Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis became the latest Republican governor to sign a bill making it harder for citizens to shift away from the fossil fuels that are changing the climate. The move came after Miami, which is in danger as sea levels rise, proposed cutting carbon emissions by banning natural gas infrastructure in new buildings. The bill was written by lawyers for utility companies, based on a pattern written by the American Gas Association. Lobbyists for the Florida Petroleum Association, the Florida Natural Gas Association and the Florida Retail Federation, the Florida Home Builders Association, and the National Utility Contractors Association of Florida supported the bill.
Let me get this right, these red states are allowed to keep revenue made by taking resources from FEDERAL LANDS? Meanwhile, blue state pay more into the US treasury than red states? For all their talk of “rugged individualism” these red states don’t mind living off the largess of the hard working blue states. I realize this is off topic from the critical over heating of the planet issue, but I think that the vast overreach of red states is at the root of a number of our current problems.
A very conservative colleague posted a stilted article against Biden because the oil industry is suffering and gas prices are so high because of Biden, on and on. I replied so maybe the government should quit subsidizing oil companies. Our tax dollars go to support them and they gouge us at the pump. That doesn’t seem right. No response.
Another conservative friend said we’re just going through natural cycle, the Earth does this. So the Earth pulled oil out of the ground, turned it into plastic, and threw it into the ocean the size of Texas and ten miles deep? His wife said I caused him to have a stroke. I didn’t know I was that powerful! Get dumpty on the phone!
The writing is not just on the walls, it’s everywhere. If it’s this bad we may already be too late. It will be hard to change but even harder to find a new planet. Or to become extinct!
Thank you, Heather! Appreciate your insight and continuing the conversations we need to have.
Anosognosia is a lack of ability to perceive the realities of one’s own condition. It’s a person’s inability to accept that they have a condition that matches up with their symptoms or a formal diagnosis.
This occurs despite significant evidence of a diagnosis, and despite second and even third medical opinions confirming the validity of a diagnosis.
The strongest symptom of mental illness is anosognosia; it is the biggest obstacle for health care. The strongest condition in a society overtaken by propaganda is that the more effective the propaganda, the less the victims are aware of being victims. Witness North Korea, where a majority of the people show allegiance to their dictator despite the malnutrition and forced labor camps.
Thanks to the 13 billion dollar campaign for climate denial by the Koch brothers et al., half of our country is living in a North Korea of the mind.
Those few days of record temps in Portland, OR were distressing.
Extractive economies aren’t flexible. However, “a rapid transition to clean energy can stabilize the climate, improve our health, provide good-paying jobs, grow the economy and ensure our children’s future.”
There’s our opportunity to flex and pivot - and evolve. Or else.
Back in 1973 when I was in grad school, I had a class where the text was "The Limits To Growth," published by The Club of Rome. The book was very controversial then, with the "usual suspects" denouncing it as communist, et., etc. What it did was analyze several then-existing environmental problems, and look at what the results would be 20 years out of working to solve it, something but not much, or doing nothing. A couple years ago I ran across my copy when going through boxes in the garage and re-read it. *Every* scenario in which they had looked at what the situation would be if nothing was done - was the current reality! And it wasn't a nice future they had predicted.
Unfortunately, organized labor is one of those forces that works against change. Back in 1973, I came within a vote of killing San Onofre nuclear power plant "in its cradle." My then boss, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was the Chairman of the Coastal Commission, which had to vote to allow construction, since the damned thing is in the coastal zone. I had come to the conclusion that nuclear power was the opposite of what the industry said it was, and just on the question of where do you put garbage that has a toxic half life three times longer than the entire recorded history of the human race, the industry was a killer. I had my boss ready to cast the vote that would deny the permit. And then... the head of the California AFL-CIO called him and reminded him that he had plans to run for a statewide office the next year, which he could kiss good-bye if he voted to "kill all them jobs." In fact, there never were 35,000 jobs (there never are), and now that the plant has been shut down, they're trying to figure out what to do with all the garbage that has to be kept away from the environment for three times longer than recorded human history.
