TIPPING POINTS AND COP28

                                            from Understanding climate tipping points: PHYS.ORG
 

As COP28 winds down humankind now faces at least four major irreversible climate change
tipping points. One can't help but feel COP28 was just a deceitful ruse in which the world leaders of richer countries pretend to address a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions with hot air and empty promises. This, while the leaders of lesser countries, more vulnerable (and less responsible for the,crisis) ineffectively resisted. Run an Internet search on “tipping points in the climate crisis” and dozens of alarming scientific studies and sobering assessments will pop up along with innumerable full color graphic depictions of the crisis.

The main online news sources (NY Times, etc) do dutifully include the latest grim assess-ments and warnings from IPCC and other scientific organizations. But the seriousness of the problem is drown out by background noise like the latest accounts of mass shootings (US), natural disasters (often climate change induced), endless on-going wars, and other madness. And of course there is the daily dose of interminable political wrangling and now dark threats to our very democracy..  And that's for those who still read online or follow MSM rather than relying on second-hand crapola passed along through social media. Yet on the Climate Crisis front all the indicators are flashing bright red with bells ringing loudly. But, alas, most of us have either turned off the source of the noise or havebecome inured to it.

Yet the tipping points and their feedback loops are upon us. Once we are over the brink, it will be too f***ing late.

    
                            1.          Collapse of big ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica                                                           

                                        

                                       

                              2.             Widespread thawing of permafrost

                                        

                              3.            Death of coral reefs worldwide.

                                         

       
                              4.          Collapse of a major oceanic current in the North Atlantic

                                 

 

These calamitous possibilities (or are they already inevitabilities?) stand as a dark backdrop as the world's so-called leaders and/or their acolytes again assemble for yet another charade - COP28. It's number 28 and still no firm acknowledgment that the burning of fossil fuels must stop as soon as possible. Ostensibly they gather annually to agree upon as to how all of the world's 195+ nations can collectively confront the greatest threat ever faced by human-kind. Yet this year's COP28 was hosted (un-ironically) by an oil producing Gulf State – the United Arab Emirates. Is there even a smidgen of surprise that again there will be no resoundingly firm commitment to ending our deadly embrace of fossil fuels.

The citizens of the several very wealthy Gulf States like UAE, none of which are democracies, have the world's largest per capita energy footprints. They work and live surrounded by a luxurious negation of anything environmentally sound, in monstrous 21st Century space age skyscrapers (including the highest building in the world, the 2,722 ft. Burj Khalifa, in Dubai). This monstrosity makes the Empire State Building look like some lowly Omaha Nebraska bank building. All of these glitzy ultra high-rise structures existing in a roasting hot desert climate are kept so cold that some people even wear sweaters inside.

The current fantasy peddled by the petrostates (and the fossil fuel industries) and included in the COP28 discussions is the unproven techno-fix, 'C02 sequestration', injecting CO2 back back into the ground. This comfortable delusion is that someday this technology will actually prove feasible and allow the lucrative oil business to proceed as usual. This fantasy is fostered while each year the average global temperature exceeds the previous one temper-ature exceeds the previous one. Even if this stab at geoengineering worked it would only slow or even cripple the still necessary difficult transition.

This year's COP28 made headlines by finally agreeing to grudgingly include the statement in their final agreement that all 195+ nation states) would begin "transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner." It took 28 meetings to get to to this obvious acknowledgment - no real committment, no real plan. One continues to wonder how seriously our political leaders and their billionaire friends are taking the impending doom that they are still not materially confronting. Or are they blowing (more) hot air our way while simply squirreling away as much money as possible to build artificial redoubts that can survive a new Paleocene Epoch?

                                 COLDEST JUNE DAY IN MEMORY 

 

                                            Out my front window cold gray haze to the horizon.

 

It's the coldest June in Pacifica since I moved here in 1993. Somehow we are in a strange chilly stretch that rivals full-on winter. A marine layer consisting of gray overcast and light on-shore winds are normal for summer here - but not so damn cold. This morning my thermometer registered 59F inside and 51F outside (with 51F w/ high humidity makes it seem much colder).

