While planning this piece last month, July 3-6 set a record for the hottest world average temperatures yet measured. Western Massachusetts was saturated almost daily with heavy humidity and rain, and floods devastated $10 million worth of farm crops. Record-shattering fires burning across half of Canada blanketed some U.S. cities with the worst air quality on Earth.

As always, urban environmental justice communities of people of color suffered most from asthma-related emergency room visits.

The first full update of the U.N. climate report since 2014 (the year that 196 countries agreed to cut emissions in an effort to avert global climate breakdown) was recently released. In response to the report’s findings, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said despondently that the world is running out of options to defuse the “ticking climate time bomb … In short, our world needs climate action on all fronts — everything, everywhere, all at once … Conditions not expected until 2040 are here.”

Ninety-nine percent of the world knows that severing our reliance on fossil fuels is the emergency remedy for an overheating world. But if governments fail to cut their Gordian knot with fossil fuels, we are on track for almost 5 degrees Fahrenheit warming over pre-industrial levels by the end of the century — unlivable heat.

What stands in the way? Not science, but the lack of political and economic will and courage. The Biden administration has launched admirable green energy programs, yet it also permits leasing on public lands for oil and gas extraction and sustains the war in Ukraine with fuel-guzzling weapons, while avaricious U.S. fossil fuel corporations are making billions of dollars exporting energy to Europe.

The climate emergency crisis is one of two equally dire, imminent threats to human existence and the natural world.

Imagine your neighbor stockpiling assault rifles positioned toward your home, ready to use if feeling threatened by you. And you do likewise. Your words escalate, you cock your weapons, you are each aggressive and short-fused. Somebody throws a stone through your window. How likely is it a bloody massacre will happen?

That’s where we are with nuclear weapons in nine countries and U.S. nuclear weapons strategically placed in five NATO countries (Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands). Likewise, Russia has recently placed nuclear weapons in Belarus. All nine nuclear countries are currently engaged in upgrading their nuclear arsenals. And a war is going on in Ukraine in which most involved have nuclear weapons. One nuclear weapon used will spark an unstoppable response.

Nuclear weapons’ governments and their bomb-making industries are criminally sleepwalking into what could mean the end of our planet’s life, with the ever-present specter of their use, an accident, or their theft by terrorists.

On Feb. 2, 1998 Gen. George Butler, former commander of U.S. Strategic Air Command, addressed the National Press Club: “The likely consequences of nuclear weapons have no politically, militarily, or morally acceptable justification … They expunge all hope for meaningful survival. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations but the very meaning of civilization.” He joined 60 other retired generals and admirals calling for nuclear weapons abolition.

The only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are never used is to eliminate them; and likewise, the only way to avert climate catastrophe is to phase out and replace fossil fuels. Both are incompatible with human survival. A recent project, Warheads to Windmills, begun in Northampton by NuclearBan.us and now state- and countrywide, brings these two life and death issues together in a grounded, pragmatic proposal.

“Warheads to Windmills: Preventing Climate Catastrophe and Nuclear War” proposes that all the money, brainpower and international goodwill currently being squandered by nine countries pointing nuclear weapons at each other be devoted instead to a concerted global effort to speed up the transition to a fossil-free economy. Significantly, as the report documents, the very same science and engineering training and skills being used to manufacture these weapons could easily be transferred to renewable technologies, given political will and economic investment at the state and federal level.

The campaign to kick-start this essential transition involves, at the state level, promoting H.738, a bill to establish a Nuclear Weapons and Climate Commission for Massachusetts. At the national level, the Warheads to Windmills Coalition is promoting H.R.2775, a bill calling for the U.S. to sign the U.N. nuclear weapons ban treaty, and work with the other nuclear-armed nations to eliminate all nuclear weapons and put those resources into a global effort to address the climate crisis.

How can you, concerned readers, become part of this? You can first of all read, download or order a paper copy of “Warheads to Windmills” by going to nuclearban.us/w2w. You can urge your state and national representatives to support these two bills with ready-made templates at nuclearban.us/action. And you can encourage your town, faith community, school, bank, hospital, and local businesses to divest from both fossil fuels and nuclear weapons.

Our action is needed for the fate of our world.

“We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.” — The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Pat Hynes of Montague is on the board of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice and NuclearBan.us. Timmon Wallis of Northampton is executive director of NuclearBan.us.

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