Just like the unions fought for the pipeline Biden finally killed - "all them jobs" were never the numbers the companies dangled in front of the union leaders. They never are,
I remember back in 1967, getting in an argument with my cousin, who was at the time Secretary of the Alameda County Machinist's Union, who had said they supported the war because it "was good for all them jobs." I asked him if his members were OK with sacrificing the sons for their jobs. We never spoke again.
Organized labor has never been able to see beyond the end of its nose, which is why it has ended up on the wrong side so often, and why it's practically killed itself now. "All them union jobs" Biden's touting are likely not the "real" numbers either.
Barrasso: the Biden administration is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.” What kind of economies does he think they'll have in 25-30 years when the landscape is impossible to live on or extract from????? If you scream into the void and there's nobody listening, do you make a sound? That's what it feels like to the millions on the globe who are paying attention. I heard an interview with a guy who writes on the fossil fuel industry saying that we won't be able to just quit fossil fuels - they will be with us for decades. Then he said nobody was really talking about this until the past few years! I almost wrecked the car I was driving at the time. "No one's been talking about this???" What??? Al Gore wrote 'Inconvenient Truth in, what? 1999?? The fact that the GOP has had their collective fingers in their ears for 40 years doesn't mean 'nobody was talking about this'.
The building collapse in Surfside is a tragedy. It is also a reminder. It reminds us of the need for the infrastructure improvements that President Biden seeks. To the extent that the building collapse is a product of sea level changes that come from climate change, it is also a warning of more troubles to come. lenspoliticalnotes.com
Thank you Professor Richardson yet again for giving us historical perspective of current events. I have a Subaru gas guzzler but my son has a new Prius. It’s so important that we all get vaccinated and aware of the fossil fuel challenges.
Let me die a slow death but don't take my vacation home and my yacht. Allow my children and grandchildren to fear for their lives because the planet is burning and the utility companies, whose infrastructure is 50 to 60 years old, will allow the power to fail, leaving us susceptible To attack from our adversaries. But dear God, DO NOT take my toys and my status away.
This is the mentality we are trying to reason with. It ain’t gonna happen. Unfortunately it’s going to be a force situation.
It seems the only future the rethuglicans can imagine is their own political future. The hell with the future for their kids or the planet.Their motto is "let the next generation figure it out." Well, there may not be a "next generation" for some if we continue to ignore the messages that the earth is giving us....drought, heat domes, polar votex, rising waters, wild fires. Rethuglicans have their heads up their asses.
I posted this yesterday, late in the day, and at least one reader requested that I re-post today. It's weirdly apropos of today's letter from Heather.
----
So a cloud has hung over me today. I have to confess that a part of it was the return of our local troll, DC, and it struck me in scrolling interminably and trying to get to the end of that stream of bickering, just how inane that whole conversation is, and how inane our nation is. Boosting economic growth. Rebuilding the economy. Rebuilding the infrastructure.
The image in my mind is a bunch of squabbling children in a canoe, screaming at each other and trading blows over how UNFAIR it is that people at one end of the boat are sitting "higher" than the others -- not recognizing that one end is so high because the entire canoe is already tipping, nose-first, over the edge of a very large waterfall.
It's a temporary and self-correcting problem.
There is no such thing as "wealth." The whole thing is a far deeper zero-sum game than anyone wants to admit.
You cannot create anything physical without using "stuff" that is already busy doing what it was doing before you came along. Recycling CO2 into O2. Boiling the ocean and creating rain and rivers. Eating fruit and shitting seeds. Holding up the ground. Even sunlight isn't free. Almost all of the sunlight that touches the earth MUST be re-radiated into space. Every. Single. Night. The very, very little that stays put is due to clever biological organisms that manage to store sunlight in chemical bonds and exotic self-replicating chemistry; chemistry that sequesters sunlight and lets it fall to the ground as stable compounds. But to do THAT, it needs a scaffolding of carbon and calcium and phosphorus: "stuff" that was already busy doing other things. "Solar" energy in our modern society requires silicon, gallium, arsenic, copper, lead, zinc, iron, tin. Polymers to cover the wires. Tons of paper, to engineer, to advertise, to package. All made from "stuff" that is already busy doing other things.
