It is lunch. As I open my thermos of pasta, a wave of heat wafts into my face. This is the last straw. I am sitting in long pants (my own fault) on the hot cement in the hot sun (not my fault) eating hot food and I am miserable. The quad is undoubtedly normally a very lovely place, and I have no qualms about my company, but the sheer heat of the bowl of concrete I find myself in is souring my present circumstances.
Simply put, the quad is hot. It is ridiculously, wildly hot. There is what seems to be a wall of heat that sits right where the steps begin and makes it a truly inhospitable environment. “It is boiling,” says Alina Shah, our very own senior class president. I asked her if she had any plans to resolve the issue of the quad. She says she’s “not sure what to do” and refers to the heat as “sorcery.”
Unfortunately, sorcery it is not. Berkeley Earth says that “2023 is on pace to be the warmest year yet observed since instrumental measurements began.” This is not an uncommon sentence to hear, and record heat waves have been recorded all over the world this year. This was also the case last year, and the year before. Every year and every day it gets hotter and hotter. This is not sorcery, this is not reversible, and this is not an accident.
If we were to lie and call it an accident, it would be in large part Exxon’s accident. If this name sounds familiar, it should. In the late 1980s, global concern was increasing about rising temperatures and extreme weather and the public began to ask questions. The Wall Street Journal reported that during this time “Exxon executive Frank Sprow sent a memo to colleagues warning that if there were a global consensus on addressing climate change, ‘substantial negative impacts on Exxon could occur.’” Early investigations have found that “Exxon worked for decades to sow confusion about climate change,” according to NPR. Exxon knew since 1977 and intentionally did nothing.
Now, the quad is hot and miserable. If you’re looking for people to blame, here is a list of the 12 people currently most directly responsible for climate change.
- Mike Wirth, CEO of Chevron
- Darren Woods, CEO of Exxon
- Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase Bank
- Larry Fink, CEO of Black Rock
- Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries
- Mitch McConnel, Senate Minority Leader
- Joe Manchin, US Senator
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
- Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp
- David MacLennan, CEO of Cargill
- Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR
- Ted Boustrous, Partner of Gibson-Dunne Law Firm
Amazing person.
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Test 2.
https://www.example.com/