The world lost Frank Zappa in 1993, and we baby boomers remember very well what American life was like back then. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t feature anywhere near the high-intensity, hammer-pounding stupidity that it does today.
It’s impossible to imagine what the iconic American musician would have said about our society now. Perhaps it’s best that we don’t try to think too hard about that.
The reader who submitted the mere here writes: If you want EVs just do it. If you want to drive gas/diesel vehicles do it as well. Let’s not try to make everyone conform to our way of life. If electric or fossil fuels fail they will. The same goes for Vegans eat plants if you please. Just don’t expect everyone to do as you do. Our meager environmental changes to save the atmosphere is equal to shooting spit wads at a battleship.
A few comments.
You apparently don’t have any training in this subject. Our scientists are clear in explaining to us that decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors is an absolute requirement if we expect to have an organized human civilization here 50 years down the road.
Diesel generators account for close to 0% of our grid-mix.
Uranium (nuclear) has virtually no carbon content.
Solar, wind, and nuclear are in the process of displacing coal, by far the dirtiest of our fuels. There is nothing “meager” whatsoever about these efforts.
It would a good thing if our population would follow what our scientists are begging us to do re: our behavior (driving, eating, etc.) Obviously, there are many people who won’t, and there is very little that can be done about this. More than half of Americans voted for Donald Trump and his distinctly anti-science platform. This is an uphill battle, to be sure.
Due to the demolition of U.S. education standards, American voters re-elected Donald Trump, whose administration is now poised to wage an all-out war against vaccinations and as many other elements of sciences as they can get their hands on.
There will be two main results: a) the adoration of the MAGA crowd as crackpot RFK Jr. leads the charge into battle, and b) the return of many childhood diseases (see graphic at left) that humankind had previously all but eliminated.
In my recent post Are We Looking at the End? I quoted a few scientists who claim that human civilization will “unravel” somewhere between 2040 and 2050, due primarily to climate change and the loss of biodiversity, particularly the insects.
In response, longtime 2GreenEnergy supporter Cameron Atwood writes:
What we need is a global moonshot attitude toward transitioning, and that we don’t have.
We also need a buy-in by the most exorbitantly wealthy among us, the top 1%, and we don’t have that either.
Of course, the least powerful among us individually have little sway over the direction of the paradigm, and the most powerful are disinclined to alter their behavior.
Any advisors they listen to are dependent on their good graces and will wait until what they think is the last minute to advise change.
By then it will have been too late. It may already be now.
I don’t advise we give up, as potent action may still mitigate the worst of the consequences, and at least we will have tried.
Excellent points. This civilization has no paradigm of cooperative action to promote its survival. Rich people prosper, poor people suffer, and that’s about it.
Making matters worse is the fact that the United States is driving in reverse. Massive numbers of largely uneducated, anti-science voters just re-elected Donald Trump to a second term. We’re in a pathetic condition.
I’m not giving up either but ignoring the core of the problem is not helpful.
Yesterday, I happened to meet a guy who works for the California Department of Fish and Game whose life’s work is hunting nutria, an invasive species of rodent shown at left.
“What’s the deal with the nutria?” I asked?
The answer, in essence: Nutria could be said to be the anti-matter of the beaver. Where the latter improves every aspect of the biosphere it inhabits, the former destroys the local wetland environment, primarily through their ravenous consumption of aquatic vegetation, (roots and all) which destabilizes the soil leading to erosion, which, in turn, destroys critical habitat for other wildlife and disrupts the entire wetland ecosystem balance.
According to the fellow I met, what they do to the manmade portion of the environment is arguably even worse, e.g., undermining bridge footings.
I asked what they look like, to which the guy said, “Just imagine a 20-pound hamster.” When I searched for the picture above, I realized that I would call it an ugly 20-pound hamster.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
