San Francisco is the city climate change deniers love to hate. We like electric vehicles, which upsets the fossil fuel magnates, we are one of the most diverse areas of the United States, and we are famously tolerant of just about every religious belief or lack of it, every sexual variation, every (well, almost every) political belief — though we haven’t always been so tolerant — which seriously get the noses of the fundamentalists out of joint, and who are probably at this moment praying that an earthquake sends us all to hell. Failing that, we should burn up in a heat wave. (Sorry, I can’t find any links at the moment. But we’ve all heard the gloating from Fox ‘News’ over our problems, real and/or exaggerated.)
So it must really gall these hatemongers that the city they hate most is the one doing the best at surviving the climate change they are denying even exists.
I’m not gloating about this. I have become increasingly upset over the past decades at the destruction climate change denial has already inflicted on our planet, much less the upcoming damage already locked in place — even if we all agree to halt climate change tomorrow. I seriously worry that we are on a pace that will make our planet uninhabitable. (And I am furious at those who actually hope that happens — because it will trigger the Second Coming.)
No part of this country, this planet, is an island — in the sense that John Donne meant it:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
I address this to the religious nuts who think that God controls the weather and uses it to reward and punish us according to how closely we obey the dictats of the self-anointed. Let them explain, for example, how when the Supreme Court said Georgia could outlaw gay sex, Georgia then suffered the worst drought in its history (while Massachusetts, which was fine with it, never had a weather disaster). Or how no storms followed the same court’s ruling that outlawing gay marriage is unconstitutional.
“God works in mysterious ways,” they say. Meanwhile, San Francisco is enjoying the fine weather that is a gift from that same God.