And what a day for bad news on the Climate Crisis front. As we push into summer all sorts of things are happening that are not good.

• The forests of Canada continue to burn like never before – see map. Air quality in Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh is classified as Very Unhealthy.

• A heat wave almost to the “wet bulb” stage (over100F w/ high humidity) encompasses the American Southeast (MAGA-land packed w/ climate deniers).

• Dead sea lions and porpoises are washing up on California beaches.

• Freak weather soaks Australian outback, dumping months of rain in two days.

As we descend deeper into this critical decade in which either we start to meaningfully address this crisis or pass the point of no return, it doesn't look good. Yes, things are being done and some on a large scale. And technological breakthroughs that would help are being made and if implemented at the scale required could make a difference. But the climate globally keeps getting fucking hotter (even if Pacifica is having an especially cold summer). Keep in mind that if we reversed the warming today it would require decades to make any difference. 

It seems with all this outpouring of grim news on the state of the global ecological situation there would be more of an uprising from the peasants, more pitchforks and burning effegys.

But the population for the most part is constantly being distracted by more immediate material concerns either serious of facile.  This while the powers that be, our leaders, continue to engage in their age-old habits of geopolitical gamesmanship and imperialistic rivalry including (yes again) another arms race. And it doesn't help when one superpower's entire economy dependent on arms production.

Interconnected wirth international power games there is the immediate need to maintain the always precarious global economy at the nation state level.

And with much of the world's population's lower classes still mired in a near survival mode, while the middle classes in both older and newly industrialized countries remain involved in competitive  conspicuous consumption goaded on by Fortune 500 corporate advertising. The basic problems is capitalist economies must either grow, or they stop and everyone suffers. But if they grow they must continue to consume a finite amount of now precious natural resources – and in the process produce prodigious amounts of toxic waste. If these tenuous market driven economies stop growing, they stall and/or contract. If that happens a dreaded recession occurs laying off lower and middle class workers right and left, stranding many without any means to maintain their former situational status. 

So even leaders, aware of the damaging effects of continued growth on a now overheating biosphere, must first survive politically by feeding the beast so as to keeping their respective economies perking right along, that is growing. This regardless of the increasing well document evidence of the deleterious and eventually cataclysmic effects of a rapidly heating planet. And to make matters worse a parasitic billionaire class has a disproportionate influence over said leaders either of the autocratic variety (also themselves billionaires) or the (merely wealthy) democratic variety. So world leaders locally, nationally, globally continue to dilly and dally as the weather gets ever weirder. Their first concern must always be their own political survival.

And in the US you have an entire political persuasion (the GOP) with their own opportunistic and demagogic political leaders who have convinced itself that all of these “environmental issues” especially the so-called Climate Crisis is nothing but a 'hobby horse of the Left'. Only when panic sets in like skyrocketing food prices will a crisis mentality sets in and will these leaders on the US Right react and whole wholeheartedly suddenly embrace hare brained and dangerous geoengineering quick fixes.

We are indeed in a bind. We are prisoners to our tribal inclinations writ large as nation states. No powerful nation state will allow any international entity to take anything close to full command no matter how enlightened that a global entitie's leadership might be. The nation state remains a primitive embodiment of an ancient tribal past with its superannuated quest for imperialistic dominance now re-framed as 'hegemony'. Leaders may pretend to have higher more holistic aspirations than raw dominance but their need to justify themselves and their nation state and its population (with its nationalism) always finally prevails. Hence the weakness of United Nations as a global institution in confronting this world historical crisis of ongoing inexorable damage to the biosphere that we as a species evolved in.

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90 Seconds Before Midnight

It is sad how an ongoing humanitarian disaster like the Ukraine War has dragged on long enough to become stale old news even as it continues to pose the possibility of a thermonuclear war. In late January of this year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the "Doomsday Clock" to 90 seconds before midnight -- the closest humanity has ever been to Armageddon.