I loaded up a chart I've seen before, on energy usage (and its sources) since the 1700's. The last century is terrifying to look at, and almost all of it comes from releasing stored sunlight laid down so cleverly in chemical bonds over the course of a hundred million years. The waste heat itself isn't too bad: it's a very small rise in thermal energy that radiates away as quickly as we produce it, like the heat from a campfire under a star-filled sky. The problem is not the energy release: it is the STUFF we're releasing back into the world. The stuff that used to have a job, but is now just a bunch of freeloading CO2. It's an off-the-charts immigration problem. We have a FLOOD of Idle Cretaceous Carbon invading our atmosphere. And we are causing it. Deliberately.
Why? To be "competitve" in the "economy." To "improve" and "maintain" our "lifestyle."
A lifestyle that did not even exist a century ago.
Our theory of economics involves each of us cutting the flesh off our own bones, and "selling" it in exchange for others' flesh. A "healthy" economy is one that endlessly and mindlessly consumes and produces MORE flesh. Two percent more every year. Proportional increase. Geometric increase. Exponential increase. Doubling increase. All the same thing. Every 35 years, it must double over the previous 35. Twice as many cars. Twice as much popcorn. Twice as much beer. Twice as much marijuana. Twice as much flesh cut from our own bones and sold to others, so that we can buy twice as much of their flesh.
We have no choice but to indoctrinate our offspring into this, because exponential population growth is the only practical way to accomplish this exponentially increasing exchange of flesh. But they HAVE to do as we do. Or we will fall behind.
The canoe tips further.
What is the answer to this? Something unthinkable. We must remember that we dare not piss off the elves.
In Iceland, the tradition is that it is unwise to piss off the elves. Concern for pissing off the elves blocked a major highway project in the fairly recent past. The "progress" party raged, but the people said, "No, the elves would not like this highway. We must not build it."
The elves are the imaginary beings that represent all of the very real things that are carved away and traded in our economy. Those real things have their own lives. Slower lives than ours, and mostly briefer, and ingrained with millions of years of wisdom about exactly how to bury their dead so that they reincarnate into a world worth living in.
When all of you are talking about Critical Race Theory, I'm with you, but then my mind turns without volition to Critical Anthropocentric Theory, in which we, the hominid master race, carve up the earth and trade it among ourselves in pieces, because, after all, it is just an insensible brute. Mindless, without true sensation, fit for nothing but to be the inanimate mudsill of our glorious, God-sanctioned economic progress.
So what would a truly great people look like? A "strong economy?" Not as it is currently envisioned. A giant military? Hardly. Great works of architecture? Nice, but no.
Thank you, Dr, Richardson. I once had a night school instructor, who was a geologist in his day job, say to us that the earth would take care of itself through the impending climate change. It would adapt and change; whether the new changes would be survivable for human beings was another question. That was about forty years ago, and it got my attention in a big way. It changed my life in a big way.
The Republicans don’t want to think or legislate about global warming because their lobbyists and donors don’t want them to....
The states that are losing revenues from fossil fuel industries could — with enlightened legislators — make as much or more money from renewable energy revenues. The key factor is the legislators, because time is running out.
I continue to be amazed at the wealth of knowledge and sources that HCR has. I live in Florida and follow the news closely, but didn’t know about the latest fiasco from our governor DeSantis. He is despicable.
"This week, in the Pacific Northwest, temperatures in Portland, Oregon, reached 115°F; Seattle hit 108°. Canada hit its highest temperature on record: 116°F in British Columbia. Roads are buckling and power cables melting. In the New York Times today, climate scientist Michael Mann and climate communicator Susan Joy Hassol warned that the conditions of our earth will only get worse unless we do something. But, they wrote, “A rapid transition to clean energy can stabilize the climate, improve our health, provide good-paying jobs, grow the economy and ensure our children’s future.”" Sure, but with Republicans in power in southern and western states where the economies literally depend on oil and gas, what is the plan for that? Is it naive to think that the Biden administration could roll such a plan out directly to the people of these states and win this fight? That's part 2 of this Letter - what's the plan? Biden and the experts can tell people they will be all right, people can believe they will be all right in the new economy, but powerful people will work to keep the people's wishes subordinate to their own. What's the plan to get around that?
