Tag Archives: The Uninhabitable Earth

We’ve Reached That Point. Give the Fools the Culture War They Always Want.

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(Trigger warning for more delicate readers. The following screed may include occasional outbursts of profanity.)

I wish I did, but I don’t own any Berkshire Hathaway stock. And while I tend to take the nostrums and bromides of billionaires with a 50 lb. block of salt, I find I pay more attention when Warren Buffett is quoted. Like recently, when he said, ” … there will be another pandemic. We know that there is a nuclear, chemical, biological and now cyber threat. Each of them has dire possibilities…It doesn’t seem like it’s something that society is fully prepared to deal with”.

His concerns didn’t stop at insufficient financial or technological wherewithall. That exists. What doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity is the matter of getting conservative public officials, “thought leaders” and the general public to take such things as seriously as, well, football play-offs, beach raves and motorcycle rallies.

Buffett, who credits his success as an investor to thousands of hours of reading of a wide spectrum of information, has every reason to be pessimistic about the U.S. and the world coping with a truly ravenous pandemic — a medieval-style disease with faster and more lethal rates of transmission than COVID-19. No one who has done any reading (or something other than Facebook posts) can look at this latest fourth surge of COVID-19 and fail to accept that this all but entirely due to an epidemic of stupidity … in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet.

I’m sure Buffett would agree that this literally death-dealing imbecility, doesn’t stop with COVID. The same bone-numbing ignorance applies to two other existential thrwats, namely, climate change and authoritarian violence against democracy.

Here in Minnesota we’re well into our second month of yellow, LA-in-the-Seventies-style, crud-filled skies, with daily records being set for the worst air quality … ever. You’d be just as healthy sucking down a pack of Camel straights as spending a day breathing in the air from wildfires. Fires stemming from drought that is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change. A crisis thoroughly researched and scientifically validated but yet still one that essentially the same 25-40% of Americans prefer to see as “liberal fear-mongering”, if not a plot by Silicon Valley elites and radical socialists to somehow deprive them of their freedoms.

That same percentage — and I’m confident a Venn diagram of the COVID “hesitant”, climate deniers and Trump worshippers would have near perfect overlap — sees no reason to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, convinced by the echoes of their cult that it was something other than what everyone saw and was recorded for eternity.

So if you’re keeping score at home, that’s (1.) A pandemic that has already killed 640,000 and is revving back up again to re-cripple the economy, (2.) Climate change that is now routinely turning summers into bone-dry, smoky, crop-killing hellscapes, like something out of “Blade Runner: 2049” and (3.) A complete indifference to violent insurrection inspired by failed government leaders.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the connective tissue to all this is reckless, wretched stupidity, inspired and validated by a startling minority of players for their self-interest, be that commercial, ego or both.

COVID is resurging, spawned by the Trump base and the chronically alienated. Climate mayhem will only get worse, thanks to the ignorance and indifference of conservative leaders. (Do NOT read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells if you want to believe otherwise. Stick with whatever Laura Ingraham is selling this week.) And then there’s violent insurrection, (which would aggravate both of those two). Violence egged on by elected Republican officials will happen again and likely repeat itself in worse ways in the absence of investigation and public punishment.

There isn’t just one grand solution to the “unpreparedness”. But permit me to suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point where coddling, and “reaching out” to those who don’t/won’t understand and pretending that global pandemics, global climate disaster and violent (not to mention racist) attempts to overthrow the American government are no more serious threats to our existence than quarrels over tax policy and school prayer.

What’s to be done? In the COVID context: Mandates. French style.

No vaccine? No walking into a bar. No getting on public transportation. No returning to work. Your kids stay home from school. Let the deniers rage. Let Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley fund-raise off their voters’ dumb-as-a-stump petulance. Protestors in France made headlines, but 76% of the population agreed with the government’s vaccine mandate. Only fools want to prolong this idiocy.

Obviously the Biden administration would benefit from some back-up from private industry, which it is getting in a halting way. But we’d be snuffing out this fourth wave a lot faster if mega-coporations like Delta Airlines for example, denied service to the unvaccinated. (Might cut down on some of their “disruptive customers” problems, too.) Likewise, the Minnesota State Fair. No vaccination? No entrance.

Fair-minded Christian coddling of the stupid, the perpetually reckless (i.e. sociopathic) and the “historically suspicious” has become lethal enabling. So … remove their choice to be stupid and selfish. Give them the goddam culture war they always seem to want.

