Climate Change? Nahhh ...

If we just ask Republicans nicely, they'll stop saying Climate Change is a made-up thing so a bunch of academics can get rich.

 

They’re not communists, Donny, they’re nihilists.

 

I disagree. A lot. Significant change and improvement has been made in climate-friendly behavior since 1985. (Sadly, we demonized nuclear power, which was a mistake.)

 

This summer in Texas hasn't been horrible. A few days over 100ºF but way less than normal, and a very wet summer.

The two weeks in winter where it got down to -2ºF one morning was definitely a bitch. Damn near killed a live oak tree in my front yard.

But I've said it before and I'll say it again: Anytime the weather sucks anywhere else, in Texas it always seems to be beautiful.

 

I lived on a rather large lake, one of the world’s largest man-made lakes, that experienced algae blooms. Millions of dead fish. Some dead dogs. Smelled of death during the summer. Killed tourism to the point that lakeshore homes were going for a quarter the asking price.

For years farmers were warned their nitrogen runoff would get the lake to this point. They kept finding other reasons for the blooms.. Not enough water being let into the lake. A cyclical anomaly. You name it. They incrementally improved the amount of runoff poured into the lake, but refused to do the hard work

When the lake got so bad the state had to intervene with alum treatments, they blamed the state government and said they were being vilified for simply farming. They formed a rival watershed group to fight the watershed group dedicated to cleaning up the lake.

In your cosmology, the authorities did enough. Gently reminded and educated the farmers. In your cosmology, the farmers did enough. Operations improved incrementally with the times.

But in the end, the lake still had two inches of toxic goo on top of it. The fish still died. And no one took responsibility, except the agency that tried to warn the farmers in the first place.

There is no try when it comes to saving a global ecosystem. Either do or die.

 

How dare progressives decline to kick the football???!!!!!????!!?!!11??

 

When all politics are local, you can make the argument that none of them are.

 

I recognize a line like this as evangelism. Which, fine.

Your anecdote, while sad and frustrating, illuminates the limits of persuasion, and the, uh, attractiveness of dictates and mandates.

Nevertheless, real progress has made. Not utopian progress. But real gains.

 

There are going to be a lot of people getting rich off the climate change movement if it goes in a sharp change-the-world direction. The military will love it, too. Wait until the US starts "climate interventions" in rogue nations that couldn't give a shit about wind or solar energy.

 

I do not find hoping for a world without a million dead fish lining the beach and boats pumping alum into the water I drank as utopian. I think those are pretty modest hopes.

Holding up our hands and saying” Whatcha gonna do?” as global temperatures reach 2.5 degrees in 80-100 years seems inadequate to me. You may call me a dreamer…

 

You just described the oil industry.

So, maybe we should do the thing we did for the oil industry for something cleaner and sustainable?

 

If there's climate change, people are going to get rich. If there's not climate change, people are going to get rich.

As it turns out: People are going to get rich, with or without some sort of global crisis.