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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

It’s true that Trump is probably the greatest single one-person threat to our capacity to address climate change mitigation and adaptation, not only in America, but in the world as a whole.  That’s because a) he won the 2024 U.S. presidential election with his  extraordinary skill at reeling in the affection of our nation’s least educated and most scientifically illiterate people, and b) has consistently made great use of the torrents of donations he’s received from the multi-trillion dollar fossil fuel industry.

Let’s face facts: he’s intensely good at what he does, in this case, ruining this planet for his own enrichment.

Is there something we can do to turn this around?  Frankly, I’m not sure.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Regarding English grammar, would you be well advised to “do as you please,” per the suggestion at left?

The fact that we have adopted words and phrases from other languages doesn’t mean that butchering the English language comes without a cost — if being accepted by educated people is at all important to you.

I told my children when they were young, “Other people can’t see your thoughts, but they can hear what you say and read what you write.  If you can’t speak or write well, they will infer that you can’t think well.  Don’t put yourself in that position.  People in other countries learn at least two or three, sometimes four or five languages.  You only need to get one down well.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

At left is an ad for an environmental conference in Dubai.  While the event itself may be interesting, the answer to the question posed here is No.

The entire world and everyone living on it has been warned for many decades about climate change and the urgent to mitigate it and adapt to it, yet our leaders in both the public and private sectors have been incapable of making any real progress in decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors.

We may need to conclude that the evolutionary path of humankind ultimately got us to the point of an insurmountable amount of greed and selfishness.  It’s hard to explain our behavior in any other way.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

The big difference between the current Gilded Age and the last one is the fragility of the environment.  In the late 19th Century, we weren’t roasting our planet and losing tens of thousands of species annually.

Sure, environmental science was in its infancy, if it existed at all, but no one thought we were headed towards imminent collapse.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

As we take in these words of the great primatologist Jane Goodall, one obvious thought is this: How sure are we that we’ll still be here at some point in the future to have the opportunity to look back?

In an earlier post today, I mentioned that there are plenty of scientists who believe that organized human civilization will not survive the next few decades, due to runaway climate change and the loss of biodiversity, especially that which is occurring at the base of our food chains. e.g., the dramatic collapse of insect populations.

by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Many American schoolchildren in the southern part of the United States are still taught that the American Civil War was caused by northern aggression, where Union soldiers attacked the south, raped their women, and stole their land?

German philosopher Georg Hegel told us, “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

How could this turn out any differently, when we deliberately lie about our past?  What’s the matter with telling the truth?   

 

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Climate Change

Here’s an article in which some of our planet’s top minds predict the unraveling of human civilization sometime between 2040 and 2050, driven largely by the loss of biodiversity and climate change.  According to these folks, the only way for our society to survive is not the deployment of technology, but the change in our behavior.

And that doesn’t seem likely, when the last Conference of Parties (to address global warming) was held in a petrostate (Azerbaijan), and was presided over by the CEO of an oil company.  Moreover, the next COP will be essentially a reprise of the one that just concluded.

From the article:

In this corner, the biosphere. We’ve spent a solid year higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius; we’re wiping out species at a rate of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 annually; insect populations are crashing; and we’re losing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, no matter what we do at this point. Alaskapox (see photo above) has just claimed its first human victim, and there are over 15,000 zoonoses (diseases that can be transmitted to humans from animals) expected to pop up their heads and take a bite out of our asses by the end of the century. And we’re expecting the exhaustion of all arable land around 2050, which is actually kind of moot because studies from institutions as variable as MIT and the University of Melbourne suggest that global civilizational collapse is going to happen starting around 2040 or 2050.

They go on to point out that Darwin told us in 1859 that we thought the human race would not achieve sustainability, and would eventually go the way of all these other species, i.e., extinction.

These people aren’t optimistic, and their viewpoints are not childish, but neither are they set in stone.

Let’s go back that “behavior” thing.  It seems perfectly possible that the 8+ billion people on this planet will do what the folks in Norway did, as an example, and simply stopped buying cars that run on gasoline and diesel.

It’s true that the zeitgeist here in the United States is rooted in a staggering level of ignorance and the indifference to the suffering of others, collectively referred to as “MAGA,” but that can fade as quickly as it came into being. The level of absurdity in today’s news could easily, at any moment, cause a watershed event in the American culture, away from the lunacy of 2024.   How many alcoholic Fox News hosts can we put in change of things like national defense before we say Enough!

This isn’t over.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

At left is a profound thought, but it’s one that the vast majority of Trump supporters can’t relate to.  The incoming president’s billionaire friends got rich by exploiting America’s workforce, not by helping the working class achieve its own affluence and pleasant living conditions.

I’m a generally optimistic guy, but I write these words with absolutely no hope that the MAGA world is going to figure this out.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

On this one, a reader notes. “I’m pro every form of energy!!”

Really?  Would you say this is “who you are?”

If so, I hope you’ll think about this a little bit more deeply.

Once our civilization discovered fossil fuels a couple of hundred years ago, it used these forms of energy to power its unprecedented growth.  A relatively small group of people got incredibly rich, and that expansion of wealth continues to this day.

All that was fine until scientists discovered that the consumption of massive amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas, while they were extremely inexpensive, were contributing to massive amounts of human disease and environmental destruction.

Dear reader, say what you will, but I honestly do not believe that this is “who you are.”

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

I’m sure most readers agree with the author of the meme here.

There are two other major ingredients that I would add to what we can expect to experiece:

Arrogance, i.e., an unfounded confidence in the correctness of Trump’s observations.  This is part of what it means to be a cult leader: your viewpoints are unassailable.

Wanton cruelty.  If you’re a wealthy Republican who’s been consistently loyal to Trump, you can expect smooth sailing.  Everybody else: journalists, congressional Democrats, the working class, political activists, humanitarians, students, asylum seekers, women, LGBTQs, people of color, non-Christians, is going to live under pressure.

Trump has been quite clear over the last few years that, if he were to be re-elected, he will exact revenge against all the people who stood against him.

Being a little guy with very low visibility, I don’t worry about this.  But think about  people like Liz Cheney and Anthony Fauci.

What exactly did Dr. Fauci do to earn him the biting hatred of about half of all Americans?  He wouldn’t go along with Trump’s anti-scientific methods for dealing with the pandemic.

Liz Cheney famously said, “You can be loyal to the Constitution, or you can be loyal to Trump, but you can’t be loyal to both.”  Lord only knows that Trump and the MAGA Republicans have planned for this brave woman.

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