Here on Long Island, everything is sepiatone, and it smells like a smokehouse.
But I also know that folks in California and Australia have been dealing with exactly this, for a long time. It's news, because it's happening to the Northeast US.
I was watching AppleTV+ Extrapolations[0], which is actually damn depressing. The first episode has wildfires everywhere, and air quality around the globe sucks.
I'm in Brooklyn and sometime mid-afternoon I walked out into my living room to it being completely dark inside and orange out my windows. Local AQI has said 330-350 all afternoon.
And somehow this is a lot better than when I was in Delhi one winter. Some nights I'd see 500+, and there wasn't much escape from it in our airbnb in hauz khas, I'd just sleep with a keffiyeh around my face. People are living like this almost daily in cities around the world, to the point where the locals are sort of just used to it. Pretty depressing, but hopefully we'll start doing something about it.
In general the Northeast is pretty liberal and would happily go along with plans to prevent climate catastrophe.
Wall Street will is a tool, it does whatever makes the most money, and it seems to act pretty greedily (in the greedy algorithm sense). If you want to fix the environment, convince the rest of the country to pass some better laws. Wall Street is part of the engine, not the steering wheel.
Wall Street plays golf with everyone else, and the purpose of liberalism's economic policy is to delay and water down. The major newspapers that could stop both-sidesing everything are predominantly on the East Coast and policy decision-making is centralized around Washington, DC. Voting is also nearly useless and performative.
Start getting acquainted with purpleair checks too before going out. We used to review and hunt out the green air locations for the day and take a trip out to the ocean or wherever we could find respite to get some outdoor time. You go stir crazy stuck in a house for days on end.
It is damn depressing because solving the climate crisis costs so little:
It is estimated to cost between 2-6% of global GDP each year until 2050 to prevent exceeding 1.5 C mostly by building out renewables.
I could imagine that many people will start investing in air quality filtering solutions for their private home on a scale that matches what we should be spending on climate efforts per person per year.
2-6% global GDP probably means 20% of all western country’s GDP paying for the rest of the world while China paints their rocks green to fool their own gov inspectors.
The site you are pointing to does not use accumulated past emissions to judge countries so is highly dubious from a developing country perspective.
But again, I think pointing to others is a straw man in the debate. Each country need to go ahead and shoulder their share. For a country such as Germany the estimates point to 2.5% of GDP per year to be spend over the next 27 years to achieve a net zero economy. This is an effort that is so miniscule that it is embarrassing. And it is mostly domestically spend money to build wind mills and install PVs. The component cost is becoming less and less of a share.
I think China is well aware that their country is one that is very negatively affected by climate change. The continental climate will turn China into a desert if climate change isn't reduced.
The cost trajectories are so much in favor of renewables that spending money to build them is starting to make even financial sense.
(P.s.: My low effort google was an answer to a bullshit Youtube channel)
But I also know that folks in California and Australia have been dealing with exactly this, for a long time. It's news, because it's happening to the Northeast US.
I was watching AppleTV+ Extrapolations[0], which is actually damn depressing. The first episode has wildfires everywhere, and air quality around the globe sucks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrapolations_(TV_series)