The Good Ol' Days

Perhaps it is time to learn from our future; after all, it is through the future that we finally understand the present.

Let’s consider the Napa Valley, Santa Rosa, the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico, Houston, or St Martin–an island in the Caribbean devastated by Hurricane Irma. At this point St Martin’s people are scrambling for survival. So are the people in Puerto Rico. In Florida, the people are scrambling to reassemble their lives. In Northern California, the wealthy climate refugees are scrambling to reassemble their myth of invulnerability from anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance. In that scramble, in that yoke, an expanding economy acts as a tool for recovery, but not a solution to immediate needs. Safety, food, water, shelter, medicine, refrigeration, infrastructure materials, and community matter overall. And those priorities will propagate mercilessly–because right now–given the stupidity of the current US administration and its collection of cabinet-level buffoons, Cave-lite, the almost-worst-case-future-climate-scenario, has been given the green light to circulate throughout our nation.

Imagine for a moment Puerto Rico and other parts of the USA hit by another rash of so-called 500-year storms this winter, before infrastructure and economic activity can be re-built. Worse, imagine a devastating storm after the infrastructure and economic activity resumes at a healthy clip–and then another–and another. That’s our not-to-distant future here on planet Earth–regardless of your assets or your ability to repress debate and  choke freedom of speech.

Now imagine millions of people on the move seeking the basics of survival and that number rising every year on into the foreseeable future. BTW, that’s now. The future will be far bleaker because complex mechanical and electrical resources will be depleted. To master that future we may not ignore science or the need for a working society. We must foster a society built on consent of the governed and teamwork, not malevolence and bribery. We must take substantial corrective steps to turn our economies away from being net GHG emitters to net GHG sinks.

(The ignorance that pervades the Trump administration says we have time to address anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance. Their stupidity, tied to their corruption, will kill your children–and maybe even you.)

A healthy economy used to be paramount. In a world that used to exist. Economies do not thrive in a repeating cycle of devastation. That is our world now: intensifying disaster after intensifying disaster. And for you market driven mavens: Survival supplants the profit motive because chaos stifles capital formation. In the world that now exists, a healthy economy is one that considers how capital formation impacts the planet and its destructive forces. An economy leading to the propagation of repeated devastating events shredding society, hindering alliances–that make our nation stronger–defeating innovation that makes us competitive, a corrupt economy undermining our right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness is treason.

And by the way, where hell is DoD these days anyway? Go protect the nation, fella’s (Sorry you have my highest respect, but the people of our political leadership are idiots.) Our country is founded on the idea that well-informed ruling elites are needed for national security. Look around, leadership is denying accepted scientific knowledge. Clowns with their head-in-the-sand controlling a nation leads to everything but well-informed ruling elites. Rather the buffoonery of the current leadership seeks to propagate ignorance: treason against the nation because leadership that seeks to remain ill-informed–for money–is no better than the “rabble” and apparently a whole coal-pond worse. At what point does the propagation of evil inside our leadership get your attention? Global Warming is a threat multiplier–and it is getting amped up–ready to make the world a toilet of pain.

Repeated infrastructure destruction without time for repairs has blazed a path inside our nation regardless of the nonsense propagated by graft-sucking politicians and nonsensical news. A path paved into an interstate by corruption, bribery, and foolishness (Class warfare will not work in the face of anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance you greedy little pissants). The death-throws of the carbon-based economy and the felonies it now feeds upon are the root cause of the worsening climate-fostered events that are starting to savage our homes, our families, our nation, and our allies.

Just say no.

Or see the future: St Martins, Napa, Key West, Puerto Rico, Houston, New Orleans, these are our paths, no matter what economic fantasies our ill-informed leadership jerks-off to at night. We The People must get off our keesters and deal with the truths of our time. We may not eviscerate truth in the pursuit of rebuilding a lost past. We must see that a future created by an illusion of ultimate dominion over the planet in the name of our economics is preposterous. We must turn away from the ruin and foster a leadership with an insight on survival–not nepotism. We must see that low emission GHG industries can be the future. The time of energy generation by large-scale fossil fuel systems has come to a close. The same to be said for their influence in our political climate.

Unless we make meaningful cuts in GHG emissions–right fucking now–we will all face unimaginable horrors. In some places, it is happening already, not at the end of this century, not at the end of the decade, not next year. It will be our choice if items like solar power, electric vehicles, or a resilient infrastructure will define our national agenda, or buggy whips and candles.

And here is another absolute truth about global warming (anthropogenic forcing of the radiative balance) that you can take to the bank…These are the good-old-days. Everywhere–the only question being, will we see the end of the coming bad-old-days or will they see the end of us, by my reckoning, the worst-case scenario.