We’re sort of working today, much like the crew in the photo, and have dug ourselves a bit of a hole with respect to the writing. Hence the links extravaganza. UPS sucks, present company excluded.
Seriously, they suck.
The sentiment that governments and corporations bear the largest share of responsibility for remediating the consequences and slowing the advance of what we’re told should be described as “global climate disruption” is appropriate, but the decision to ignore individual and collective personal contributions to the problem isn’t.
Americans are less concerned now about how climate change might impact them personally — and about how their personal choices affect the climate — than they were three years ago, a new poll shows, even as a wide majority still believe climate change is happening.
The June Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, which was conducted before Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act on Friday, shows majorities of U.S. adults think the government and corporations have a significant responsibility to address climate change.
UPS really fucking sucks.
On the same subject, here’s Fox Business sticking it to climate hawks who opposed including support for fossil fuels in the alleged climate bill but have since lost their tongues.
Democrats who have loudly opposed Big Oil and fossil fuel development on public lands were silent Friday when asked about the Inflation Reduction Act's energy provisions.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., introduced in late July, includes a series of provisions requiring the federal government to hold oil and gas lease sales spanning millions of acres on federal lands and waters. The legislation, which is backed by President Biden, was passed along party lines Sunday in the Senate.
About a week after the IRA passed, The Guardian reviewed a book by climate-ish scientist Bill McGuire.
The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.
…
“I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”
This is bad!
At the same time, The Hill published an opinion piece by environmental engineer Mark Jacobson, whose biography describes him as having provided the science for the Green New Deal. Jacobson says that current technology offers everything we need to address climate change (or global climate disruption) right fucking now.
The world is experiencing unprecedented fuel price increases, energy blackmail between countries, up to 7 million air pollution deaths per year worldwide and one climate-related disaster after another. Critics contend that a switch to renewable energy to solve these problems will create unstable electricity grids and drive prices up further. However, a new study from my research group at Stanford University concludes that these problems can be solved in each of the 145 countries we examined — without blackouts and at low cost using almost all existing technologies.
The study concludes that we do not need miracle technologies to solve these problems. By electrifying all energy sectors; producing electricity from clean, renewable sources; creating heat, cold, and hydrogen from such electricity; storing electricity, heat, cold and the hydrogen; expanding transmission; and shifting the time of some electricity use, we can create safe, cheap and reliable energy everywhere.
This is good!
Here’s where we learned to say “global climate disruption” instead of climate change or global warming.
Coleman and her colleagues’ work builds on earlier research that suggests avoiding the term “climate change” may help generate support for sending humanitarian aid to areas hit by natural disasters. Climate science skeptics who participated in that experiment “reported greater justifications for not helping the victims when the disaster was attributed to climate change,” according to the paper, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science in 2016.
Coleman, Thorson, Jimenez and Vinton note their study has several limitations. A big one: Their experiment involved only two story pairs.
Probably best to ignore the miniscule sample and go with the more neutral (if you’re talking with climate change deniers) designation anyway.
We see stuff like this big NY Times spread on the impending Great Salt Lake disaster, and wonder if Bill McGuire up the page there isn’t right about the already terrifying estimations of what we’re facing being understated.
If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here’s what’s in store:
The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.
Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.
“Arsenic and Old Lakes,” you might say.
We have no reason to believe that whoever concocted the current U.S. position on democracy in Central and South America was not overwhelmed by powerful mind-altering drugs at the time.
President Biden formally opened the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles on Wednesday by declaring democracy a “hallmark of our region,” as he sought to quell tensions over his decision to exclude some leaders the U.S. considers autocratic, a move that triggered a partial boycott of the conference.
“As we meet again today, in a moment when democracy is under assault around the world, let us unite again and renew our conviction that democracy is not only the defining feature of American histories, but the essential ingredient to Americas’ futures,” Biden said during a 15-minute speech kicking off the summit at Microsoft Theater.
We’re taking ketamine every few weeks and could not have manufactured that.
The Washington Post editorial page editors explain how to publish an op-ed in their august pages. This should be easier if they really do start firing reporters en masse; they’ll be more in need of content.
Your thesis — your main argument — is the most important part of an op-ed, so make sure it is easy to locate and understand. Ask yourself: What is the two- or three-sentence takeaway from this piece? Or what might the headline on this piece be? If it is not clear, it is not an op-ed — not yet. (Tip: Try writing your column as a tweet or a short email. Then incorporate that near the top of your piece.)
Yeah, whatever.
Capitalism is, as we’ve demonstrated time and again, an asshole.
[I]t’s no secret that health care in the United States is an abomination. We spend more on care than any other developed nation, and yet have worse health outcomes. How did this happen?
A big part of the answer is the profit motive. Treating health care like a capitalist industry has driven US hospitals to cut corners and endanger lives, all to maximize returns on investment.
To do so, many US hospitals have adopted a management system first used in auto factories. It’s called “lean production” — and it’s literally killing us.
Worth a read.
Here we have a well-reasoned argument in defense of looting. This is a really good piece, and while all of the reads linked here are good ones, this is the one to read if you read just one.
Of the many forms of political action in twenty-first-century America, it’s hard to think of any less popular than rioting and looting. Voting and electioneering are widely respected as the baseline of political action; petitioning and lobbying elected representatives are not far behind. Labor action, despite four decades of propaganda and federal action against it, still has strong support in many quarters. Community organizing is at least theoretically the founding principle for thousands of nonprofits across the country. Liberals and conservatives alike grudgingly support demonstrations, at least when they’re nonviolent and their people are doing it.
More extreme political actions also have widespread support. Both liberals and conservatives believe in war, considering it a necessary evil or a fundamental good. Liberals may oppose the death penalty, but they, like conservatives, believe in the efficacy of murder: they had little to say about Obama’s extrajudicial drone executions, his death lists and Terror Tuesdays, and Democrats mostly critiqued Trump’s 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani on procedural grounds: “He didn’t consult Congress!”
Torture is celebrated a thousand times a day on television in police procedurals and action flicks, and most people accept imprisonment — years of unrelenting psychic torture — as a necessary fact of social life. Economic coercion on the international stage, through sanctions, trade agreements, and development loans, is a matter of course. At home, the threat of unemployment, homelessness, starvation, and destitution, along with debt, taxes, fines, and fees of all kinds, are so naturalized as to rarely even be recognized as a form of political domination at all.
UPS sucks. Gotta run.
(Musical contributors to this post include, and in fact are limited to, Richard Dawson’s “Peasant.” Not that Richard Dawson, as we hope is obvious. If you have music recommendations please leave them in comments, as well as any comments.)
I'm stunned nobody commented on Arsenic and Old Lakes.
Here's my op-ed: A major national newspaper should not be owned by a union-hating, employee-torturing, space-travel-obssessing, inhuman freak like Jeff Fucking Bezos.
That's it. That's the op-ed.