Painting Fakes

I just read Bill McKibben's Oil and Honey , his memoir of the early days of 350.org, published in 2013.  Of course I already knew who McKibben is - he is the key founder of 350.org and a long-time writer and activist on climate change - and I'd read a few short articles he's written, but this is my first long-form encounter with him, almost a decade after the event.  I may be slow but I get there in the end. McKibben has been writing about climate change for decades.  In 1989 he published The End of Nature , one of the first books to explain climate change to a broad audience.  He kept writing in the years that followed, expecting that sooner or later the penny would drop and governments and corporations would act rationally and reduce their emissions.  Around 2006 he realised this wasn't going to happen without a fight and he teamed up with a few of his students at Middlebury College, Vermont to form 350.org and launch a rolling series of global actions. Oil and Honey

It rained.  And rained.  It rained more.  The river was rising.  There would be minor flooding.  It rained more.  Actually, it would be moderate.  More rain.  No, sorry, major. We moved stuff upstairs.  The lights went out.  We headed for higher ground, and there we stayed for five days.  We were lucky, we just had a couple of inches of water in the rooms we had emptied.  Our neighbours, a few metres down the hill, not so much.  The rain headed south, wreaking havoc wherever it went.   Amidst all this, along with the war in Ukraine and the ongoing global plague, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report saying how bad the impacts of climate change are, how much worse they will be, and how much we're not doing to adapt.  Tell us something we don't know.  If you listened to our politicians, you wouldn't know the report had been published.  From many of them, you wouldn't even know that its contents were being acted out in real life in communities th