![]() This year's report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in August, shows the picture very starkly. That global economic expansion has been fueled by cheap fossil fuels and accompanied by a dramatic rise in greenhouse gas emissions. ![]() The ozone layer is now recovering.īut that moment faded, replaced by the urgency of the War on Terror and the gridlock of hardcore partisan politics, along with a global economic expansion that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and into the middle class. The entire world banned chlorofluorocarbons in less than a couple years after it became clear they were depleting the ozone layer, exposing us to more solar radiation. Politicians and corporations were paying attention. Those of us who are old enough might remember a brief window in the 1990s when it seemed like the environmental movement was ascendant. The added feeling of isolation from this new phase was almost too much to bear. ![]() A day? A week? Three weeks? We were already locked down at home from the Covid pandemic, with the kids out of school and most businesses closed. ![]() We had been breathing wildfire smoke for about three weeks, and all I could think about was how long this new phase, this deep-orange darkness, would last. But the day the sky turned orange in San Francisco from widespread wildfire smoke was a different kind of tragedy, precisely because it wasn't personal - it was communal. ![]()
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