Americans for the most part seem oblivious as they obsess over pocketbook issues and Republican Party driven culture wars - or at least the media makes it seem that way. Judging from comments on any column that suggests peace talks regarding Ukraine, most readers of the NY Times seem convinced that this war must be pursued until the Russians are driven out of all of the Ukraine; furthermore Russian must be bled bone dry and made into a pathetic pariah state like North Korea and hopefully Vladimir Putin driven from power. And if any peace accord allows Putin to retain any part of the Ukraine including the Crimea, it will be perceived by Putin as victory - and he will soon be back for another bite of Europe.

Are we to believe that Vladimir Putin's ill-equipped demoralized army is a threat equivalent to Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht? Putin wishes that were the case. The 1930's are not the 2020's.  In the 1930s fascism was seen by many as the solution to a general social breakdown. Capitalism had crashed. On the left Marxist explanations and solutions were being seriously considered by the intelligentsia. On the right Mussolini's fascism seemed to be rescuing Italy. The German version of fascism, Nazism, was alluring. Even Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh liked it.  Nazi Germany was an ascendant power then, post-Soviet Russian is not.

We are all blithely assuming that the Biden Administration knows what they are doing. But it is alarming that so little attention is given to the thin ice that we are skating on. The ex-USSR's thermonuclear armed ICBM arsenal is still intact and their fleet of thermonuclear armed submarines are still out there. Does it make sense to humiliate Putin so badly that he is driven into actually deploying a tactical nuke? What would that mean? It would necessitate an equally serious response from US/NATO (read: Biden). There is general agreement that the invasion of Ukraine was an off-the-charts act of aggression – and that it went badly. How it looks to the over a hundred non aligned countries large and small is another matter. To them the US and wars are synonymous – Korea, Vietnam, Central America, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. It never ends. Of course many of them are no strangers to brutal internecine conflict, border squabbles, terrorism and civil wars. 

The point is that Putin must be extricated from his blunder without triggering WW III but also not establishing a precedent of nuclear armed autocrats getting away with cross-border aggression by using us all as a hostages, the ultimate act of terrorism. But it is especially the case with the ex-Soviet Union's massive nuclear arsenal and now presumably the Peoples Republic of China. The question remains does the protection of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) still apply?

But to make matter worse President Biden is now following Donald Trump in blaming our decline in global leadership status on China and vilifying Xi Jinping.  Ironically Biden is taking a lead from his loathed predecessor DJ Trump and his foolish neo-mercantilism ("Trade wars are easy to win.") and going a step further and cranking up a brand new Cold War with China. This of course is pushing them into a more defined relationship with Putin's Russia even has they don't approve of Putin's ill-advised and tragic war. Furthermore, the Biden administration believes Xi's China is on brink of imitating Putin's disastrous mistake with respect to their much coveted Taiwan.

Our most influential opinion making apparatuses seem to be fine with all of this.  Only the mindless fucks on the political right (MAGA types, Marjorie Taylor Green wackos, etc.), who are knee-jerk opposed to any position the Demos takes on anything, are at all publicly critical. One must revert to rummaging through YouTube to encounter any opinions that divert from our corporate media and Washington Consensus. One has to look up Jeffery Sachs, John Meresherme or Noam Chomsky on You Tube to get any alternative opinion - or any historical context. The core of the problem with Putin's disaster is historical. It goes back to the betrayal of Mikal Gorbachev. Gorbachev was an idealistic reformer who was intent on converting the broken, autocratic socialist experiment, the Soviet Union, into a modern European style social democracy. And importantly he was promised that NATO would not expand eastward. But successive military industrial complex influenced administrations both Republican and Democratic Party did just that with Russian by 2022 almost surrounded on one entire side with nuclear armed NATO members. Putin paranoid, autocratic, nationalistic and ex- KGB believed that Ukraine would soon join. And he had been pecking away at Ukraine for years. He apparently foresaw the Ukraine eventually allowed into the EU as well admission into NATO, a total shrinkage of the Russian Federation's sphere of influence. Some experts believe the invasion could been avoided had Putin been assured that Ukraine would stay neutral and not eventually join NATO.

