climate

The European Heat Wave is Coming for Us

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The amazing thing about this title is that it has to be said at all.  There is only one world, and what happens to everyone else on this planet is going to happen to us too.  However the Trump-induced national insanity is such that the European heat wave has made zero impact on the national consciousness.   Those Europeans are just too stupid to understand air conditioning the way we do. We’re too good for climate change.

The Europeans have been hit by climate change that is beyond what their world is equipped to handle.  It  didn’t have to be very many more degrees to have a monumental impact.  This isn’t just a matter of personal discomfort.  Costs of crop failures are monumental, energy costs are way up, wild fires are burning in unheard-of places, and water levels in rivers are so low that they threaten cooling for nuclear power plants.  However as the following chart shows, we’re not so far behind.

The results for us will be different, because our national infrastructure is different.  We do have air conditioning, but we are not equipped for the electricity needs to double at precisely the same time that we need more power for data centers—which also stress water supplies for cooling.  We do have a vulnerable agricultural sector and our own potential for wildfires.  We have not been spared because we are smarter. We’ve been lucky enough to get a little more time to prepare, and all we do is pat ourselves on the back.

I have to end by repeating what always needs emphasizing—there is NO NEW NORMAL we can somehow prepare ourselves to handle.  If we don’t address climate change things will just continue getting worse—more and more rapidly.  There is no alternative to action.  By now we have a pretty good idea of what to do, both immediately and going forward.

We need to beat back the giddiness and do the work.

Do We Neeed More Proof that Dictators are Bad for the Economy?

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When dictators make bad decisions no one can stop them. Here are a few:

  • Trump likes oil, so we’re doing everything possible to push fossil fuels in the economy, and eliminating anything to support sustainable energy.   We are even so petty as to take out installed car charging stations for government employees.  So we’ve pegged our economy and everything in it to fossil fuels, a future that is going away–not tomorrow but necessarily soon, whether we like it or not.  We’re not just a non-player in the coming economy (presumably the US auto manufacturers will be lucky if they’re picked up–instead of closed down–by the dominant Chinese players), we’re tying a weight around the neck of all our industrial production.
  • We’re killing any kind of government supported research.  We have made ourselves non-players in anything beyond current mainstream production.  If you ask business leaders how much basic research is done by the private sector they will tell you the answer is pretty much none.  Business deals with current and coming product.  We as a country will no longer be inventing the future.  We can ask the Chinese for help when we need it.
  • We have decided there is no need for competence in government employees.  Instead for the entire federal government all that matters in loyalty.  There are no more real government jobs—just political appointees.  If these are the rules of the game, there will be no more competence or help from Washington.  If you don’t think that matters you should look at the mess today.  That’s the tiniest piece of what is coming.
  • We have decided to convert all of our alliances to protection rackets.  Unfortunately we’re not the only game in town.  We have opponents in China and Russia.  They, not us, have understood there is strength in numbers.  We have given them an enormous present with no positives in return.  For Russia we have even descended to flattery.
  • Our now to be jettisoned international order was established to provide stability and reduce the danger of war. It wasn’t perfect but it gave us many years of growth and peace. The danger to growth has been much talked about, but the danger to peace less so. In this new era of every land for itself, all efforts to manage nuclear proliferation are now out the window. On the contrary, every country had better get its own nuclear weapons fast–or be prepared to face defeat. In our glorification of selfish greed we’re stupidly asking for disaster.

Many people have figured out these are mistakes.  But as long as this dictatorship continues, we as a nation we have no way to fix it.