November 21 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I visited Roanoke for the fourth time this year to find countless people standing up against Trump to protect one another in ways they’d never imagined—including my friend Beth Macy, whose party I attended Tuesday night as she announced she’s running for Congress. You can watch the podcast episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

Now I want to turn to news this week out of Qazvin, Iran. In an echo of the apocalyptic desert visions from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” President Masoud Pezeshkian announced that the country would have to move its capital from Tehran to a new location due to dwindling water supplies.

Ongoing drought and overdevelopment have strained conditions in and around the capital city to a catastrophic state. There is no longer any widely held belief that the situation can continue. The city—or at least parts of it—may have to be evacuated even before any long-term move can take place.

Environmental authority Hassan Akhani described calling the government’s attention to the crisis for years now. Former Iranian environmental protection agency deputy director Kaveh Madani said he had been trying to address the looming crisis but had been warned against alarming phrases like “water bankruptcy.” Madani has since left the country and now works in Canada at the Institute for Water Environment and Health at the United Nations University.

Iran was one of only three countries to have signed but not ratified the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate. (The U.S. signed and ratified it, but President Trump has ordered the removal of the U.S. twice—once at the beginning of each of his administrations.)

As the UN Climate Conference wrapped up today in Brazil, the conditions that scientists once discussed as hypotheticals are already underway. Iran is an alarming example. Tehran has seen one millimeter of rain this year. The last weeks of November are typically snow season there, but the Guardian reports that “snow cover has decreased by 98.6% nationwide compared with the same point last year. 98.6%. People pray for rain regularly, as headlines pursuing a religious interpretation of the crisis, asking “Why do atheist countries have more rain?”

Those kinds of discrepancies will continue: one of the hallmarks of climate change is that arid places get more arid and wet places get more wet. But I would argue that the real answer the the question lies with Iran’s existence as a petrostate, particularly the ways that burning fossil fuels around the globe is now exacerbating and will continue to exacerbate conditions worldwide, with some countries already on the front lines of misery.

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My last book was about the Arctic, and climate issues are something that I spent a lot of time on in recent years—at least, before the 2024 election. In 2018, I reported for The Washington Post from Longyearbyen, often called the northernmost town in the world, about massive effects of climate change already very apparent there: mudslides, deteriorating roads, and melting permafrost.

The U.S. has been backtracking on the climate initiatives it supported. And just last month, the U.N. announced that the world is blowing by the goals set in Paris a decade ago. Within a few years, humanity will miss the planned target to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The U.S. is being just as foolish as we not only walk away from international commitments but pursue becoming a petrostate ourselves and embrace AI models that will only exacerbate our water and climate issues. Proponents of massive investments in artificial intelligence, like Sam Altman of Open AI, promise the public that the climate harm that AI and its massive data centers will bring in the short run will somehow be “fixed” by AI eventually. This claim has been met with widespread derision, yet many who want to profit off the current AI bubble try not to see what is staring them in the face.

Just as people in Iran are wondering if the climate crisis is a sign of God’s disfavor, during the opening years of the AIDS epidemic, the religious right in America claimed that the new disease was a sign of God punishing gay people, much as evangelical leaders tended to do with earthquakes.

Unlike earthquakes or the genesis of AIDS, I would argue that the climate crisis is one that humanity has brought on itself through its depraved actions. Not through unveiled women in Tehran, or women getting abortions in the U.S., but through the logical consequences of refusing to alter our governance and policies in the face of changes that are already taking lives around the world and will kill millions more in the coming decades.

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In one popular Simpsons meme, Bart says to his father that today is the worst day in his life, and Homer corrects him, saying it’s only the worst day of his life so far. This meme has long been used about climate change to say that it’s not the hottest summer of your life, it’s just the hottest summer so far.

One of the great collective failures of humanity has been our inability to accept the reality of a thing that has been widely understood for half a century now, and modify our behavior to acknowledge it. There is a collective delusion that suggests that it’s someone else’s problem to fix, and we are helpless to do anything about it.

It reminds me of the delusion that a lot of media executives embraced when Craig’s List, the Internet, and the drop in advertising hit US journalism. Most companies simply rode their newspapers into the ground as they diminished into unprofitability, or sold them to buyers interested in stripping them for parts.

Though our obsession with fossil fuels runs deeper and stronger than any national attachment to journalism, it’s true that there was no clear path for journalism to take to fund its reporting, once the ad revenue fell so precipitously. While some news organizations have managed to institute a paywall and thrive, that clearly couldn’t be an answer for everyone.

Unlike journalism as a whole, however, technology has made extraordinary strides toward answering the climate crisis in recent years. Clean energy has become cheap and efficient enough that our path is laid neatly before us. Yet in the U.S., our leaders are balking, just as Iran balked at addressing the realities of its drought until catastrophic measures were required.

I’ve seen some people who refuse to vote say that they are tired of hearing that this is the most important election in history, and that prior ones have resulted in no real change, so they’re going to sit voting out altogether.

While I understand the frustration with a broken system that often seems only to represent the interests of the most monied among us—and usually the worst actors among the rich—I want to return to that Simpsons meme. When people say this is the most important election of your life, I might argue that each of the last several elections have been the most important of our lives so far. And that is likely to remain the case until we take significant steps to change what is ailing both the country and the globe.

We can’t continue the way we always have. In each election, the least-worst person may be our best option, but we need to reimagine what we demand of our leaders. When they so visibly add to every current problem we have, we need to stop deluding ourselves that the willfully blind are going to solve anything.

We need to create better options. We have to make climate issues part of the change we’re working for at every level. The window for the most effective actions closes a little more each day. Don’t fall for the mindset that someone else is going to take care of it. Even if we divide up who works on which issues on the ground, the safety of the planet has to be a cornerstone of the larger challenge that we’re all taking on. We shouldn’t have to look upon the ruins of a capital city in the desert to know that Ozymandias is all too real.

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