The real question is at what point does the Ukrainian bloodbath end? What will stop this contest between a seemingly endless supply of morale challenged Russian conscripts fed into a meat grinder vs a highly motivated but limited supply of Ukrainians? All wars eventually end. What will it take to end this one? It's crazy that that question never comes up in our saber rattling media. The media likes provocation – if it bleeds it leads: murders, violent confrontations, economic crises and especially wars where we (or our surrogates) are fighting bad guys. The media runs selling eyeballs (and now mouse clicks) to advertisers. They are unapologetic money making enterprises, ruling class billionaire owned corporations. Education and historical background is for books and college courses not for news channels and 'newspapers' (the few online versions that are left). Context implies analysis which in turn requires some ideological underpinnings. Media likes to provide news bereft of complicating nuance pretending to be objective and free of bias. But the very selection of new items themselves is steeped in subjectivity.

Daily witnessing the Ukraine War unfold is like watching the grimmest bloodiest days of WWII unfold in real time. Now aided by the satellite supported US media we can sit at home eating popcorn cheering our side and booing the bad guys. This might seem like simply a modern version gladiatorial entertainment with tanks and guns instead of swords and shields if it were not for the dark cloud of a possible thermonuclear doomsday hovering overhead, a meta-catastrophe of such a grand scale that it would pretty much end our so-called civilization.

It would make our present slow boil of climate change catastrophe seem like the long lost days of a bygone Eden.

 

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WTF?

     

Every morning I dread bringing up the online news. The relentless bad news is  not a good way to start a day. And today there was this profoundly sad piece in the Washington Post on the oldest trees in the world now in great danger:

           Scientists rush to save 1,000-year-old trees on the brink of death   

                           

A new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that climate change has pushed almost a quarter of Earth’s best-protected forests to a “critical threshold” for lost resilience — the point at which even a minor drought or heat wave could tip them into catastrophic decline. Washington Post 07/16/22

Also today we have Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, coal baron extraordinaire and stalwart defender of the beleaguered fossil fuel industry, again in the news. Manchin has set himself up as the self appointed linchpin for the Demos getting anything passed at all this term regarding the now whittled down almost forgotten 'Build Back Better' plan and its climate crisis component, He has now decided to pull the plug on voting for it at all.  This has left poor Biden stood up, broken-hearted again.

But as bad as Manchin's Lucy snatching the football stunt is, the antics of the Supreme Court are the far worst. The West Virginia vs the EPA is a disastrous decision for the environment in general and confronting Global Warming specifically. This grave mistake by this science blind dogma-driven majority now makes it virtually impossible for the US to come anywhere near its COP26 commitments (that we were already doing poorly on anyway).

This idiotic ruling comes despite recent Condition Red warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), alarm of the entire scientific community as well as hundreds of environmental organizations up in arms. These six stupid bastards must have cotton stuffed in their ears and blinders on.  Can't they see the ecocidal disasters on all sides already - ever worsening floods, droughts (the entire Western US bone dry), fires (the giant sequoias of Yosemite are in danger of burning up), storms (tornadoes in the winter?); awful signs every directions like huge parts chunks of West Antarctica may soon slide into the ocean raising sea levels everywhere.

This landmark judicial blunder, besides preventing the EPA from confronting fossil fuel emissions from power companies using the Clean Air Act, does far more harm. It also undermines the executive's branch general overall authority to delegate implementation of laws through government agencies. A staggering array of federal rules are now potentially vulnerable to cancellation by further law suits against federal agencies routinely enforcing long standing existing federal mandates and laws, ones accepted as reasonable and necessary. The American right is in the process of eviscerating the authority of the federal government to confront rapacious corporate behavior in all directions. This all under the rubric of reining in what they call the 'administrative state'. This has been in the works since the so-called Reagan Revolution, through Newt Gingrich's Contract on American and the fake populist Tea Party Movement.

