Trying to stay sane…

Am I the only person tightening my belt right now? I doubt it.

It happens every six months or so. I’m so morbidly suspicious of free sources of news like Meta/Facebook and X/Twitter (I’ve long cancelled my subscriptions to both), that I try to keep in touch from carefully selected paid sources, which I keep under review.

It was on one such culling expedition that I decided I hadn’t heard from Andy Worthington recently. I forget when I added him to my monthly outgoings, as a token way of supporting his tireless work to shut the illegal and immoral Guantanamo private prison, and wondered if he might be dead and the money was simply falling into a void.

He is very much alive, as I discovered from Andy’s website. Which has sent me on another housekeeping mission: to discover why I’d been overlooking his published output [plot spoiler: relying too much on my inbox to keep abreast].

This article jumped out at me: Trying to Stay Sane in a World of Rapidly Accelerating Climate Collapse:

Some days are better than others. Some days, the dread, the anger, the sadness don’t begin until some time after I’ve woken up, but it never takes long, to be honest, until I remember that I’m living in a dying world.
If you think I’m exaggerating, I can only suggest that you’re not really paying attention to what’s happening. For at least 35 years, climate scientists have been warning…

Now my sources have been bending my ear about the rapidly worsening climate, in a way which disagreeably reminds me of Christian messianism, except a bit more evidence-based. The stunt that impressed me most was Al Gore (An Inconvenient Truth, 2006) using a cherry-picker to project a graph of atmospheric carbon decades ahead. This was the notorious “hockey stick” – much mocked by the world press at the time, though the mockery has abated somewhat since his predictions have been arriving reliably on-schedule. Maybe a little ahead of schedule.

As I look out of my window at our green and pleasant land, and feeling the “lazy wind” on the sea-front (it doesn’t bother to go round you, just blows straight through) as I go outdoors to watch glorious sunrises and sunsets, I need Andy’s article as a standing reminder to read monthly as one of the better summaries of what all the fuss is about.

And if I can, I’ll try to find the patience to keep watching as the signs of climate collapse grow ever stronger — as they certainly will — and to believe that, sooner rather than later, and long before 2030, the shrill hysteria of the deniers will ring ever more hollow until it collapses under the weight of its own malignant emptiness, and the genocidal CEOs of the fossil fuel companies will be ever more clearly exposed until the change we need becomes inevitable.
What else can I do?

From this article I have to conclude that Andy’s views and range of interests closely parallel my own. In fact there’s only this to distinguish between us: Andy is shit-busy doing something about it …and I am not.

P.S. — So much for my belt-tightening this month. Not only have I failed to cancel my token support for Andy’s sterling work, I’ve increased it. So why not hit Andy’s PayPal Donate button too? – it’s quite painless.