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  "description": "It is time to decide.",
  "path": "/climate-our-planets-billions-or-petro-elite/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-20T20:28:36.000Z",
  "site": "https://deceleration.news",
  "tags": [
    "dizzying 126 degrees Fahrenheit",
    "just this month",
    "over 100,000 years ago",
    "The Ice Age was cancelled",
    "a belated “No Kings” fervor",
    "Public Law 88-206",
    "the first of likely a round of lawsuits",
    "lost women of science",
    "__Australian Women's History Network__",
    "for 100 years",
    "impact the planet's temperature",
    "As Berkeley Earth remind",
    "got a handle on acid rain",
    "to keep the ozone hole from gobbling us all up",
    "most subsidized industry on the planet",
    "illegal to divest from fossil fuels",
    "illegal in Texas to boycott Israel",
    "purging the United States of all non-white citizens",
    "@hejronja.illustration"
  ],
  "textContent": "Shortly after Jessica Witzel collapsed and died on a Five Points area sidewalk her body temperature was logged at a dizzying 126 degrees Fahrenheit. The sidewalk on that 100-plus-degree day was almost certainly even hotter than that. Though disputed by the local medical examiner—who steadfastly refuses to label essentially any deaths unattended by an ER doctor as heat-related—Witzel died in the heat and from the heat.\n\nJust the day before during this hottest rush of summer a nearby neighbor called the police when they found Witzel, who was living unhoused in the area, trying to cool down with their garden hose.\n\nAs a paper published just this month by a leading Texas-based climate scientist makes clear: the body count of heat-related deaths are rising. Increasing, even across Texas, more public health officials are watching and marking heat-related deaths.\n\nSuch concerns are rising with global air and oceans temps, which have been pushing upward for decades as the world bakes under heat the planet hasn’t seen since humankind first began to emerge from the African continent over 100,000 years ago.\n\n## Sign up for Deceleration\n\nDeceleration is an online journal of environmental justice growing solutions to an overheating world.\n\nSubscribe\n\nEmail sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup.\n\nNo spam. Unsubscribe anytime.\n\nWe were supposed to be moving toward another ice age with glaciers again advancing across North America instead of jettisoning into unprecendented life-threatening heat. But guess what?\n\n> The Ice Age was cancelled. And at root of that is the pump jack, the frack site, the data center, and all the fossil fuel pollution thickening the greenhouse layer, no longer swaddling the planet like a baby in the crib, but choking it like a python.\n\nMore than 100 years after the discovery of the greenhouse effect and the relationship of gases like carbon dioxide to that warming, they were finally added to the umbrella of the Clean Air Act in 1990 and roughly 16 years ago integrated into our regulatory system.\n\n0:00\n\n/0:30\n\n1×\n\nThe Clean Air Act is celebrated as an Earth Day feat. A big national  _pachanga_ in denim and love beads. The largest day of mass activism in U.S. history (until Trump’s authoritarian lurch and mounting attacks on fundamental liberties shook millions to get out into the street with a belated “No Kings” fervor).\n\nBut deeply bipartisan concerns over the poisoning of the nation's lands and waters and people had taken root earlier than that. The post-World War Two building boom and “white flight” from city centers into seas of unrolling suburbs contributed to deepening unease of the unintended (or willfully neglected) consequence of all this productivity—particularly when it came to fears over what exploding automobile transportation, energy generation, and deepening industrialization were all doing to the air.\n\nIn 1963, the Clean Air Act’s original legislation passed as Public Law 88-206 with a charge to “improve, strengthen, and accelerate programs for the prevention and abatement of air pollution.” Air pollution was of special concern because what comes out of those tailpipes and smokestacks doesn’t travel obediently by road or cross checkpoints at county lines. Poisons were hitching a ride on the wind and dropping like the rain, just where they damn well liked.\n\nThis anarchy of the commons presented challenges.\n\n> “The growth in the amount and complexity of air pollution brought about by urbanization, industrial development, and the increasing use of motor vehicles, has resulted in mounting dangers to the public health and welfare, including injury to agricultural crops and livestock, damage to and the deterioration of property, and hazards to air,” the legislation states.\n\nWithout unified federal rules and coordination among local governments, a company could shake off its toxic tailings in any community that challenged them and plop down across a county or state line to avoid reforming its behavior.\n\nWhich is what makes President Trump’s argument in favor of abolishing of the “endangerment finding” that added greenhouse gases to the roster of pollutants in 2009 so pathetic. He and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin stepped forward with straight faces to assert that only local poisons matter. That pollution that does its dirty work after traveling a few hours from home can’t be regulated in the same way as pollution that asphyxiates a neighbor's cow or melts the paint off their car or gives them cancer.\n\nThey overlook that this problem of proximity was the very point of the Clean Air Act as far back as the 1960s.\n\nPL88-206 sought to protect the public health, speed research into new air pollution technologies (particularly in motor vehicles), and clean up fuels, while helping state and local governments collectively organize to solve the problem of pollution that by its aerial nature transcends political borders.\n\nThe cognitive dissonance underlying Trump’s attack on this root of climate regulation is one reason some environmental attorneys are like…yup…this blatant chicanery is toast. _We'll see you in court._ (In fact, the first of likely a round of lawsuits have already been filed.)\n\n> Others holding less regard for the current Supreme Court, though, worry that cognitive dissonance is just the air that we are all forced to breathe now. The rule of law has been effectively overthrown. That power is what decides now, not logic or reason or justice.\n\n> They likely are seeing matters more clearly.