November Marsh Marigolds
If not the very first to flower in the Central Wisconsin spring, the radiant yellow Marsh Marigold is by far the most exciting of the spring ephemerals. These perky bouquets love shallow seeps of water, poking their golden heads above a green nest of round edged leaves, and where conditions are favorable, they carpet the wet, leafless spring woods for several glorious weeks in April. My first picture this year is dated April 14th, about the time our Forsythia blooms. This early splash of color in the drab days not long after winter’s end is joy incarnate. It demands a trip into the ditch for pictures that get enthusiastically shared broadly around our network of friends and family year after year. Eventually, though, like every other living being their exuberance fades and gradually the plant disappears with only the underground root system remaining to wait out the winter in anticipation of another dazzling spring gala performance.
Imagine then, my surprise this November when I saw the glint of Marigold yellow smiling unexpectedly at me from the ditches along our road. A quick detour down revealed blooming Marsh Marigolds, the last picture of which I took on the 20th. Since when do wildflowers bloom around here in November? Even a late blooming fall flower like a purple aster would be quite a surprise in late November, but a spring blooming flower? Not a chance! When canaries in the proverbial coal mine fall silent, the miners rush to the surface. When Marsh Marigolds bloom near the end of a Central Wisconsin November, I’m pretty sure hardly anyone even notices. But November Marsh Marigolds are an excellent example of why a lot of climate scientists call Climate Change, Climate Weirding instead.
There are so many things other than November Marsh Marigolds that are really weird about climate change. The way so many places around the world flip from extended drought to record flooding, or year after year of Arctic wildfires are a couple of pretty good examples. The World Meteorological Association says that the last ten years have been the hottest on record, with 2023, and now 2024 being the hottest. At the same time scientists who measure the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere record increases. The weirdness here is the number of people who believe the politicians who call climate change a hoax. Can’t we believe our own eyes? We don’t have to be all that old to know that Wisconsin winters aren’t, with occasional exceptions, what they used to be. The daughter of a friend does research above the Arctic Circle, and often logs summer temperatures around 100 degrees while we enjoy the lower 70s, climate weirding for sure. So is the prediction that at the current rate of melting Arctic Sea ice will no longer exist in the summer sometime between 2030 and 2050. But what really seems weird, correct me if I’m wrong, is just how nonchalant we are about climate change, and the dramatic loss of living creatures – except for us humans – around the world.
That we continue to prefer fossil fuels to generate our electricity instead of wind and solar; that we continue to drive cars and trucks powered by “infernal” combustion engines that blow twenty pounds of greenhouse gases out the tailpipe for every gallon of gasoline the engine burns seems like the height of weirdness to me. In just a couple of days I read about an oil tanker that sank smothering the coastlines of numerous islands in the Philippines; an Enbridge pipeline in Southern Wisconsin that leaked 70,000 gallons of oil while our DNR was giving the go ahead for Enbridge’s Line 5 reroute in our water rich Northern Wisconsin where a leak could do inestimable damage, and research showing that the Arctic has become a source of greenhouse gasses due to the fires and the melting permafrost instead of a place that sequesters them. Just two days of news. If there is anything we won’t sacrifice to our dangerous love affair with fossil fuels, I’d like to hear about it. We even seem to ignore the fact that the climate doesn’t stay put anymore, and that our children and grandchildren will live in a significantly more chaotic climate than we do today. What kind of future are we leaving our children? That we seem oblivious to this most troubling of questions has to be the weirdest of climate change realities by far.
While we remain anchored to the destructive and increasingly deadly convenience of gasoline, diesel, natural gas, L.P. and coal, many other nations are rapidly crossing the bridge to clean, renewable energy and electric transportation. Leading the race across that lifesaving span is none other than, and weirdly enough, the country we Americans love to hate: China. In fact, according to the Economic Times, China accounted for 80% of global EV sales this year. In 2024 Chinese consumers bought 870,000 new EVs, while we bought less than 135,000. China wants to dominate this growing global market and is. Chinese car manufacturer, BYD sold 4 million EVs this year, outpacing even Tesla by well over a million cars. In fact, 51% of the cars bought in China this year were EVs. Compare that with 10.4% in America. According to Yale Environment360, “China has more than 80 percent of the world’s solar manufacturing capacity.” Their competitive dominance does not bode well for the future of our economy. In this, a country once known as the most innovative in the world, it appears the best we can do today is to order large tariffs to protect our own lagging corporations. Tariffs won’t save us in a global economy that China wants to own.
Science tells us we absolutely need to stop burning fossil fuels now to begin to restore our chaotic climate. Economists say we need to send a clear and unified signal to our industrialists and business owners that we have opted for a green economy, that we are a determined player in the global energy transition. Renewables are in, we turn our back on the fossil fuel economy that has outlived its welcome. Most agree that we need a steadily growing price on our carbon emissions – corporate, governmental, yours and mine. As fossil fuel energy prices rise, the incentive to make the leap to renewables and sustainable ways of living grows along with it. Be it corporate, with the greatest energy appetites of all, or the individual consumer like you and me, we all walk across the energy bridge at our own pace. Organizations like the Citizen’s Climate Lobby – go ahead and Google it – recommend returning the money collected by a federal price on our emissions to all U.S. citizens at the same rate to help us make this transition when we are ready to. This monthly dividend check grows as the price of carbon emissions grows and helps make the transition easier. This is a well thought out legislative proposal that will help us ensure that our beloved descendants have a livable planet to live their lives on. Our Native American sisters and brothers follow this principle, I am putting my hopes in our ability to learn this wisdom too.