the earth’s population, directly experienced the effects of this ongoing global heating.
It has long been crystal clear that the burning of fossil fuels is causing this heating. It has been clear for just as long that the only way to stop this phenomenon is to stop burning fossil fuels and stop pumping their waste into the atmosphere.
So what are our so-called world leaders doing? The exact opposite.
Only a few days before the above study was published, a new United Nations report concluded that the 20 major fossil fuel producing nations – all of whom signed the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement pledging to limit the rise of global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius or less compared to preindustrial levels – plan to keep increasing coal production until 2030, and will continue increasing oil and gas production for decades more!
This insanity might be hard to imagine if we didn’t know the world we live in. This is a capitalist world, driven by the insatiable need for profit, and the One Percent and their businesses need fossil fuels to continue raking in those profits.
As long as this status quo is allowed to continue, the fossil fuels will continue to burn, and we’ll continue on the global death march.
