We Can't Pretend Climate Change Impacts Aren't Already Here

Two vital water sources - Lake Powell and Lake Mead - are hitting dangerously low levels in the American southwest, and they are projected to get even lower as the year goes on. A terrifying drought now threatens the water and electricity supply for millions of Americans, and this is what we can expect more of as climate change intensifies. This isn't a far-off threat - it is here right now, so you'd better start paying attention. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Are you paying attention? Are you watching? And have you been watching even just the last couple of months, what has been happening? Not just here in the United States, but all over the planet, because if you've been paying attention, then what I'm gonna tell you is not a surprise whatsoever. Climate change is not knocking on our door. The impacts of climate change are happening right now in our own backyards. We have two lakes in the American Southwest lake Mead and lake Powell that are both at dangerously, low levels. Um, Mead is projected to get down to 22% of where it had previously been. By the end of the year, Powell is expected to drop to 27% of needed levels. These two lakes not only provide, you know, the drinking water through their aquifers for millions of residents, but also one of them feeds the Hoover dam. And right now, because water levels are so low because the Colorado river levels are so low and so on and so forth. It's a chain of events, all related to climate change. They're seeing a drop in electricity. And in fact it may not be too long before the water levels get so low that Hoover dam is no longer able to generate electricity. And of course, if we do hit those levels, that of course will mean even bigger. Droughts people in those areas will have a harder time getting water for them to drink.

This is climate change, the fires in California, the floods in St. Louis, the massive crippling heat wave that left scores dead across Europe, just a couple weeks ago. All of those are climate change. And again, all of these have happened within the last couple weeks. Folks, climate change is an existential threat, and we know that the problem is getting people to pay attention. Now I will give credit to MSNBC because over the last year or two, they have actually spent a little bit more time talking about climate change issues. They have had Dr. Michael Mann come on their programs. Uh, he goes on there actually relatively frequently, which is a huge leap forward for the network. I still don't think they give it enough coverage. But as Chris Hayes from MSNBC admitted on Twitter a few years ago, the reason they don't give it enough coverage is cuz obviously, and we see this on our channel. It doesn't draw in the big crowds and Chris Hayes, wasn't saying, I don't talk about it. Cuz people don't watch. He was saying, that's basically what the higher ups at the network at the time were kind of telling them like, yeah, you can talk

About it, but you're gonna lose audience. So we'd rather you not, this is a problem that is fixable climate change. And that's what we have to remember at least right now. If we take that action, if we finally make that big leap forward, we can fix this. We might even be able to fix it to the point where we could start reversing it if we act. But if we don't, we could hit that point of no return. It was 20 18, 20 18, 4 years ago where we got that report telling us that, Hey, we got 12 years. We have until 2030 before the worst effects of climate change basically become permanent here on planet earth. That was four years ago. Four. What, what have we done since then? We're no longer talking about double digit years left folks. We got eight. According to that report, we got eight years. We have to do more. We can do more. But part of that involves putting people in positions of power that want to do more.