NPR’s Terry Gross and Guest: 2018 Revealed Just How Ill-Prepared We Are For Climate Change

As material for my books and videos, and just for my own edification, I’ve conducted approximately 200 interviews with subject matter experts in my days here at 2GreenEnergy. Of course, it’s important to go into each one with a certain level of preparation, so as to engage the person across the table, and to ask solid, penetrating questions that get at the most interesting and controversial aspects of the matter at hand.  

Having said all this, I could live to be 500 and never master this art form to anywhere near the level of Terry Gross (pictured), who’s been hosting her radio interview show “Fresh Air” since 1975.

I hope you’ll take the time to listen to the show that aired yesterday, featuring Somini Sengupta, international climate reporter for the New York Times, who pointed out how ill-prepared we are to deal with climate change, partially because “hot” isn’t news.  Oh, it’s hot in Pakistan in the summer? People are dying? Was I expecting anything else?  Hasn’t that been happening forever?

Another issue is that it’s hard to measure the extent of human misery that an extra couple of degrees causes.  Yes, heat waves can kill. So far this year, 65 people died in Pakistan at least because of a heat wave, 80 in Japan and at least 70 people in Canada. But there is much more to it than that.

Poor people get poorer and more malnourished because of crop failures that result from droughts and floods.  People who work outside wind up in hospitals because the heat is so debilitating, and these facilities have failing medical equipment because of power outages due to overuse of air conditioners.  A study from the World Bank estimated that across South Asia, 800 million people would see their living conditions decline because of extreme weather brought on by climate change.

What are we in the U.S. doing about this?  Pulling out of the Paris Accord, of course.