homo erectus-electus-ejectus

Driving to the End of the World

Still floating about in the isolation chamber. Coordinates are by latitude and longitude found by spelling out the word weird, clicking your heels twice, hoping your inner wicked witch doesn’t spit on you in a big box store, no mask-no admission denial rage.

There is a spectrum of reactions to the hellacious reality the world has been forced into by bat cave craving carnivorous culinary outliers. Anthony Bourdain may have performed a disservice to our species by nudging the curious to eat from the forbidden fruits and bats of Asia.

As earth rushes headlong toward billions more inhabitants there is this sense that within our species lurks a self-destruction seed. Adolph may not have been a one off.

Sunflowers

I am a creature of the infinitesimal, working class, lunch bucket, card carrying-bus transferring-shop steward protecting endangered species. My kind is the $600 a week quitters’ slime. John Maynard Keynes would recognize the austerity obsessive Republicans as the kind that would double down on a recession and make it the mother of all depressions because they see bootstraps, belly dancers and deli trays in their version of how an economy works.

Regulation you can believe in

This summer I’ve been threading my way back and forth through the Western slope. A vast area surrounding Grand Junction, Colorado is running 2.5 degrees centigrade hotter now than a century ago.  “Heating begets drying, and then drying further begets heating, farmers once growing between 350 and 400 tons of hay; in 2018, raised 30 or 40.” Quote from Washington Post.

I can speak with civility to a farmer running an irrigation pivot. I know about pushing yields with nitrogen, spraying for broadleaf, or if water or electricity given their costs makes growing a hay crop even pencil out.

In the before times, before the virus, we were all too busy to give the climate emergency much if any of our attention. Scientists have been trying to warn that if we don’t like the pandemic then we are sure to just hate the living snot out of the climate change crisis.

Today for fear of being killed by an invisible pathogen you no longer have to imagine what it is like to not be able to go outside.

I’ve thrown my hopes in on science coming up with a vaccine. I’d like some semblance of day to day life back. I’m with the crowd that believes whatever the new normal turns out to be it will not resemble anything like the old normal. Our world, our economy, our challenges are just too steep for us to play dumb about the climate fight we have on our hands.

Meeting of the Minds

We’ll keep rolling out more renewables, expand battery storage, electrify our transportation systems, figure out how to make steel without burning fossil fuels, repower our aircraft, retrofit heat pumps in every single building in the world, pay a living wage, scrap this employer based health care insurance fiasco, vaccinate every last stubborn one of us, send our kids to school, graduate more engineers, figure out how to grow more nutritious fruits and vegetables and stop this crime against the living that goes by the name factory farming animals.

I kind of think a no good rotten stinking stubborn human being of any kind, color or gender will enjoy the challenge of deploying a 21^st Century energy system that future generations will thrive upon.

Joe Biden said, “Climate change poses an existential threat to our future,”

Squares up with what I know.

Some yesteryear type replies, “What’s your climate change solution that doesn’t include taxation and socialism?”

That’s got the stench of Rupert Murdoch and Mr. Charles Koch smeared all over the doubts and fears of the can do spirit we once possessed.

Cline curing sonic therapy

Doing nothing might work if you got cheating on your mind but given the corner we’ve backed ourselves into we’ll just have to figure things out. It’s called doing something about the pickle we are in. Miss Patsy Cline had seen her share of cheating closeup, and put it this way, “Don’t leave me here in a world, filled with dreams that might have been…”