This is a good time to remind everyone that separate, massive studies by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government both concluded the same thing at the same time a few years ago independent of each other: If man doesn’t completely stop contributing to climate change by 2030, nothing done later can help and the earth will become uninhabitable for humans within 100 years.
Let me get this right, these red states are allowed to keep revenue made by taking resources from FEDERAL LANDS? Meanwhile, blue state pay more into the US treasury than red states? For all their talk of “rugged individualism” these red states don’t mind living off the largess of the hard working blue states. I realize this is off topic from the critical over heating of the planet issue, but I think that the vast overreach of red states is at the root of a number of our current problems.
A very conservative colleague posted a stilted article against Biden because the oil industry is suffering and gas prices are so high because of Biden, on and on. I replied so maybe the government should quit subsidizing oil companies. Our tax dollars go to support them and they gouge us at the pump. That doesn’t seem right. No response.
Another conservative friend said we’re just going through natural cycle, the Earth does this. So the Earth pulled oil out of the ground, turned it into plastic, and threw it into the ocean the size of Texas and ten miles deep? His wife said I caused him to have a stroke. I didn’t know I was that powerful! Get dumpty on the phone!
The writing is not just on the walls, it’s everywhere. If it’s this bad we may already be too late. It will be hard to change but even harder to find a new planet. Or to become extinct!
Thank you, Heather! Appreciate your insight and continuing the conversations we need to have.
Anosognosia is a lack of ability to perceive the realities of one’s own condition. It’s a person’s inability to accept that they have a condition that matches up with their symptoms or a formal diagnosis.
This occurs despite significant evidence of a diagnosis, and despite second and even third medical opinions confirming the validity of a diagnosis.
The strongest symptom of mental illness is anosognosia; it is the biggest obstacle for health care. The strongest condition in a society overtaken by propaganda is that the more effective the propaganda, the less the victims are aware of being victims. Witness North Korea, where a majority of the people show allegiance to their dictator despite the malnutrition and forced labor camps.
Thanks to the 13 billion dollar campaign for climate denial by the Koch brothers et al., half of our country is living in a North Korea of the mind.
Those few days of record temps in Portland, OR were distressing.
Extractive economies aren’t flexible. However, “a rapid transition to clean energy can stabilize the climate, improve our health, provide good-paying jobs, grow the economy and ensure our children’s future.”
There’s our opportunity to flex and pivot - and evolve. Or else.
Back in 1973 when I was in grad school, I had a class where the text was "The Limits To Growth," published by The Club of Rome. The book was very controversial then, with the "usual suspects" denouncing it as communist, et., etc. What it did was analyze several then-existing environmental problems, and look at what the results would be 20 years out of working to solve it, something but not much, or doing nothing. A couple years ago I ran across my copy when going through boxes in the garage and re-read it. *Every* scenario in which they had looked at what the situation would be if nothing was done - was the current reality! And it wasn't a nice future they had predicted.
Unfortunately, organized labor is one of those forces that works against change. Back in 1973, I came within a vote of killing San Onofre nuclear power plant "in its cradle." My then boss, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, was the Chairman of the Coastal Commission, which had to vote to allow construction, since the damned thing is in the coastal zone. I had come to the conclusion that nuclear power was the opposite of what the industry said it was, and just on the question of where do you put garbage that has a toxic half life three times longer than the entire recorded history of the human race, the industry was a killer. I had my boss ready to cast the vote that would deny the permit. And then... the head of the California AFL-CIO called him and reminded him that he had plans to run for a statewide office the next year, which he could kiss good-bye if he voted to "kill all them jobs." In fact, there never were 35,000 jobs (there never are), and now that the plant has been shut down, they're trying to figure out what to do with all the garbage that has to be kept away from the environment for three times longer than recorded human history.
Just like the unions fought for the pipeline Biden finally killed - "all them jobs" were never the numbers the companies dangled in front of the union leaders. They never are,
I remember back in 1967, getting in an argument with my cousin, who was at the time Secretary of the Alameda County Machinist's Union, who had said they supported the war because it "was good for all them jobs." I asked him if his members were OK with sacrificing the sons for their jobs. We never spoke again.
