There are people who thought Elon Musk and Donald Trump were going to team up and use some blend of competence, selflessness, and honesty to eliminate wasteful government spending so as to benefit the American people.
They are called “idiots.”
If you’re looking for the poster child of this phenomenon, let me introduce you to Trump advisor Marc Andreessen, and his assertion that “universities will pay the price for DEI.”
U.S. universities have been cranking out well educated young people for 400 years, and, generally, without too much trouble or controversy. The issue that is actually of concern here, of course, is very few of these graduates are Trump supporters. That’s because higher education provides the tools that are required to perceive that Trump is a sociopathic liar who has no more business running the United States than any other of the world’s criminal dictators.
I met a young couple the other day who politely asked me about solar and wind, and the environmental problems they cause.
I responded that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” In other words, there are no energy-related processes that are 100% free of negative environmental consequences.
Nuclear comes as close as anything, and may eventually win the day, if the promise of fusion or the fission of thorium can be realized.
Until that day, if it comes at all, solar and wind are offsetting the consumption of fossil fuels, especially burning coal, which has horrific consequences to all life forms on this planet.
When I was in business, my sales team would occasionally write proposals for services that my company had never delivered, and someone would ask, “Craig, if we get this project, how will we deal with it?” My normal response: “I’m not sure. When and if the prospect signs off, I’ll figure it out then. There is no reason to solve problems that don’t exist, when there are so many that actually do.”
The same applies to immigration. These people pick our crops, clean our hotel rooms, bus our dishes, build our houses, do our gardening, and watch our children. Virtually all of them are law-abiding and hard-working. They form a segment of our society that works just fine.
Want to talk about problems that do exist? The list might begin with environmental collapse, the end of U.S. democracy, the dismantling of the federal government so as to further enrich billionaires, lousy education, the rejection of science, healthcare, poverty, homelessness, and never-ending religious wars abroad.
I just met a guy whose career was drilling for oil; he’d been active all over North America and the Middle East for about 40 years until he retired ten years ago.
Naturally, I asked him for his thoughts on our civilization’s phasing out fossil fuels in favor of low-carbon sources of energy. He responded, “If you’re asking me if I believe in global warming, the answer is that I don’t. If it exists at all, it will take at least a million years to do any real damage to human beings, and by then, we will probably have disappeared through some other means.”
Now, this got me thinking. It was clear that he honestly believed this; he isn’t getting paid by Big Oil to spread their propaganda. It looks like the line from the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Boxer” that includes the line, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
If you try hard enough, you can still, to this day, find a few scientists who do not buy the almost universally accepted theory of anthropogenic global warming. It takes diligence, but it can be done, with enough motivation.
Don’t forget: we live in a country in which about half of our people approve of this, i.e., that the president can threaten to remove the citizenship of anyone he doesn’t like.
As the ancient Greeks used to say, “The only people worthy of power are those who have no desire for it.”
Fast-forward to current-day America and behold that we’ve elected president the single most power-hungry person in our nation’s history. The fact that he’s also a sociopathic criminal only makes matters worse.
Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA) joins MSNBC’s Ali Velshi to discuss Donald Trump’s shifting explanation of the Ukraine weapons pause and why, according to Rep. Vindman, it’s “dangerous” that our “Commander-in-Chief is the last to know.”
Speaking strictly for myself, I would love to believe that someone (anyone) other than Donald Trump is making the big decisions that guide our domestic and foreign policy.
A few years ago, when I was lucky enough to run into and introduce myself to author, activist, and heavy-duty environmentalist Bill McKibben at a conference of the Bioneers in Northern California, I congratulated him for his 40 years of writing and speaking on what is arguably our civilization’s most important topic.
Just now, I caught the tail end of an interview he did with NPR’s Marketplace, in which he said a few things that stayed with me:
The United States’ decision to adopt Trump’s “drill baby drill” strategy, removing our subsidies from solar and wind, and handing the vast economy of the energy future to China, is already having catastrophic consequences for our nation.
China is installing a gigawatt (the equivalent of a coal-fired or nuclear power plant) of solar every eight hours. Yes, that’s right, with the passage of every single day, there are three more.
He predicts that the U.S. will soon become a kind of “museum,” the only place on Earth that still uses the technology of the 20th Century to power its society in the 21st.
He casually mentioned that we love the burning of coal, even though it’s baking the planet and killing more people every year who are forced to inhale its exhaust fumes. He seems to look at this as America’s “par for the course.”
I love this guy’s idea here, and I wish I had this thought when my kids were young.
Helping others has so many wonderful places in our lives.
I just ran into a man and his wife, a chiropractor and a nurse, who asked me what I wrote about. I explained that I focus on environmental sustainability, the woman almost shouted, “Oh my God, that’s so important!” It’s a good feeling to know that the world is a better place as a result of one’s work.
In a recent post I warned again the folly of solving problems that don’t exist, given that there are so many that actually do
