As we predicted back on August 17 of last year, delirious claims that Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act meant the US is finally taking action have quickly given way to moans that nothing is being done and we finally need to start doing something. Now it’s American Vice-President Kamala Harris’s turn to express it with her inimitable clarity: “Students who are here and those who are thinking about their role in this: You are going to come out and just leapfrog over all of us. Because, you know, especially for our younger leaders, the benefit that you have is you’re not burdened by any question about, ‘Is this real?’” Whereas for her stodgy generation “we’ve been having to deal with some folks who just literally ... we’re kind of like, ‘Have you looked out the window?’” Yeah. At huge piles of snow. Why do you ask? Didn’t you see the Feb. 9 NBC story “Sprawling storm brings snow, rain and high winds to millions in the eastern U.S.”?

Presumably probing the mind of Harris, whose perky style would be ideally suited to a grade 2 class in our view, is a quest for treasure that is not there. But if looking out the window already demonstrates that the problem is unavoidably real and present, why is it only young people who will have been going to see it or whatever?

Actually NBC looked out the window and saw that with some 50 million people facing winter storm warnings, it was positively balmy:

“in parts of the Ohio Valley, Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, strong southerly winds will bring a warm, spring-like airmass. High temperatures were forecast to be 15-25 degrees above average on Thursday across the Ohio Valley, with even higher readings expected Friday across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast…. This warmth could bring about several record highs on Thursday and Friday, including for cities like Detroit; Richmond, Virginia; Hartford, Connecticut; Binghamton, New York; and Providence, Rhode Island.”

Unless it doesn’t.

Also, when Harris and her ilk look out the window and see a forest fire, a flood, some rampaging fungus or whatever, did they expect something different? Wasn’t the Inflation Reduction Act they backed and praised as saving the climate precisely the kind of bold and decisive measure needed to stop climate change? Why’s it still ravaging whatever?

Oh, never mind. As we said, we’re digging for nuggets that are not there. Including, incidentally, anything resembling gratitude from Greta Thunberg toward people like Kamala Harris. The Swedish scold just told the New York Times’ David Wallace-Wells that:

“It seems like the world is getting more and more grim every day. The concentration of CO₂ is now higher in the atmosphere and causing more and more extreme weather. But there are also positive things that have changed. We have more people now who are mobilized and who are in the climate movement, in the fight for the climate and social justice. So I guess that’s a good thing. But we have to be able to zoom out and see that we are still moving in the wrong direction. The things that people said back then that they were going to do, they still haven’t done, which proves, or which shows us, that it was just empty promises and really not taking it seriously, unfortunately.”

See, politicians like Harris don’t even care. They’re part of the evil capitalist system:

“Right now it seems like the people in power just don’t want to solve the climate crisis. They want to find “solutions,” whether they’re good or not, that enable us to continue now as we have been, that allow them to continue staying in power and to satisfy their greed. That’s not what I think that we should be striving for. I think that we need to make sure that no one’s well-being is at the expense of someone else. But that’s not what our current people in power seem to want.”

So there, you old fogey. You’re leapfrogged. Just as soon as we think of a plan, that is. Other than the obvious one of getting rid of capitalism. Wallace-Wells softballed Thunberg, “Can we limit damages without changing that fundamental dynamic of exploitation, which predates the climate crisis?” And she responded, making the world that much more grim, “I don’t think we can.”