Organized labor has never been able to see beyond the end of its nose, which is why it has ended up on the wrong side so often, and why it's practically killed itself now. "All them union jobs" Biden's touting are likely not the "real" numbers either.
Barrasso: the Biden administration is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.” What kind of economies does he think they'll have in 25-30 years when the landscape is impossible to live on or extract from????? If you scream into the void and there's nobody listening, do you make a sound? That's what it feels like to the millions on the globe who are paying attention. I heard an interview with a guy who writes on the fossil fuel industry saying that we won't be able to just quit fossil fuels - they will be with us for decades. Then he said nobody was really talking about this until the past few years! I almost wrecked the car I was driving at the time. "No one's been talking about this???" What??? Al Gore wrote 'Inconvenient Truth in, what? 1999?? The fact that the GOP has had their collective fingers in their ears for 40 years doesn't mean 'nobody was talking about this'.
Don`t these lobbyists and those in the companies they work for have children? Grandchildren?
The building collapse in Surfside is a tragedy. It is also a reminder. It reminds us of the need for the infrastructure improvements that President Biden seeks. To the extent that the building collapse is a product of sea level changes that come from climate change, it is also a warning of more troubles to come. lenspoliticalnotes.com
Thank you Professor Richardson yet again for giving us historical perspective of current events. I have a Subaru gas guzzler but my son has a new Prius. It’s so important that we all get vaccinated and aware of the fossil fuel challenges.
Let me die a slow death but don't take my vacation home and my yacht. Allow my children and grandchildren to fear for their lives because the planet is burning and the utility companies, whose infrastructure is 50 to 60 years old, will allow the power to fail, leaving us susceptible To attack from our adversaries. But dear God, DO NOT take my toys and my status away.
This is the mentality we are trying to reason with. It ain’t gonna happen. Unfortunately it’s going to be a force situation.
It seems the only future the rethuglicans can imagine is their own political future. The hell with the future for their kids or the planet.Their motto is "let the next generation figure it out." Well, there may not be a "next generation" for some if we continue to ignore the messages that the earth is giving us....drought, heat domes, polar votex, rising waters, wild fires. Rethuglicans have their heads up their asses.
I posted this yesterday, late in the day, and at least one reader requested that I re-post today. It's weirdly apropos of today's letter from Heather.
----
So a cloud has hung over me today. I have to confess that a part of it was the return of our local troll, DC, and it struck me in scrolling interminably and trying to get to the end of that stream of bickering, just how inane that whole conversation is, and how inane our nation is. Boosting economic growth. Rebuilding the economy. Rebuilding the infrastructure.
The image in my mind is a bunch of squabbling children in a canoe, screaming at each other and trading blows over how UNFAIR it is that people at one end of the boat are sitting "higher" than the others -- not recognizing that one end is so high because the entire canoe is already tipping, nose-first, over the edge of a very large waterfall.
It's a temporary and self-correcting problem.
There is no such thing as "wealth." The whole thing is a far deeper zero-sum game than anyone wants to admit.
You cannot create anything physical without using "stuff" that is already busy doing what it was doing before you came along. Recycling CO2 into O2. Boiling the ocean and creating rain and rivers. Eating fruit and shitting seeds. Holding up the ground. Even sunlight isn't free. Almost all of the sunlight that touches the earth MUST be re-radiated into space. Every. Single. Night. The very, very little that stays put is due to clever biological organisms that manage to store sunlight in chemical bonds and exotic self-replicating chemistry; chemistry that sequesters sunlight and lets it fall to the ground as stable compounds. But to do THAT, it needs a scaffolding of carbon and calcium and phosphorus: "stuff" that was already busy doing other things. "Solar" energy in our modern society requires silicon, gallium, arsenic, copper, lead, zinc, iron, tin. Polymers to cover the wires. Tons of paper, to engineer, to advertise, to package. All made from "stuff" that is already busy doing other things.
I loaded up a chart I've seen before, on energy usage (and its sources) since the 1700's. The last century is terrifying to look at, and almost all of it comes from releasing stored sunlight laid down so cleverly in chemical bonds over the course of a hundred million years. The waste heat itself isn't too bad: it's a very small rise in thermal energy that radiates away as quickly as we produce it, like the heat from a campfire under a star-filled sky. The problem is not the energy release: it is the STUFF we're releasing back into the world. The stuff that used to have a job, but is now just a bunch of freeloading CO2. It's an off-the-charts immigration problem. We have a FLOOD of Idle Cretaceous Carbon invading our atmosphere. And we are causing it. Deliberately.
