Climate Disasters Are Making It Hard to Enjoy the Olympics. And I ’m Not Sure I Want to, Anyway

A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. As the U.S. approached a coronavirus peak last July, a noticeably eerie Disney World reopening advertisement began making the rounds online. Cases were rising, driven by a false sense of security in much of the country and bad faith arguments around masking and social distancing. But at Disney World, the sun was shining, and rides were open. Low-paid service workers waved while wearing surgical masks, apparently thrilled (or at least willing) to come in contact with crowds of tourists braving the pandemic for a spot on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Often, rather than reassuring us, such mass recreations of normalcy in the midst of a disaster can deepen our sense of unease, because they reveal an unsettling truth: the people who should take responsibility either don’t understand how bad things are, or do not care. Watching the Olympics this year amid endless, compounding climate disasters has given me pangs of that pandemic-at-Disney-World feeling. It’s not that the Olympic organizers aren’t trying, at least in some sense. They’ve made great strides to conduct this summer’s Games sustainably, using renewable energy to light their arenas, for instance, and offsetting the event’s emissions with carbon credits, while a lack of internatio...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate Source Type: news