2020 in Review (and a Little Bit of Environmental News)

“Please, let’s not revisit 2020 more than we have to.”

Hey, happy new year!  Or, I think it’s happy, anyway.  It’s a new year, at any rate, of that I can be sure.  But what does a “new year” mean, anyway?  Especially in this pandemic, where we can’t see anybody and shouldn’t be going to parties, it didn’t really feel like a new year.  There was no celebration, no ball drop (that I watched), no crowded house of people.  I stayed home and binged Schitts Creek with my mom, which was nice in its own way, but the only sort of celebration I experienced was I got a new years kiss with my partner via facetime.  January 1st, 2021, just felt like another day.

My family and our close friends have a tradition of visiting a museum in Chicago for New Year’s Eve and then spending the night at someone’s house into the next morning, and that couldn’t happen this year.  Which is maybe kind of indicative of the way things have been going, but I have to remind myself every so often that missing parties and seeing friends over Zoom isn’t so bad compared to the alternative.  Things could be much, much worse.  And for a lot of people, they probably already are.  Which is a terrifying thought to close out a terrifying year.  If there wasn’t at least one day in 2020 when you were scared for yourself and your future for one reason or another, you’re either a moron, a crazy person, or a liar.  2020 was a fucking bonkers year, and I think it’s fair to say that many of us, myself included, were frightened on many more days than just one.

The way I see it, there were three major things this year that caused me to fear for my future or the future of others, or made me incredibly angry. If you live in America, I think it’s pretty clear what these three things are; COVID-19, the racial reckonings in America, and the 2020 election, in no particular order. Let’s talk about them all a little, and I do mean just a little because everyone else in this batshit country has talked about them all already to no end and I’m fucking exhausted, and none of them have even affected me personally. I’m one of the luckiest bastards alive and I’m still tired. I can’t imagine how it would feel to have gotten COVID, or watch my family members make national news because they were lynched by police, or have to fear personally because the results of a single set of elections could potentially determine my status as an equal citizen. But first thing’s first; the pandemic.

The pandemic. This fucking pandemic. What more can I say that hasn’t been said to death already? “We live in unprecedented times” my ass, everyone’s known this from the start. This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing that’s going to shape the future in ways we can’t even begin to comprehend yet. At least a million people dead and millions more have been sick or in the hospital. Emergency workers and essential staff have been overwhelmed not only by the threat of something we can’t even see and can just barely detect but also by selfish idiots who claim the whole thing isn’t worth the trouble of wearing a mask. This year of disease and quarantine is going to make me rethink every movie or game that features a disease, because I know now that how we think people will react versus how they actually react is very different. And it doesn’t help that the US government absolutely dropped the ball on this one. We have about 4% of the world’s total population but almost 19% of total deaths. I don’t think we can attribute that to random chance. This wasn’t inevitable. This could have been avoided. Wear a mask. Believe the scientists. Follow the guidelines. It’s easy. But I’m not talking about that anymore. It’s been done to death, and it just makes me angry. But that anger I feel is still only a drop in the bucket compared to the anger that African Americans must feel every time another person is lynched by police or random armed civilians.

The second thing this year was, of course, the continued murder of unarmed African American men and women at the hands of police. Black lives still matter. Maybe that topic isn’t as “relevant” now as it was this summer, during the protests, but police brutality is still an ongoing menace to the black community, and other communities of color. I wrote about it earlier this summer, but this is a topic that hasn’t gone away, and never will go away until African Americans receive the same rights and opportunities as white Americans. So many individuals murdered by police still haven’t received justice, and despite all the protests and well-deserved anger this summer, nothing’s really changed. More work needs to be done, and while I think that this year was a watershed moment in the modern civil rights movement, I’m sure plenty of people would agree with me that it wasn’t and isn’t enough. I can do more as an individual, and we can do more as a society. We need to do more if we care about the lives of other humans at all. And while this isn’t really my fight to take, I can still support from the sidelines. Say their names. Black lives matter.