Why? To be "competitve" in the "economy." To "improve" and "maintain" our "lifestyle."
A lifestyle that did not even exist a century ago.
Our theory of economics involves each of us cutting the flesh off our own bones, and "selling" it in exchange for others' flesh. A "healthy" economy is one that endlessly and mindlessly consumes and produces MORE flesh. Two percent more every year. Proportional increase. Geometric increase. Exponential increase. Doubling increase. All the same thing. Every 35 years, it must double over the previous 35. Twice as many cars. Twice as much popcorn. Twice as much beer. Twice as much marijuana. Twice as much flesh cut from our own bones and sold to others, so that we can buy twice as much of their flesh.
We have no choice but to indoctrinate our offspring into this, because exponential population growth is the only practical way to accomplish this exponentially increasing exchange of flesh. But they HAVE to do as we do. Or we will fall behind.
The canoe tips further.
What is the answer to this? Something unthinkable. We must remember that we dare not piss off the elves.
In Iceland, the tradition is that it is unwise to piss off the elves. Concern for pissing off the elves blocked a major highway project in the fairly recent past. The "progress" party raged, but the people said, "No, the elves would not like this highway. We must not build it."
The elves are the imaginary beings that represent all of the very real things that are carved away and traded in our economy. Those real things have their own lives. Slower lives than ours, and mostly briefer, and ingrained with millions of years of wisdom about exactly how to bury their dead so that they reincarnate into a world worth living in.
When all of you are talking about Critical Race Theory, I'm with you, but then my mind turns without volition to Critical Anthropocentric Theory, in which we, the hominid master race, carve up the earth and trade it among ourselves in pieces, because, after all, it is just an insensible brute. Mindless, without true sensation, fit for nothing but to be the inanimate mudsill of our glorious, God-sanctioned economic progress.
So what would a truly great people look like? A "strong economy?" Not as it is currently envisioned. A giant military? Hardly. Great works of architecture? Nice, but no.
It would start with honoring the elves.
Thank you, Dr, Richardson. I once had a night school instructor, who was a geologist in his day job, say to us that the earth would take care of itself through the impending climate change. It would adapt and change; whether the new changes would be survivable for human beings was another question. That was about forty years ago, and it got my attention in a big way. It changed my life in a big way.
The Republicans don’t want to think or legislate about global warming because their lobbyists and donors don’t want them to....
The states that are losing revenues from fossil fuel industries could — with enlightened legislators — make as much or more money from renewable energy revenues. The key factor is the legislators, because time is running out.
In my most humble opinion.
I continue to be amazed at the wealth of knowledge and sources that HCR has. I live in Florida and follow the news closely, but didn’t know about the latest fiasco from our governor DeSantis. He is despicable.
"This week, in the Pacific Northwest, temperatures in Portland, Oregon, reached 115°F; Seattle hit 108°. Canada hit its highest temperature on record: 116°F in British Columbia. Roads are buckling and power cables melting. In the New York Times today, climate scientist Michael Mann and climate communicator Susan Joy Hassol warned that the conditions of our earth will only get worse unless we do something. But, they wrote, “A rapid transition to clean energy can stabilize the climate, improve our health, provide good-paying jobs, grow the economy and ensure our children’s future.”" Sure, but with Republicans in power in southern and western states where the economies literally depend on oil and gas, what is the plan for that? Is it naive to think that the Biden administration could roll such a plan out directly to the people of these states and win this fight? That's part 2 of this Letter - what's the plan? Biden and the experts can tell people they will be all right, people can believe they will be all right in the new economy, but powerful people will work to keep the people's wishes subordinate to their own. What's the plan to get around that?
This is a good time to remind everyone that separate, massive studies by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government both concluded the same thing at the same time a few years ago independent of each other: If man doesn’t completely stop contributing to climate change by 2030, nothing done later can help and the earth will become uninhabitable for humans within 100 years.