The court in West Virginia vs the EPA is now requiring any major legislation on what Roberts calls “major questions” to be fully defined in term of implemen-tation which, of course, is impossible. Policy wonks (often in a revolving door w/ industry) within every agency are the only ones who have the in-house expertise to get 'into the weeds' of the complex arcane technical issues that will arise. It is a crazy irresponsible move against routine and necessary authority of governance. It's neoliberalism on steroids; it's boldly jumping in bed with Ayn Rand and her nutty ultra-libertarianism. Why remove the authority of the alphabet soup of agencies that keep things running halfway sanely? Think the FAA and the air travel; the FDA and pharmaceuticals and food safety, Medicare/ Medicaid and profit driven health insurance companies, the SEC and the financial sector.

And the Roberts Court specifically timed their attack on the EPA 's authority just as we eat into the last decade before all hell breaks loose (global temperature must not increase another 1.5C or our gooses are cooked). The EPA with what authority it had under the Clean Air was trying to act to address the painful transition from fossil fuel to sustainable sources. The EPA had to take charge due to the GOP's collective intransigence on any pro- environmental legislation especially any confronting Climate Change .

In this ruling the court killed three birds with one stone. First the existing Clean Water and Clean Air Acts enforced by the EPA was all that stood in the way of doing nothing – the GOP's preference. Secondly it effectively attacks the authority of the executive branch at the same time. And finally mixing this ground breaking decision in with two other equally dramatic extremely unpopular decisions regarding abortion and guns, it deflects attention from its serious implications.

Short term we are in very bad shape . The pitifully weak resistance for decades of the Democratic Party to the hard charging, take no prisoners, ruthless ethics-free GOP (on steroids during the Trump era) is only part of the problem. Even as Donald Trump as president made a joke out of the office until the pandemic hit and he spent too much time in denial as hundreds of thousands died, many needlessly. Before that he seemed graced with fair winds especially riding on the momentum of an Obama's necessary but weak Keynesian stimulus-prodded recovery that was still growing from the post 2008 Great Recession. But as bad as the Trump regime was, the 2020 voters did not producd any Blue Wave with the Demos barely winning the Senate by a razor thin Senate margin -  but with two turn-coat spoilers embedded.

But beyond the Demos loss of support of much of the rural and rust-belt white working class (mostly due to ossification and overemphasis on identity politics and cancel culture BS), other forces were also at work. Plain old bad luck confronts them.There is the pandemic distorted global economy created shortages and the biggie, the devil incarnate - Inflation. Then there is the perceived crime wave. Add to that, the geopolitical catastrophe of Vladimir Putin's stupid pointless neo czarist Ukraine War which puts a super charger on existing but tolerable supply chain drive inflation with energy and food prices exploding. And underlying that is corporate opportunism. Monopoly and oligopoly market control in many industries is allowing widened corporate profit margins to be tacked on to existing price increases. Net result: hard working but uninspiring and charisma-challenged Joe Biden and his Democratic Party gets blamed for it all.

In these dark times one can only hope a coalition of the sane will come together composed of those with social and environmentally consciousness but without unreal expectations together with those with conservative values in the original sense of the word, who are level headed and fair minded and not driven by craven political ambition or cynical pecuniary opportunism. Together maybe these two factions can effectively confront the crazies that have invaded this country from within.

Ill winds are blowing our way

 

Every day now the news feels like a cold wet smack in the face. Below are some examples. 

 

The Biden agenda slogs along under-performing in the eyes of most Americans. But his administration is beset with mostly inherited impossibly difficult problems not of their own making. Yet the failure of his 'progressive' agenda is thrown in our faces daily without mentioning that it is explicitly due to two Repubs in Demo clothing, especially one coal baron- senator from West Virginia who pretends to be a Democrat but really intends to wreck any Democratic Party agenda and any hopes of their surviving the next election cycle.

 

 

 

Omicron

 Covid-19 Delta has mutated into something even more  contagious - Omicron. As we wait to find out how bad it will be, Republican politicians and their media continue to sow discord specifically intended to lower Biden's popularity. Especially malicious is conflating requirements to get vaccinated, wearing masks indoors and taking common sense precautions as violating Constitutionally protected rights. This as their hand picked Supreme Court takes those very rights away from women.