And of course there’s that last thing, the 2020 election. Yeah, Biden won. That’s great. Whatever. I like him substantially more than Trump, but I still don’t like him, I guess. He’s another career politician with big words and, so far, not a lot to back him up. His cabinet is promising, but also full of oil executives and some sketchy individuals. I’m happy that he’s at least given lip service to climate change, but not thrilled with his choice of individuals to work on that problem. And the huge voter turnout was great, but the fact that Biden didn’t win by a landslide is disappointing. After all this time, how more than 70 million Americans can still vote for Trump is a bit mind-boggling to me. But what’s more mind-boggling is the fact that people genuinely believe this bullshit that the election was rigged. So, so many high-ranking people from both sides of the aisle have come out against challenging the election results. By throwing around this dangerous rhetoric of unfounded conspiracies and fraudulent votes, Trump is actively trying to stage a coup, and people are on his side. I used to wonder how Hitler came to power, and while I’m not saying that Trump is Hitler or near being as bad as Hitler, and while I’m not saying that Trump is trying to be Hitler, I am saying that I believe their means of getting and staying in power are very similar. There’s a reason that neo-Nazis like Trump so much, is what I’m saying. He’s an unstable megalomaniac who can’t stand losing and is willing to throw the country into chaos for his own gains. And that’s been going on for a while, but 2020, like so much else, brought it to a head.

But what about the other insane shit that happened this year? Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, and Kobe Bryant all died this year, and those were sad for three different reasons. So did Alex Trebek, Chadwick Boseman, Eddie Van Halen, and Diego Maradona; they also passed away. The US blew up Iran’s second-in-command, Qasem Soleimani, and we almost got into a war. Trump was impeached but not removed. Yeah, that happened this year, too. Murder hornets briefly appeared. And Beirut had that massive explosion. Not to mention some other things that probably happened that I’m not forgetting. That all happened in one year. And normally that might have all been standard fare if it wasn’t for the Coronavirus. Oh, yeah, and both Australia and the western US burned to the ground thanks to out of control wildfires. Which brings me to something that got put on the backburner for the year; climate change. Despite everything else that’s happened, and despite the fact that we did see decreased individual CO2 emissions and cleaner spaces for the first time in, like, forever, thanks to the pandemic, climate change keeps on chugging along. Those decreased emissions aren’t going to last any longer than the quarantine, and then they’ll be back up higher than ever, probably. The world did have more immediate concerns than climate change (for the first time in recent history, mind you), so I’ll cut everybody, myself included, just a little slack for letting it fall to the wayside this year. But greenhouse gas emissions haven’t stopped. Deforestation hasn’t stopped. Glacier melt and sea level rise hasn’t stopped. These things have been chugging along silently in the background this entire year, and sooner or later we’re gonna have to deal with it.

I guess that’s the interesting thing about the virus. It did clean things up, environmentally, just for a little bit, even as it overshadowed any sort of environmental change. My environmental activism club at the University of Illinois had to cancel just about every protest event we had planned because of COVID, and that’s ok because it was hopefully for everyone’s safety, but virtual protest events just don’t work as well, if you ask me. I’m hoping to see climate activism pick back up in a new way once it’s safe to be in person again, and I’m hoping that Greta Thunberg will take the center stage some more, because I think she’s the strongest voice for fighting environmental destruction right now. But until then, things have kept on. Those wildfires in Australia and the western US aren’t caused by climate change but were severely worsened by it, since this is, for like the tenth year in a row, one of the hottest years on record. Great.

There are a lot of different sources if you want to read about some of the biggest things that happened this year in the climate change and environmental science fields, but honestly, there wasn’t a whole lot besides the forest fires in terms of huge news (although I think that this article has a pretty interesting take on things, and I’d recommend it the most for a more positive read). Just like usual, it was instead a lot of little things that are going to keep adding up into a much larger whole, like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot of water, with the forest fires being what made headlines this year for most people, but isn’t what’s really going to be the defining moment in the long run. They’re all the defining moment. This stuff is going to keep happening year after year. Things will continue to get worse. For example, the coral reefs are still going extinct, apparently. So if you want to get that snorkeling in, I’d recommend putting that higher up on your bucket list because you might not make it. The glaciers are still melting and the sea level is still rising, and sooner or later I suspect Florida is going to have to learn to swim. And freshwater lakes are shrinking, too, which is something I haven’t heard about since the Aral sea disappeared. The cutoff timeline for what we can do before we’ve lost to climate change has been pinpointed to the next twenty to thirty years or so. And of course there’s the political stuff, too, where Trump has continued to destroy environmental activism and policy in the United States. Though how far he got is questionable. But Biden’s team doesn’t have a fantastic track record, so fingers crossed that they actually do a better job and really get those green jobs they’ve been talking about.

