President means chief servant.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Funeral March | Frédéric Chopin | Marche funèbre
Dearly Beloved,
We are gathered here today—not in reverence but in resigned amusement—to bid farewell to the American climate.
Once a vibrant, unpredictable tapestry of seasons, it has now been flattened, scorched, flooded, and deregulated to death. Its demise, while tragic, is not entirely unexpected.
After all, the writing was on the wall—or rather, in the ice cores, the sea levels, and the increasingly deranged weather reports.
Let us begin by acknowledging the architects of this great undoing: the minority mandate of 77 million desperate voters, who, in their collective wisdom, decided that progress is overrated and science is for suckers.
With pens poised and executive orders in hand, they rewrote the rules of engagement with our planet, all in the name of short-term convenience and long-term chaos.
First, we declared a national energy emergency. Not the kind that solves problems, mind you, but the kind that unleashes a tsunami of pipelines and power plants.
Who needs pesky permits or environmental assessments when you can bulldoze your way to "progress"?
Next, we rolled back every regulation that dared to impede domestic energy production. Clean air? Overrated. Clean water? A liberal fantasy.
Let industry reign supreme, because nothing says "freedom" like a skyline etched in smog.
We signaled our intention to loosen tailpipe pollution standards—because why should cars run cleaner when they can run faster?
We stripped energy-efficiency regulations from dishwashers, shower-heads, and gas stoves, giving Americans the God-given right to waste as much water, gas, and electricity as they damn well please. Efficiency, we were told, is socialism in disguise.
We flung open the gates of the Alaska wilderness to oil and gas drilling, turning pristine landscapes into profit centers.
And in a final flourish of dystopian theater, we dismantled environmental justice programs, ensuring that the poorest among us bear the brunt of the pollution. Call it trickle-down toxicity.
Oh, and let us not forget the pièce de résistance: unilaterally ending electric vehicle mandates and sneering at the Paris climate agreement like a teenager rejecting curfew.
After all, who needs global cooperation when we can go it alone into the inferno?
And now, here we stand. America’s greenhouse gas emissions have barely budged—down a paltry 0.2% in 2024.
President Biden’s lofty goal of a 50% reduction by 2030 lies in tatters, a relic of naive optimism.
Meanwhile, the planet exacts its revenge with fake city-destroying wildfires, unreal massive floods, faux depressed crop yields, and overblown increases in heat-related illnesses.
It's practically performance art: ashes to ashes, floods to floods.
So let us mourn the climate, not with tears, but with the dark laughter it so richly deserves.
The absurdity of it all is almost poetic. We knew better, and we did worse. We had the tools, the knowledge, the resources—and we traded them for convenience and denial.
In the end, we weren’t defeated by nature; we defeated ourselves.
As we lay the American climate to rest, let us remember it not for what it was, but for what it could have been: a testament to our capacity for care, innovation, and collective action.
Instead, it became a casualty of apathy, greed, and hubris.
Rest in peace, dear climate. Or, more accurately, rest in pieces.
Amen.
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