 

 

Meanwhile armed wackos, young and old, continue to sporadically reap carnage in homes, schools, work places and Black neighborhoods (AKA “hoods”) everywhere. Plus in many cities dystopian zones have sprung up composed of the homeless, mentally ill and/or addicted. The police departments in cities feel understaffed and unappreciated with calls for “defunding”(that mostly never materialized). As a reaction 'the finest' seem to be engaged in an informal unacknowledged work slowdown allowing crime rate to soar thus building support for another Nixonian type call for law 'n order. All the videos we saw of summary executions of Blacks now forgotten.

 Inflation has returned despite assurances from the Demo party economists that it wouldn't. Nothing peeves the average Joe and Jill Normal more than prices going up (even as their incomes also rise). And to add insult to injury some store shelves are suddenly as bare as old Mother Hubbard's cupboard of something they need badly (like for me, cat food) as the pandemic continues to cause bottlenecks in the global supply chain. Inflation will surely be a handy noose to hang the Demos by for past expenditures as well proposed ones (except $$$ for the military). Inflation is more complicated than simply too many dollars chasing too few goods (demand pull). You have monopolistic 'price management', the Fed creating money to juice the economy, all kinds bottlenecks in the supply chain and pandemic induced increases in labor costs passed to on consumers (cost push).

 

 

 Helping to boost our military budget (see above) Vladimir Putin is threatening to invade and reclaim a big chunk of the old USSR, the Ukraine, while crafty old Xi Jinping has his eye on Taiwan. With all three sides here armed to the teeth with thermonuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems, we never know how close we are to WWIII which would make the Climate Crisis look like merely a picnic on a warm day.

 

 

 

 

 

 As bad as these things are, they can be seen as   temporary maladies. But for us in the USA something very sinister looms. An underlying threat that academics and Constitutional experts continue to flash red light warnings on - the machinations underway in Republican controlled states re: the survival of our democracy. A host of Republican controlled state legislatures are rewiring their state's election apparatus to not only make it more difficult to vote but commandeering the formerly non-partisan vote counting apparatus. Only Congress can step in and head off this threat to the very foundation of our imperfect but so far operational democracy, and again Joe Manchin stands in the way.

 

 

 

 

Then there is the really big one, the Climate Crisis. It is unfolding before our very eyes as our weather gets weirder and worsens (tornado swarms in winter, fire season all year, melting glaciers). The much ballyhooed COP26, in which the powers that be (minus one D. Trump) would finally get serious about global warming, was a big fat flopperoo. 195 nation's governments couldn't agree on jack shit. What a surprise. Commitment and follow-through at the top of each country's power structure is vital. Yet only with top down strongly enforced, far reaching and ambitious collectively embraced measures will we have any chance of slowing down the warming to avoid catastrophic mass extinctions (including us). Stopping it is now impossible. Our only chance now is mitigation. The entire world's 195 nations must be weaned from using fossil fuel as an energy source – and soon!.. Each nation's leader premier, prime minister, president, king or whatever the hell they call themselves must commit to a politically sensitive course of action; and they won't. They are politicians therefore they are afraid to or they may lose their jobs.

 

  Politicians, also known as our leaders (and all we have presently) are exactly the wrong ones to lead in such a crisis. Politicians, democratic or autocratic, are temporal actors who must survive in whatever political arena in which they exist. The system culls for ego-driven, alpha types. The ones at the top have managed through a mix of tenacity, verbal skills, charm, guile and often sheer ruthlessness to get to the top of of their particular dung heap of a political hierarchy.

 

 

Their survival as top dog depends on among other things in keeping their respective population materially pacified - or at least subdued through fear and/or cynicism. This as well as managing effective tactics against their internal political opponents. Also finally and importantly they must keep their respective capitalism-driven economies perking along well enough to maintain some degree of popular quiescence. Unfortunately these manifold immediate concerns always eclipse long term considerations or slowly emerging crises - like the overheating of an entire planet. Hence COP xxx (whatever number we are at) always tragically fails to deliver.  

The question is will we pull out of this civilizational nosedive or not?.