It isn’t all doom and gloom. The review article I highlighted in the paragraph above is a pretty nice way of looking at some of the good environmental things to come out of not just 2020 but the coronavirus pandemic itself. We also got a new David Attenborough documentary, which I enjoyed. The New York pension fund officially divested from fossil fuels (meaning that they no longer invest pension funds into companies related to oil, coal, and natural gas) which is a huge economic step in the right direction. Voting with your wallet and buying or paying for goods and services that are environmentally beneficial or neutral instead of environmentally negative are one of the most powerful things you can do as a consumer (eating organic vegetables and avoiding beef are big things), but voting with your investments is a good one, too, especially at that huge scale. The New York Times has got some nice articles on reviews and also alternative liquid fuel sources, but they also have this downright disgraceful article (it came from the NYT first) that’s boohoo-ing over students who are struggling to find jobs in the fossil fuel industry thanks to the pandemic. Oh, what’s that, the pandemic has sped up the contraction of an already dying industry and now you can’t find cushy, lucrative jobs working for some of the single largest polluters in the world? Fuck you, find a different job instead of contributing to the destruction of our planet. As an aspiring grad student myself, I can empathize with the difficulty of finding a job, especially when research positions are scarce, but still, fuck off. That article and everything it stands for disgusts me, and the fact that the New York Times would publish it and condone it sickens me. Those students (who probably come from money and/or family in the oil business) willingly chose to pursue a doomed, destructive industry for profit. Sure, some of them talk about how they want to change the industry from the inside and develop carbon capture programs and things like that, but let’s be real; the oil industry isn’t going to invest in something that won’t make them profit. Fixing it from the inside isn’t going to work. Fuck big oil and fuck that article. They can piss off.

Well, that’s a different note to end on, but ending on it I am because I’m tired of thinking about and talking about 2020. What a fucky year. Hopefully 2021 will be better, but honestly, I have my doubts. I’m glad 2020 is over, but these things aren’t going away. Despite my flippancy, I think we learned a lot in 2020, but whether or not we use these lessons in the future are up to us. We have three successful COVID vaccines, but it could be all of 2021 before the US is entirely vaccinated, let alone the rest of the world. Black lives still matter, and if this year has shown us anything, it’s that those subtle racisms are just as present now as they’ve ever been. And even with Biden winning the election, it isn’t going to fix the problems inherent to our government. 2021 might not look as bad as 2020 because it (hopefully) won’t have massive event after massive event, but it’s going to have to suffer through the fallout of everything that’s happened and has been happening for the last year, five years, ten years, or more. Years aren’t isolated, they’re additive. This year is just an extension of the last, the last before it, and so on back to infinity. COVID is still here. Racism is still here. Bigotry and white nationalism are still here. And climate change is still here. None of these things are going away, and in one form or another, they pose threats as equally destructive in 2021 as they were in 2020. It’s a new year, but nothing’s really changed.

Except for us. We’ve hopefully learned and grown as people, and we can use what we know from before to impact our decisions now. I, personally, want to make my new year’s resolution be doubling down on activism and truly helping to make a positive change in the world. If I can start doing that in more earnest in 2021, I’ll be happy. I hope everyone has a new year’s resolution they can be proud of, and I hope you all succeed. Here’s to a new year, and hopefully a new future. We have to live with the past but we don’t have to settle for the future. Good luck, and stay safe. Happy new year. Don’t forget 2020; let’s learn from it. See you soon. Socially distanced, of course.