\n\nTrump's longstanding complaint of a “green scam” plays because it overlies legitimate grievances around globalization or offshoring of so-called “dirty” jobs while paving over the penalties of a failure to innovate. Its claims are so insulting (or should be) to human intelligence that it's hard to even respond.\n\nAnd yet, y'all. OK. The basic understanding of the greenhouse layer and greenhouse effect follow. For you believing types: god in Her infinite wisdom established life on the planet, life that breathed, and through that process of breathe, generated a special atmospheric hug that wrapped the planet in a swaddling blanket to ensure the planet remained in Goldilocks temperature status: cycles of cold and heat would come and retreat, but always remain basically amenable to biological life.\n\nYou can see this in action in an actual greenhouse or home terrariam, with glass letting in that incoming heat and light and then containing the moisture and warmth for the plants inside, keeping it from overly dispersing into the broader universe. A stable environment.\n\nMay we introduce you to one of the “lost women of science” Eunice Newton Foote, who discovered the greenhouse effort years before the official greenhouse discoverer John Tyndall a few years later.\n\n__Read more about her at the__ __Australian Women's History Network__ __. Image: @hejronja.illustration via Wikimedia Commons__\n\nYep. 1850s. Not the 1950s. This is old stuff.\n\nThat's why _Popular Mechanics_ boasted about covering global warming for 100 years.\n\nOn March 1, 1912, in fact, they published a story—probably the first to be picked up by media around the world—describing how burning massive amounts of coal would impact the planet's temperature:\n\n> “It is perhaps somewhat hazardous to make conjectures for centuries yet to come, but in the light of all that is known it is reasonable to conclude that not only has the brain of man contrived machines by means of which he can travel faster than the wind, navigate the ocean depths, fly above the clouds, and do the work of a hundred, but also that indirectly by these very things [emissions of burning coal and gas], which change the constitution of the atmosphere, have his activities reached beyond the near at hand and the immediate present and modified the cosmic processes themselves.”\n\nScientists have understood these “cosmic processes” for a long ass time: the link between carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases for decades (if not more than a century, as in the case of carbon dioxide). And now it's been felt by all of us in brutally rising heat and storms and drought.\n\nAs Berkeley Earth remind:\n\n> \"The last 11 years have included all 11 of the warmest years observed in the instrumental record, with the last 3 years including all of the top 3 warmest.\"\n\nOf course we also know that political action doesn't get underway until the real blisters of the thing began to pop. So it was with the original Clean Air Act when substances like tetraethyl lead were still being intentionally added to gasoline. A potent neurotoxin, lead is a key culprit fingered in the fall of Rome. And it was pouring out of tailpipes and blanketing the United States' cities and countryside, ultimately prompting health warnings for fish consumption in virtually every lake in the United States.\n\nThe 1970s Clean Air Act reboot took on lead, and the air (and waters) improved because of it. It wouldn’t be until 1990’s, after the expanding heat and storms and droughts they were causing became inescapably obvious, that greenhouse gases were included inside the legislation.\n\nThe “endangerment finding” that then advanced climate concerns into national regulatory policy put us on the path to reductions, even if emissions in most sectors continued to rise.\n\nTrans-boundary challenges remain with efforts to respond to the climate crisis. But we've faced these before—and won.\n\n> Reducing sulfur dioxide emissions with Clean Air Act updates in 1990 got a handle on acid rain, a major concern in the 1980s. And in spite of trust issues and nationalist animosities we also somehow worked out international deals to keep the ozone hole from gobbling us all up.\n\nThe problem with climate progress is the death grip the fossil fuel industry holds on profits. So beings of the Earth who wish to inhabit a planet with regulated temperatures amenable to survival: Put your claims on hold because the wealthiest and most subsidized industry on the planet isn't done profiting, they insist.\n\nTrump can crow about green scams all he wants, but basic facts remain that should put a Texas-sized kink in oil and gas's pisser (and not in a good way): Coal is literally just carbon. Gas _is_ methane. They are the culprits behind this heat. Meanwhile, the world is rich in solar, wind, water, and fully capable of doing things differently. We can have MRI machines and good food and safe homes and reliable power. And we can have all of that while correcting the bad actors among us.\n\n> Christofascist billionaires are funny creatures. They don't just want their wealth and sustained political influence over the lives of the rest of us—but they want all of that untroubled by conscience. They just can't stand being seen as villains, even bumbling and unwitting villains.\n\n__Por ejemplo.__\n\nTheir political henchmen (and, yeah, they are mostly men) seek to make it illegal to divest from fossil fuels in the same way they made it illegal in Texas to boycott Israel. And yet they are not only collapsing life on Earth but (we learned this last week thanks to Forrest Wilder at _Texas Monthly_) funding the campaigns of candidates who are committed to purging the United States of all non-white citizens.\n\n(But god forbid you call any of them planet-destroying Christofascists hellbent on murderous plunder with a churchly smiles.)\n\nAs our friend Rose Jones wrote recently on LinkedIn: The obliteration of the endangerment finding, itself resting on more than a century of science, is a decision that “carries a body count.”\n\nIt's a body count, I would add, that is measured in the billions.\n\n> Each of us now must choose now where our loyalty lies: With the billions of lives that emerged together on this beautiful and fragile planet, or the billions lining the pockets of the guilty petro elite.\n\nThe Earth can no longer sustain both.",
  "title": "The Choice: Our Planet's Billions—Or the Guilty Petro Elite? (We Can't Have Both)",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-11T16:47:47.012Z"
}