Clock stopping bathing beauties

Good Advice

You’ll get yourself into hot water if you go to Thermopolis, Wyoming. That’s the idea. I’d recommend the town’s health food store, Nature’s Corner and the Crow Bar. I found my people hanging out there and the food my people like to eat.

Twenty years back I got my first taste of hair raising fun while trying my luck cheating death over at the Star Plunge. Waterslides are pleasure enough, but a hot spring waterslide, a pitch-dark pipe with corkscrews, dips and twists that tosses you near as close as you’ll ever come to a free fall, well there’s all of that plus now you’ll be dealing with heart palpitations, and a very real decision over whether you’ve got the guts to try that slide a second time. “Well, do you punk?”

Lousy Advice Found Here Too

Hot water enthusiasts come from all corners of the world so that they may take to the mineral waters found here. Bathing beauties are stopping the clocks here there are also plain various sized and shaped people that help keep all those other clocks running on time.

Getting to Thermopolis is convenient to nothing. Salt Lake City is far away, Denver’s further and the drive from Jackson Hole makes a normal person regret ever having embarked upon the journey.

Nature’s Corner is a Magnet

Nearby Worland is more familiar Wyoming where Thermopolis is an aspiring example of what the Cowboy State could be. Nature’s Corner attracts the counterfactual crowd that has come to this part of the frontier west. Our host at the room we rented was an out of the closet lesbian. Nearby Shoshone and Arapaho come soak at the pools and shop in the store. You’ll see Volkswagen vans in town.

Caw in your Order

South is the Atlantic City Iron Mine. Further south from there is Rock Springs. Nearby Carbon County is undergoing a boom in wind turbines. Three thousand megawatts have been installed.

I have heard said roughnecks believe that leaving the drilling business for wind turbine installation is akin to cheating on a wife. Making a wind turbine service technician out of a roughneck can’t be a hayride or trouble-free transformation.

Europe needs to acknowledge that its future is no longer with fossil fuels, said the President of the European Investment Bank. “To put it mildly, gas is over,” Dr Werner Hoyer said.

Ending the use of fossil fuels that’s where people paid to consider the future are coming down. Wyoming’s fossil fuel industry is trying to come to terms with the end, but like a lot nasty habits kicking the old ways is not quick or easy.

Wind Turbines as Salvation

Five billion dollars was borrowed to build the coal fueled Prairie State Energy Plant in Marissa, Illinois. Dreamed up by the Peabody Coal Company less than ten years ago this colossus is in danger of finding its multiple billions of dollars stranded. There were cost overruns and long-term contracts locking municipalities into expensive rates and carbon pollution the world can no longer afford.

Then, you’ve got states talking about the changes heading their way like it or not, and you’ve got the states with the most to lose that haven’t found the courage to start talking yet. West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Wyoming remain tongue tied. All that silence is about to come to an end.

Ten years ago, nobody was predicting renewable energy would be today’s low-cost energy leader. Making a better battery was a pipe dream. Next generation batteries will take a full charge as fast as a gas-powered car needs to fill its tank with fuel. Range anxiety, what’s that?

The politics of fossil fuel has been complicated, but it is becoming less difficult. Wildfires are now conflagrations, hurricanes are more frequent. We’ve got an iceberg the size of Hawaii floating in the Southern Ocean. Monday, January 18th, smack dab in middle of winter here in Walnut Creek, California, we hit 79 degrees.

Not another soul to talk to

I return to Denver next week crossing over by Sprinter van. My route will take me across 1200 miles of landscape desperate for more rain and snow. The clock is ticking, winters half over. So far this season the measly three inches of rain in San Francisco is horrible, half an inch in Santa Barbara is terrifying. The new religion here in wildfire wonderland is talking to the weather gods, forty million left coast liberals are praying for an atmospheric river and soon.  

We all know what is barreling straight at all of creation. Humanity has got a raging catastrophic climate change global emergency. Fixing this hot mess is the fierce urgency of now. That’s the Kong sized crisis we’re in, add a pandemic, toss in social inequality, and a rowdy bunch of anxious Hannity audience members and well we do have a full plate. We need a vaccine, solar panels, pay raise and the courage to strike out on a path to save the world.  When we’re finished, we can all go have a good soak at the Star Plunge. We’ll need it.