Of Life and Lithium - TomDispatch.com

Of Life and Lithium - TomDispatch.com Joshua Frank, As the Rich Speed Off in Their Teslas March 28, 2024 Let's face it: we're now on a different planet in a different era and it matters not at all that a committee of the International Union of Geological Sciences wasn't yet willing to officially call it the Anthropocene or (all too) human age. I mean, why sweat about that when, in a distinctly overheating world, we have so much else to sweat about? Call it what you will, but thanks to humanity, we're already sweating big time -- and not just in South Sudan, where schools were recently closed for two weeks in expectation of a heat wave that could hit 113 degrees! After all, last year set a dazzling record for heat and the U.N.'s weather agency, the World Meteorological Organization, expects 2024 to repeat the pattern in some equally grim fashion. It's already sounding a "red alert," warning that, as the organization's secretary-general recently put it, “never have we been so close -- albeit on a temporary basis at the moment -- to the 1.5C lower limit of the Paris Agreement on climate change.” In that context, it's no small thing that, just the other day, the Biden administration issued an important new climate regulation designed, as the New York Times reported, "to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032." And on a planet where startling heat records were set monthly in 2023 and the same thing may indeed be happening again this year, that is no small thing. Those words "no small thing," however, do trigger something else in my mind. It's a subject that TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank, author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, takes up vividly today. It's no small thing that some of the same creatures responsible for heating this planet to the figurative boiling point now have the urge to try to "save" the planet. And while that's a distinct positive, don't think those creatures, who have already created so many problems, won't create more as they try to -- so to speak -- change gears. Ah, gears! Yes, if we humans remain in the same gear as we try to solve the problem of climate change that we've been in while creating it, count on this: there will be a steep price for all too many of us. Think, for instance, of the parts of the Global South that had so little to do with creating the conditions for climate change in the first place or, in the case of the lithium that Frank focuses on today, both Native Americans and the land itself. We are, after all, the very same creatures who created the problem, so hold your hat as the "solution" comes down the line. The question remains: Who will pay what price in the perilous future to come? And how large might it be? Tom