The Sun Got Jealous & Now We’re All Sweating

Day 9 of Our Collective Sunburn

Right. Climate change. That thing. The one where we all nod gravely while scrolling doom reports like they’re bedtime stories narrated by a particularly passive-aggressive penguin. Remember when poets wrote odes to the moon? Seems the sun got deeply offended by the lack of lyrics in its honour. In a celestial fit of pique, it cranked the thermostat to “Venusian Sauna” and declared, “Fine! You like cool? Try this, you ungrateful rock-dwellers!” Twenty-one days of infernal glory later, here we are. Sweating. Complaining. Still arguing about whether the sauna is real or just a figment of the thermostat’s imagination.

The world, bless its complicated heart, feels increasingly like a malfunctioning jukebox stuck on “Noise and Fear.” Yet, stubbornly, amidst the cacophony of collapsing systems and political posturing, grass still grows. Trees, bless their uncomplicated souls, continue their slow, leafy ascent. It’s almost insulting, this quiet persistence of nature. Doesn’t it know we’re having an existential crisis over here? Could it at least look a bit more concerned?

Ah, but the crux, the glorious, infuriating crux! We’re told the problem is scarcity. Not enough water! Not enough land! Not enough sustainably sourced, artisanal despair! Rubbish. The problem isn’t that the pantry is bare. The problem is that the keys to the pantry were handed, generations ago, to a gaggle of grinning gargoyles – let’s call them the “Profit-At-Any-Postcode” Consortium. Their motto? “Why solve a crisis when you can monetize the panic?” They fiddle with spreadsheets while Rome (and Miami, and Mumbai) gently simmers. They care more about quarterly dividends reaching escape velocity than whether the rest of us achieve breathing room temperature.

Environmental advocacy, bless its plantain-scented heart, feels increasingly like bringing a reusable tote bag to a thermonuclear knife fight. We meticulously sort our recycling (bottle? Tetrapak? Existential dread? Green bin!), bike heroically to work (inhaling the sweet, sweet fumes of the SUV idling beside us), and whisper fiercely about carbon footprints. Meanwhile, the Consortium jets off to a “Sustainability Summit” (location: exclusive, melting glacier-adjacent resort) to discuss… well, discussing how discussing the iceberg is impacting shareholder value. Progress! Probably!

It’s the conflict, you see. The inherent, screaming dissonance. We’re bombarded with ads featuring polar bears weeping on tiny ice floes, soundtracked by melancholic piano, urging us to turn off the tap while brushing. Seriously? It’s like trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon while the captain is busy selling tickets for the lifeboats to the highest bidder and insisting the ship is merely “experiencing buoyancy challenges.” The sheer, galling audacity of it all is almost impressive. Almost.

Aldous Huxley, that cheerful chap, saw it coming. He didn’t call it “late-stage capitalism,” he called it the “era of the World Controllers.” Chillingly accurate. We’ve got our scientific caste system alright: the Tech Bros promising geoengineering salvation from their bunkers, the Policy Wonks lost in acronym soup (COP-who? IPCC-what?), and the rest of us – the “Consuming Caste” – desperately trying to remember which bin the compostable coffee cup actually goes in this week. His “nightmare of total organization”? It’s not around the next corner, mate. It’s sitting in the boardroom right now, sipping single-malt Scotch and debating the carbon offset value of tears shed by displaced islanders. Efficiency!

So, where does that leave us? Baking gently on Day 9, clutching our reusable water bottles filled with increasingly questionable tap water?

Here: Staring at the grass. That stupid, persistent, glorious grass pushing up through the concrete. It doesn’t read the doom reports. It doesn’t attend the summits. It just… grows. Maybe that’s the ultimate act of environmental advocacy right now. Not naive hope, but stubborn, green persistence.

The fight isn’t about if we have resources. It’s about wresting the damn pantry keys back from the gargoyles. It’s about laughing, bitterly, uproariously, at the sheer absurdity of it all – because if we don’t laugh, we might just lie down and let the rising tide take the irony along with everything else. It’s about demanding better than teaspoons while the ship lists. It’s about finding comfort in the shared sweat, the shared fury, and the shared, ridiculous act of still trying, even when the sun is throwing a tantrum and the Controllers are counting their coins.

Keep growing, grass. Keep shouting, advocates. Keep sweating, everyone. And maybe, just maybe, write a damn lyric for the sun. It clearly needs the attention. Something about its radiant rage and our collective, melting clown car. It couldn’t hurt. Much. Probably…