Love is simply acknowledging the full humanity of the other

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed a release from the World Meteorological Organization that says the next five years will be the hottest on record (following eight years that were the eight warmest) and in those five years there will be more weather disasters. Also, we’ve been told we should not let the earth warm by 1.5C if we want to avoid big climate catastrophes, and we have a 66% chance of passing that by 2027. So far the earth has warmed by 1.1C. For the last three years the oceans have been in the La Niña pattern in which warm waters are pulled lower and the surface remains cool. But the oceans are shifting to the El Niño pattern, in which all that warm water returns to the surface. That will fuel the heat and the disasters. Sumner wrote:

There will be droughts, floods, wildfires, and economic disruptions like power plants being idled by low river levels, barge traffic halted, and livestock dying in masses from sheer heat. The climate crisis already significantly drives immigrant movements in the Americas and Europe. Those movements will increase, and as they do, they will contribute to increased political instability, not just in the nations people are forced to leave, but in the areas where they arrive. The effects of climate change and the associated disasters are a matter of local, national, and international security.

We need to prepare for this at each of those levels. And we aren’t. Pro-polluting politicians like to point out the cost of addressing climate change. Already climate disasters and lost production have been much more expensive and the costs will go up.

In any one of these El Niño years, the combination of decreased production and increased disasters amounts to something like a 2-3% downturn in the global economy. The two-year El Niño in 1982-83 meant a loss of $4.1 trillion. Another two-year cycle in 1997-98 cost $5.7 trillion. Now we’re heading into another such cycle, and there are no guarantees it will last only two years. Over the remainder of this century, the cost associated with these cycles is estimated to be $84 trillion. That’s about the same size as the entire global economy. That’s what we are already paying for not taking the steps necessary to address the climate crisis. Addressing climate change now is being fiscally responsible for the future. That price will only increase along with rising temperatures. It’s not too late to move. It’s never too late to move. But the longer we wait, the more costly it becomes.

An Associated Press article posted on Kos discussed the world’s shrinking lakes.

A close examination of nearly 2,000 of the world's largest lakes found they are losing about 5.7 trillion gallons (21.5 trillion liters) a year. That means from 1992 to 2020, the world lost the equivalent of 17 Lake Meads, America's largest reservoir, in Nevada. It's also roughly equal to how much water the United States used in an entire year in 2015. Even lakes in areas getting more rainfall are shriveling. That's because of both a thirstier atmosphere from warmer air sucking up more water in evaporation, and a thirsty society that is diverting water from lakes to agriculture, power plants and drinking supplies, according to a study in Thursday's journal Science. Authors also cited a third reason they called more natural, with water shrinking because of rainfall pattern and river runoff changes, but even that may have a climate change component. That's the main cause for Iran's Lake Urmia to lose about 277 billion gallons (1.05 trillion liters) a year, the study said.

For now, the Great Lakes around Michigan seem to be maintaining size. Another AP story on Kos reported that New York City has passed a law requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by buildings starting next year. This will affect about 50K buildings. This is important because buildings are the largest source of the city’s emissions, accounting for about two-thirds. The article tells the story of machinery in the basement of one of those buildings that captures carbon dioxide, the most prevalent problematic gas, and sells it. The company that buys it, Glenwood Mason Supply, combines the CO2 with calcium in cement to create calcium carbonate, which becomes a stable part of concrete. That’s pretty cool! And definitely a help. But... Better than trying to capture emissions is no emissions. Also, many of these buildings are more than a century old and under-maintained. Switching to a better energy source is a better solution as is making them more energy efficient. But that takes time and money (though we could debate whether it is better to install carbon capture or to make these other improvements). There is also the question of whether storing CO2 is safe. A large release of CO2 replaces oxygen and lead to asphyxiation. But safer than what? Safer than natural gas? Safer than a warming climate? Yes, to both. Installing carbon capture is a good short term solution to lower emissions now on our way to something better. But it cannot be the end solution, one that permits ongoing use of fossil fuels. Jeffrey Levin tweeted a cartoon by Mike Peters from the 1970s that, alas, is still appropriate. A guy at a desk marked Big Oil says:

You want coal? We own the mines. You want oil and gas? We own the wells. You want nuclear energy? We own the uranium. You want solar power? We own the er... ah... Solar power isn’t feasible.

Othuke Umukoro tweeted the poem To the Young Who Want to Die by Gwendolyn Brooks. Here’s part of it, though the whole thing isn’t very long.

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day.

I found the whole thing meaningful. And no, I am not depressed and I don’t want to end myself. However, if you are, in the US please call 988 to reach the crisis hotline or call the Trevor Project. Leah McElrath tweeted a thread:

I believe in love. As a verb. Love as a feeling is wonderful, but feelings change. If you think of love as a verb, you can choose how to act in a consistent way that’s not based on transient emotional states. Consistently applying love as a verb makes love into a practice, similar to prayer or meditation. What you’ll discover if you consistently practice love is that doing so sometimes upsets people. It seems that many in our culture have a belief that some people are deserving of love and others are not. Many confuse loving with approving. But that’s not what love is. At its most pure, love is simply acknowledging the full humanity of the other. Love dependent on approval incentivizes secret-keeping and shame and will ultimately render us all unloved. Loving is a choice we make for ourselves, not for the other. Love is a way of being.

David Hayward tweeted a cartoon of Jesus saying:

I said feed my sheep, not feed on them!

Rachel Martin of NPR has started a series titled Enlighten Me. The first episode, 16 minutes long, was during All Things Considered last Sunday. Martin talked to Simran Jeet Singh, who is Sikh and the author of the book The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. The book is a response to a shooting in 2012 in which a man opened fire in a Sikh Temple, killing six (a seventh died of their wounds in 2020). Singh didn’t know the victims, but recognized it as a racist attack on his faith and culture. Here are some ideas from that discussion. Don’t let fear keep you from life. Live with no fear and no hate. The hate, the anger at what someone has done to us is a natural reaction. But it’s not the only choice. The anger directed at me is not my problem unless that person can’t control their anger. Forgiveness sometimes doesn’t seem quite right. Part of that is forgiveness is expected – a church is supposed to forgive a shooter. And forgiveness may not be the solution to our suffering. An attempt to get to know the Sikh Temple shooter (who had killed himself at the scene) didn’t work Singh felt he and the shooter had nothing in common. So why did that guy kill? He talked to some kids about it and one suggested he killed because he was evil. But evil is not a Sikh concept. We are all from the same light, we are all interconnected, we have a shared sense of humanity. We are able to hurt one another when we fail to see that humanity.

Part of what I didn't expect coming out of this conversation with the kids was this way of thinking, essentially saying there's no place for judgment. There's no place for discrimination. This is a core teaching of Sikh philosophy and I realized that as I was thinking about this white supremacist, I was so judgmental of him and I had developed the same kind of supremacist thinking that I was upset at him for. I thought I was better than him as a human being. I thought I was more divine or had more light inside of me, or however you wanna describe it. I just thought I was better than him at the end of the day. ... I don't think that our ability to live in certain ways necessarily means we're better than other people. Growing up, the one thing that I found most frustrating and the biggest turnoff about religion was when people thought that they were better than you. And maybe it's because I grew up in Texas and there's a lot of that kind of judgment, the whole "holier than thou" mentality. It always rubbed me the wrong way. I never really understood why it was particularly unacceptable to me until I started to think about this very one-sided relationship, because he was dead, with this man. But in trying to see his humanity and learning that if I wanted to see him as equally divine I had to get over this assumption that just because he did horrible things means that he's a monster or he's inhuman and doesn't deserve the same kind of dignity as everyone else.