It’s a Beautiful Day to Chain Yourself to the Park Avenue Home of a Fossil Fuel Executive

It's a beautiful day in the low 60s, and you're standing in a ray of sunshine that's gotten ahold of you as you turned the corner. There are birds chirping, some plant bulbs beginning to peek through the soil, and the damp and sweet smell of the arrival of a new season.

The unsettling part is…it's February. Or January. Or December. Spring, it seems, never got unsprung. 

It's easy enough to inhabit a kind of everyday malaise over the state of the Earth's biosphere while enjoying New York's new, all-year temperate climes. The feeling of learned helplessness is real, so much horrible change is a fait accompli. In New York City, many of us are already living a fairly low-carbon intensive life (look at how many carless households the city has!). It's tempting to laze about in that unsettling ray of sunshine and shrug your shoulders—you're not the problem.

But New York City has serious work to do—electrifying its buildings; turning its dirty, dirty, dirty electricity grid into one that runs on renewables; cutting way down on the use of cars (even electric ones) on city streets; and getting rid of asthma-inducing delivery trucks that are busy delivering your stupid fucking packages every day. Oh, also, figuring out how to address the one-foot of sea level rise that's set to come by 2050, without just slapping up big stupid walls.

So perhaps you spend this glorious afternoon in the park, calling your state senator to urge them to make the governor's cap-and-invest proposal better. It's also a lovely day to chain yourself to the Park Avenue home of a local fossil fuel executive! 

Or maybe you start small, and just read this fantastic thread that covered the state budget hearing on climate and the environment. (Ha ha but seriously, call your senator.)

Some more hopeful links!

• Mayor Eric Adams has lost his war on rats (on his own property) and now owes the City $300 in fines for…wait for it…"harborage conditions that encourage the nesting of rats."
• What if a Sopranos b-character was put in charge of the DEA in Mexico?
• Former detainees on Rikers Island are suing the City after they were held in "fetid" cells even after they were supposed to be released.  
• Stop-and-frisk is back—there's been a 61 percent jump in pedestrian stops by the NYPD. 
• Lawmakers are fighting to expand Medicaid to include all eligible undocumented people in New York, and not just seniors. 
• Another turn in the Hector LaSalle saga: Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said that even if Republicans in the state senate successfully sued to force a full floor vote, LaSalle would not be confirmed to be the state's next chief judge anyway…and that she might just go ahead with that vote to render the lawsuit moot. 
• A GoFundMe has been set up for a victim of an out-of-control U-Haul driver in Bay Ridge. 
• Union-busting Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is a coward.
• The CITY has a map of all the disappearing rent-stabilized apartments.
• And finally, Kathy, we will smoke weed with you (in Bumpass, Virginia):