Delusions – Anthropozone

with apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein

They like cow shows and hate Trudeau
(the father and the son).
They drive gigantic trucks to work
(electric cars are shunned).

When guys like Weibo Ludwig
Tell you something’s going wrong
You’ve got to say this show deserves a gong.

They always want to leave us,
But is Wexit really real?
I think they know America
Would drive a crappy deal.

I hate to have to say it,
But I very firmly feel
Alberta’s not an asset to the country.
I’d like to say a word on their behalf
-Alberta makes me laugh.

How do you solve a problem like Alberta?
How do you keep the oil beneath the ground?
How do you find a word that means Alberta?
A blue-eyed sheik! A cowboy! A clown!

Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them
Many a thing they ought to understand
That their little home on the range
Is quickening climate change
How do you keep the tar below the sand?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like Alberta?
How do you stop the fires they have fanned?
Carbon capture is a a joke
To send money up in smoke
And then frack their way to fucking Amsterdam!

They made forty billion bucks
And killed as many ducks
They’re all shysters! They’re all hucksters! It’s a scam!

Don’t they know their dirty oil
Will set temperatures to boil?

They could throw a Greta Thunberg out of tune
They’re so backward! They’re irate!
They made us a petro-state!
They’re a headache! They’re a scandal!
A lampoon!

How do you solve a problem like Alberta?
How do you keep the oil beneath the ground?
How do you find a word that means Alberta?
A blue-eyed sheik! A cowboy! A clown!

Many a thing you know you’d like to tell them
Many a thing they ought to understand
That their little home on the range
Is quickening climate change
How do you keep the tar beneath the sand?
Oh, how do you solve a problem like Alberta?
How do you stop the fires they have fanned?

On Friday, May 26, 2023, Timothy Martin and Joanna Smith surrendered to authorities after they were indicted on conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States and injury to a National Gallery of Art exhibit.

The two, who belong to the climate activist group Declare Emergency, entered the gallery and threw red and black paint on the case of the Edgar Degas sculpture “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen.”

Timothy Martin of North Carolina, and Joanna Smith (Ellie Silverman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Declare Emergency members block roads and provoke arrest to foreground their cause. They write:

Despite the many agreements, plans, and protocols our government announces, the planet continues to warm—and every additional day of continued emissions makes the climate crisis harder to fix.

The same day Mr. Martin and Ms. Smith were busted for defacing the case, Dr. Brian Brettschneider made a blog post containing this image.

Dr. Brettschneider is a climate scientist in Anchorage Alaska, with a PhD is in Environmental Geography focusing on Climatology. A regular contributor to Forbes magazine, Dr. Brettschneider does not deny that climate change is caused by human activity.

Here he has planned a trip one might drive on certain dates to maintain a temperature no more than 70° F (21° C).

In all my (many) years of making maps, the most popular by far is the 70°F Road Trip map that I originally produced in 2015. It’s been shared over 10 million times on various platforms if I had to guess. Maybe 20 million. That map was a hypothetical trip through the U.S. with the route tracking where the normal daily high temperature was approximately 70°F (21°C). I have been contacted numerous times over the years since from people who want to bike or drive the trip. It has resonated with people in a way I never imagined.

… It might surprise people that as fast as the globe is warming up due to human activity, the shift in 70°F temperatures between 1981-2010 and 1991-2020 is very slight. It’s just too short of a time period to capture the distance change. Instead, I decided to come up with new routes. The original route was interesting, but it left out a lot of options. This time around, there are multiple routes to choose from. Enjoy!

If you are reading this blog in the 21st century, I hope you find Dr. Brettschneider’s map counter-intuitive.

Admittedly, it’s possible there are people out there who would look at this and start pumping up their bike tires. There is the the 4,253 mile TransAmerica Trail. It begins on the East Coast at Yorktown, Virgina and cuts across America to the Pacific Ocean, ending on the Oregon Coast. But they won’t be riding on Interstate highways, which is understandably illegal for all but a handful of states. So they won’t be taking Dr. Brettschneider’s route.

According to this calculator, driving these distances in the average gas-burning car would add about two tonnes of CO2e to the atmosphere.

Dr. Brettschneider is chuffed that ten, maybe twenty million people have shared his map on social media. Perhaps next he could calculate how the popularity of the map increases the temperature along the route, where fires and floods don’t actually make it impossible to drive.

People like Mr. Martin and Ms. Smith are trying to ring an alarm loud enough for people like Dr. Brettschneider to hear.
Because every additional day of continued emissions makes the climate crisis harder to fix.

Enjoy!