Climate Change? Nahhh ...

Excellent point ... although the Hanford nuclear facility is actually in southeast Washington.

And they have been cleaning it up for decades ever since the mad dash was on to build an atomic bomb in World War II. Plutonium from Hanford was used in one of the bombs dropped on Japan, but they had no clue about safety or disposal of nuclear waste then, and thousands of Washington residents living near Hanford have paid the price through contaminated air, drinking water and high rates of cancer.

There have been tremendous improvement in the disposal and storage of spent nuclear power materials, but you can understand why people are a bit skeptical.

 

I'd love to see it bundled up and shot into the sun, but the cost would be insane, and if the booster failed I can't even imagine the scale of the damage.

 

I grew up in a medium-sized city right in the middle of the United States. From the day I turned 16, if I wanted to go anywhere, I had to drive a car.

I now live in Sydney, one of the world’s great cities. I haven’t driven a car in months, and it has been at the very worst a minor inconvenience for me. And Sydney is not one of those car-free utopias that public transportation acolytes tout. People love their cars here. But it’s not a requirement to own one.

Sydney proves that it is possible for car culture and usable public transportation to coexist. It just requires some planning and aforethought, and perhaps some incentive to leave the car at home.

Sydney also makes recycling easy and accessible. It provides incentive for individuals to save electricity. And it manages to convey how fragile Australia’s environment is without making that stance at all controversial. It hasn’t always been this way here, but sometimes some gentle societal pressure backed by incontrovertible facts goes farther than stridency backed by dogma.

 

Have you looked at how well gentle societal pressure and patient persuasion work at influencing the Republican party recently? I'm not big on strident, but after a time frustration sets in and people start to get shrill.

 

That’s the thing though. Australia is a bro culture in a lot of ways, but then you come up on something like gun control or environmentalism and the attitude is something like “Well duh, that just makes sense.”

 

This is absolute truth.

I concede it’s easier to convince 27 million people they’re in the same boat than 330 million.

But America celebrates idiocy in a way few developed nations do.

 

Especially with 26.9 million living on the coast.

 

What's Trump's role in this non-existent scenario? The antichrist? Do you think evangelicals think he's Jesus?

 

I'm focused on the future. I've written several times what I think is coming if the world continues this pursuit. I try to be honest: Yes, we can significantly reduce our carbon footprint, but to really do it, it would come with sacrifices all over the place, especially to consumption. Smaller everything. Less of everything. Fewer cars. Fewer kids. We have credit scores already that follow us around. Is it so unlikely to think a personal ESG score is coming? Maybe it won't. But if they - whoever you want to make they in this case, the experts - said, in order to save the planet, a ESG score helps do the job, wouldn't we have to do it? I mean, if the world is at stake, we're down to fractions of degrees in ocean temperature, what would be the line where we'd say, "no, not that."

Whatever takes us back from the brink requires something of us that'd we wish it didn't. Presuming we're on the brink. And I wonder, over the next 10 years, whether that'll be the prevailing narrative.

 

Like Rogan, Alma is just asking questions.

 

There are two constants. We're always going to be "on the brink," because saying, "In 150 years we could be in trouble" isn't going to move anybody to do anything.

There always will be "still time to make a difference!" because no one will say, "You had your chance, but that's all folks!" even if the planet really is cooked (word choice kind of intended).

 

You know, back during WWII, you could only buy gasoline on alternating days. Rubber was rationed. Meat was rationed. People held newspaper and scrap metal drives, and what was collected was donated to the war effort. You're right. This country is fat and happy, self satisfied but still greedy for the next status item. Someone, or several someones, would have to step up and lead, to push for things to be done. We'd have to change the way to do things to ways that use less resources, that burn fewer carbon based fuels. We'd be asked to <gasp> make sacrifices. But someone has to ask.

Someone would have to step up and say that for the betterment of our lives, and certainly those of the next generations and the long term health of the planet we live on, we need to start making some hard choices.

Then the commentators would chime in according to their political bent. The industries who stood to become less profitable would hire advertising agencies, PR firms, and lobbyists to protect their interests.

And some members of the public would respond and try to help, while others would shit on the idea every time it came up.