Member-only story
The human species is on a race to see which tipping point we reach first. One would come about if there is so much destructive disruption of the earth’s ecosystems because of the overheating of the atmosphere and oceans that life on earth will be a living hell for those who survive. It would take centuries or millennia before we return to the relatively stable climate we have experienced for thousands of years.
The other tipping point is a political tipping point, a sea change in how seriously humanity as a whole, worldwide, takes the climate emergency and takes action accordingly.
What happens in the USA has a great deal to do with which of these wins out. We are the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter when it comes to cumulative emissions since the industrial revolution began 250 or so years ago. We are also a dominant nation in the world, if not as much as in the past, politically, economically and militarily.
So are we at or approaching such a political tipping point in the USA right now? Was the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) by Congress, billed by most of the mass media as primarily a climate bill, a bill which will accelerate sufficiently the urgently needed shift from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy, while opening the way for the kind of progressive changes on a range of issues that will prevent a pro-dirty energy, counter-revolution?