 

 

 

 

 

US Deficit - Keeping Zillionaires Happy

 

Here are some numbers to consider:

Total US Debt: $26 Trillion 

Wealth of top 1%: $42 Trillion

Total Wealth of bottom 50%: $3 Trillion

We could pay the ENTIRE national debt by simply taxing the top 1%, the amount we should have been taxing them to create an economy that made them rich.

Here's what that would look like: Total US Debt: $0

Total Wealth of Top 1%: $16 Trillion

Total Wealth of Bottom 50%: $3 Trillion

And when we are done, the US has NO debt, and the top 1% still have 5x what the bottom 50% has combined. We have plenty of money. It's time for the rich to pay their fair share.

 

If these numbers are anywhere near accurate, the present Congressional impasse is just more evidence of the lock the 1% have on our two parties. It is just another silly pissing contest between the unity-challenged Demos and their monolithic greed and power unified rivals.. The Repubs are entangling a 10 year plan to revamp our pitiful social support structure and one that also engages in the critically necessary infrastructure rebuild to confront the Climate Crisis with the ongoing budget Deficit that they helped create. By refusing to raise the debt limit at this critical juncture is typical of these PR manipulative assholes. And then there is the struggle between the Progressive Demos vs Moderate Demos or more exactly Demos vs the Repubs in their midst, further evidence of the hold the biggies have on all of this.

Today the NY Times In-House conservative columnist, Bret Stephens, weighed in supporting Senators Manchin's and Sinema's unconscionable stranglehold on Biden's agenda (see Bret Stephens 9/29/21 NY Times column ). Stephens argues for the Demos tossing in the towel and passing the climate-crisis-ignoring first tier minimalist $1.5B infrastructure bill only and walking away from the rest. This would be interpreted by the public (who basically support the entire package) and re-enforced by the media as a resounding defeat for Biden and the Democrats. Game over!  In the over 1700 comments to Stephens' BS-orama, Michael Collins of Benicia CA provided the above numbers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Are we already in a 1970's dystopian nightmare?

                    Lake Oroville  Each year this lake helps water a quarter of the nation's crops,

Historic heat wave brings 100-degree heat to 40 million in western U.S.

More than 40 million Americans are in the crosshairs of extreme triple-digit heat this week, with some spots soaring over 120 degrees as records fall across the West. The heat in many areas is downright dangerous, prompting excessive heat warnings in seven states where temperatures will be hazardous to human health.

The heat also reinforces a devastating drought that continues to reshape the landscape of the West while simultaneously bolstering worries of what lurks ahead in the fall come fire season. More than half of the western U.S. is gripped by “extreme” or “exceptional” drought according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, in the two most severe categories. 

 

The above news is from the 06/15/21Washington Post. It could very well be an imagined news item in some 1970's dystopian sci-fi movie with the “greenhouse effect” as we called it then as the grim backdrop to the story (see Soylent Green (1973) with Charlton Heston). Well' folks we're there now. It's real; we did it. We let CO2 and methane trap so much heat that every summer is a crisis ridden mess – heat waves, Cat 5 storms, droughts, forest fires, deluges, mud slides and so on. It's just as they predicted. It got too GD hot. We did not do jack shit and we are still not doing jack shit to confront this very special world historical crisis. In the all important USA one entire political party believes it's all BS or at the very least an overblown other party's 'hobby horse'. The other party for it's part (until recently anyway) has responded weakly with do-gooder “green” talk about “sustainability' and “moving away from fossil fuels” but effectively doing little considering the gravity of the situation. But with so many distractions sapping the public's attention what can one expect  It's hard to keep your eye on the ball what with a grossly mismanaged pandemic, a home grown demagogue blowing away democratic norms, nuclear armed rivals vying for geopolitical power. And behind it all global capitalism creating a new plutocratic world order. This while reactionary medieval religio-cultural fanaticism attracts the young, underemployed and alienated.  That leaves little bandwidth left for the biggest crisis of all time- global ecocide. One wonders when the scientific commodity and the IPCC will finally throw in the towel and say. “Hey fuck it! It's too late now!”.