With all the frenetic hype seeking to commodify the solar eclipse, the vernal (ver, Latin for spring or youthful) equinox has been forgotten.
I always need to remind myself of what an equinox is, so here is National Geographic: “During an equinox, the center of the sun’s disk is in the same plane as the Equator. After the vernal equinox in March, the Northern Hemisphere tilts toward the sun, until the June solstice when it migrates south.”
March came in like a lamb rather than roaring like a lion. Looking at my weather app, with the exception of the dip last weekend, the 10-day forecast indicates we will have had mostly upper 40s and a variety of 50s for the first half of the month. I know our mild winter has been lovely for those who like to walk along the lakefront or bike on county roads, or simply not have to shovel snow. But December, January, and February were the warmest on record for the lower 48. That should give us pause.
Though climate change is human-made — and that’s as universal a consensus within the scientific community as we can ever get — Speaker of the House Mike Johnson continues to play cute by saying there are “facts on both sides.” (That is a tactic taken right out of Trump’s Charlottesville playbook when, after the violent white supremacist rally, he assured there were “very fine people on both sides.”)
Resistance to human-made climate change, and even active attempts to dismantle government efforts to address it, are a threat to all of us. Denial that individual actions matter while enjoying the warmer temperatures in winter, only adds to the overall hazard we face.
If this sounds like Chicken Little hysteria, I invite you to read mainstream climate science easily available in its original source material, or in more digestible summary through any mainstream (not politically tilted) media. Doing anything less, and actively repeating political talking points, is willful participation in this steady death march toward global tragedy.
On the brighter side, I recently drove to the Midwest and witnessed huge solar and wind installations sprawling across flat expanses where farms hosted renewable energy technology alongside, and sometimes within, furrowed fields. Energy from renewable sources increased by 16% in 2023 and produced enough to power 64 million homes. Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas led the way with wind while, not surprisingly, Florida and California led with solar. Many of the states with the highest production of renewable energy came from places led by Republican governors and legislatures.
In New York, 21% of our energy is hydroelectric and 10% from solar, which recently surpassed nuclear as an energy source. Amazingly, per-capita electricity consumption in New York is the lowest of all other states except Rhode Island and Hawaii. Plus, New York’s per-capita energy consumption in the transportation sector is the lowest of all.
So there is good news to be had on the climate change front, with possibilities for even more radical improvement available to us if we have the collective will to make it happen. Whether it is the individual decisions of our City Council members with regard to waste, recycling, and renewable options, or on the state and national level, who and what we support politically will have dramatic impact on our environment and our children’s future.
Cameron Miller of Geneva is an author and minister. His fiction and poetry are available through Amazon. Contact him through his website at subversivepreacher.org.
DENIM SPIRIT: The light and dark sides of our choices
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13.03.2024
With all the frenetic hype seeking to commodify the solar eclipse, the vernal (ver, Latin for spring or youthful) equinox has been forgotten.
I always need to remind myself of what an equinox is, so here is National Geographic: “During an equinox, the center of the sun’s disk is in the same plane as the Equator. After the vernal equinox in March, the Northern Hemisphere tilts toward the sun, until the June solstice when it migrates south.”
March came in like a lamb rather than roaring like a lion. Looking at my weather app, with the exception of the dip last weekend, the 10-day forecast indicates we will have had mostly upper 40s and a variety of 50s for the first half of the month. I know our mild winter has been lovely for those who like to walk along the lakefront or bike on county roads, or simply not have to shovel snow. But December, January, and February were the........
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