If that’s the same as saying, “Fuck them and the fucking horses of galloping stupidity they rode in on,” well, there you have it. Nothing else is working.

If the Democrats are Serious About Climate Catastrophe …

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Like so many things lost amid our degrading obsession with Donald Trump is this odd business of old(er) guard Democrats’ unwillingness to devote even one of their 13 scheduled candidate debates entirely to the issue of climate change. This could still happen, but for the moment the idea is going nowhere.

The realization that climate change is a fact of life, and not just a devious scare tactic whipped up out of thick, hot air by Al Gore — right after he got done inventing the internet — is steadily gaining bona fides. “Average” people have heard about it and more and more believe it is real. A few less believe it’ll get worse. Fewer still believe it’ll get a hell of a lot worse, to the point of global catastrophe.

Most of those worrying about what life will be like on Mother Earth in the year 2080 imagine places like Miami looking like Venice on a bad day, along with occasional stories of floodings and drownings in far-off Third World places our clueless leader refers to as “shithole countries.” But that, along with a bunch of dead polar bears and shorter winters, will be about it. We’ll just go on rooting for the home team and keeping up with the Kardashians.

What the majority of people have yet to accept and absorb is that, in fact, based purely on our current emission numbers, global catastrophe is already the far more likely scenario than a couple dead polar bears and watery lobbies on South Beach.

Far more.

And not 60 years off in the future, but in 20 years from now, when even a few of us “I got mine” geezers will still be shuffling around, albeit disappointed all to hell that our assisted-living condo in Naples, Florida is under three feet of water.

Denial, not being a river in Egypt, requires Baby Boomers not to read, much less take seriously, “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming” by David Wallace-Wells.

The short, briskly-paced book is, in a single phrase, flat-out terrifying. The sort of thing that changes pretty much everything you look at every day. And that’s just as things are in 2019, with the amount of carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere today. The book is a stretched-out version of Wallace-Wells’ 2016 New York magazine story, that has become one of the three most-read pieces New York has ever published.

There is of course disagreement over the horrifying scenario Wallace-Wells paints — a world where much of the tropical and sub-tropical planet is unlivable because of sea rise, heat and humidity, and where even First World economies are crippled by the cost of constant, climate-fueled natural disasters and military conflict over mass migration.

Embedded in some of the disagreement in the scientific community — not the cynical chowderheads of the right-wing media bubble — is this thinking:

“Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism. They cite research suggesting that people respond better to hopeful messages, not fatalistic ones; and they meticulously fact-check public descriptions of global warming, as watchful for unsupported exaggeration as they are for climate-change denial.” (From The Atlantic piece linked above.)

My suspicion is that this view, that, “All that doomsday shit is a bummer, man” is part of the Democrats’ no-climate debate calculation. Why have their candidates out there talking about how terrible and hopeless everything is when we’re organizing a pep rally to vote Trump out of office?

While Wallace-Wells persistently emphasizes that we already have the ability to arrest climate change before the tipping point, (it would require something like a global, WWII-size mobilization — good luck with that), there is a fascinating generational psychology at play here. These days, Boomers like me think more and more frequently about how many “good years” we have left. Twenty? Thirty? Not so many we’ll have to live through full-on climate catastrophe? So we largely ignore thoughts of climate horror and focus on other things — like the buffoonery of Trump.

But our children, who are beginning to accept that they will in all likelihood have to live through at least some level of climate (and economic) catastrophe — (at current rates of carbon exhaust, Wallace-Wells sees 2040 as the point where climate calamity becomes constant) — may think differently. As in, “Who among this crowd is actually smart enough to do something?”

Pretty much every Democrat in the race has said something about climate change. Jay Inslee, the has-no-shot-at-all Governor of Washington has made it his sole focus. But an actual debate with Inslee, or Pete Buttiegieg, or Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden all forced to get deep in the weeds of “what to do” would, I believe, be instructive to the generations who are going to have to try and survive in Wallace-Wells’ most optimistic forecasts.

Also, deep in those weeds is Wallace-Wells’ and other climate-solvers’ real-world admonition that weaning the world off fossil fuels (as in: every car and truck is electric) and keeping up with steadily increasing energy demand is simple not mathematically possible with wind and solar alone. Like it or not, carbon-free nuclear has to be a primary option.

Given the most peer-reviewed and widely-accepted climate forecasts, what Democrat is prepared to advocate for that?