by Britton Jones, CEO of The Nest Climate Campus, Chairman of the Board at Food Rescue US, and Member of NYC & Company's Sustainability Committee
While the future remains impossible to predict, recent developments offer an eye-opening glimpse into what lies ahead if we fail to make significant changes.
For starters, if you live in the New York area, remember what it felt like to venture outside on June 7th, when NYC had the unenviable distinction of having the worst air quality of any major city in the world. The air was extremely thick with smoke and had an acrid smell. The quality was so poor that it posed serious health risks, caused significant airport disruptions, and triggered the cancellation of many indoor and outdoor activities, including MLB games.
Air pollution in New York City from Canadian wildfires (Image source: Earth.org)
The source of this smoke was the unprecedented number of wildfires burning in Canada, where the arid conditions caused by climate change are producing the worst wildfire season in the country’s history.
A little over a month later, Canada saw its farthest-north 100-degree temperature as wildfires continue to rage on.
In California, and several other states, you recently learned that access to homeowners’ insurance through private companies has been entirely cut off, greatly reduced, or priced so high that it is virtually unaffordable. After incurring nearly $275 billion in natural disaster damages in the US between 2020 and 2022, industry leaders like AIG, State Farm, Allstate, and others are pulling back in their product offerings because of the tremendous risks in trying to price the growing incidences and increasing devastation caused by extreme weather or in other words, the impact of climate change.
In drought-stricken Arizona, communities have been cut off from public water supplies, and the situation has become so acute that in the areas around Phoenix, new building permits have been suspended because of overuse of the groundwater supply. AZ has also had to restrict the water flow to farmers, which is expected to reduce their crop production significantly.
You get the idea….. No matter where you live, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is making it impossible to avoid the impact (floods, droughts, wildfires, heatwaves, atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, hurricanes, and tornadoes) of climate change in our lives…. increasingly, in our daily lives.
Winston Churchill famously observed that:
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, only after they've tried everything else.”
With critical tipping points right around the corner, it is time for us to stop “trying everything else” by pretending that global warming can be effectively dealt with at some point in the future. The reality is that our backs are increasingly against the wall. The time is now, and thankfully, many of the solutions are at hand.
To learn more about how you can make your industry, company, job, and life part of the climate solution, please join us in climate action on The Nest Climate this September 19 -21.
