Smoke and Sweat: Cities and Communities for a Warming World

I want to lead with a sentiment from near the end of my last post, which is that it’s going to get worse, and we need to radically change society if we want to avoid mass death on a scale that makes the 20th century look like a paradise of human rights, generosity, and abundance.

The planet’s temperature is not only continuing to rise, it’s doing so faster every year. Further, it is not going to stop. Not in my lifetime, not in your lifetime, and absent global action on a scale that seems impossible today, not in the lifetimes of your children, your grandchildren, and probably your great-grandchildren too.

It’s just going to keep getting hotter.

Historically, and even to this day, deaths from cold outnumber deaths from heat. It seems like deaths by cold tend to be distributed seasonally, with cold snaps having little effect on the numbers, where heat waves do result in big spikes. With the rising rate and severity of heat waves, that death toll is going to rise, and because it’s happening during concentrated periods of time, it’s going to place increasing strain on healthcare systems, especially when you remember that every death comes with a larger number of people who just got close to death, and need treatment. The good news is that this seems to be an area in which people have taken action, with measurable results. There are some hard physiological limits for us, but we can actually improve things, even as the temperature rises, if doing so is a priority.

If it’s not a priority, well, it’s just going to keep getting hotter anyway.

There will be fluctuations, year to year, but it’s just going to keep getting hotter. I’m being repetitive on purpose, because it’s just going to keep getting hotter and it feels like a lot of people are still in denial about that. As I’ve said before, we missed the chance to prevent this long-term rise in temperature.

There is no technological fix that will just stop that. There’s no machine we can turn on that will just reset things. In the unlikely event a fascist is reading this, that includes the mass murder machine: simply reducing the population will not solve this. It will leave us will still-high greenhouse gas levels, a huge number of corpses, and a devastated global economy that’s still dependent on fossil fuels. Even if we end emissions and develop a carbon-capture method that’s more efficient than plants, and deploy it everywhere we can as fast as we can, it will still keep warming for a long time to come.

If we magically freeze CO2 levels where they are as you are reading this, it’s going to keep getting hotter, because it takes time for any insulation to reach its “capacity”. In that case, it would probably keep warming for twenty years or so.

And we are not going to do that, because magic isn’t real. There is no god coming to save us, or witch with a spell to heal the earth. It’s just us, and the heat we caused.

The forests will keep burning. And the grasslands, and the tundra, and the peat bogs, and the marshes, and the swamps. Not all at once, but on an on-going basis as ecosystems continue to collapse.

Think about it like a rainforest – a rainforest is a forest in which water is not a limiting factor in any meaningful sense. There is so much water, so much of the time, that no organism has to really expend any effort to stay hydrated. That can happen pretty much anywhere on the planet that’s warm enough for constant rain.

But crucially, the amount of rain required to reach that threshold depends on the rate of evaporation, which depends on the temperature. My current home of Ireland would be a temperate rainforest, absent human meddling. The Amazon basin is a tropical rainforest. Ireland gets roughly four feet of rain per year on average, and the Amazon gets roughly twice that. If the Amazon were to suddenly get Ireland’s rainfall, the ecosystem would dry up and burn, until it stabilized as something closer to a grassland or a dry forest. Increasing the temperature has roughly the same effect. Hotter means more evaporation, which means less available water for the same amount of rainfall, which means it’s going to dry up and burn, until it stabilizes as something closer to a grassland or a dry forest.

That’s what’s happening to the entire planet, so things are going to keep burning. This is one of the feedbacks that climate scientists have been warning about for decades. The current status quo is that most of the world’s ecosystems are going to experience a lot more drought, even if their annual rainfall doesn’t change, and they’re going to burn. Any plant matter that has grown and been maintained by abundant water and low temperatures is now a likely carbon source, and it doesn’t fucking help that the death cultists in the Republican Party are actively poisoning large swathes of American forest, creating large amounts of standing dead wood, ready to burn.

We seriously need to start treating these people as though human extinction is their goal. They seem to have decided that the solution to human carbon emissions is to murder most of the species, because that will lower our fossil fuel use by default. They would rather do that, than give up mega-yachts and private jets.

Do you understand? Whether or not they admit it, the actions they are taking are those of people who are actively trying to slaughter most of us.

—

I’m not trying to induce despair. I promise I’m not. I don’t want you to give up, I just want your actions and decisions to be informed by reality, not the fantasies peddled to us by our rulers and their propagandists. I want you – and all of us – to act, but in order for those actions to have any meaningful effect, we need to choose them based on the reality of the situation.

As a society, we still need to end the use of fossil fuels. That hasn’t changed. The more we continue increasing greenhouse gas levels, the faster the temperature will rise, and the harder it will be to do anything at all.

And we need to reshape, refit, and rebuild most of everything. There’s been a lot of talk lately about the heat up here in the air, but sea level rise is accelerating along with the heat, so those cities that, like much of Florida, cannot be walled off? People are going to leave them anyway, as the encroaching water makes life increasingly impossible. Ideally, we should move them before that, and we should dismantle those cities. Aside from things like copper, I honestly don’t know how practical it is to try to re-use the building materials, but everything else that goes into a modern city makes me think that a flooded Miami would be an ongoing source of pollution for quite a while. We want to build a better world, and to me that means breaking from history, and investing the resources in this before the climate forces our hands.

And for the heat, we need new kind of city. Think “15-minute cities”, but with the capacity to become 5-minute or 1-minute cities for a few weeks at a time. The basic idea has already been done: There are already apartment buildings, here and there all over the world, that contain grocery stores, and fitness centers, and other amenities. With a few adjustments, I think this should become a default for most cities. This would allow most of the population to “shelter in place” from extreme heat, and from the wildfire smoke that will continue to be a problem.

Beyond that, I also think that these buildings should be integrated with mass transit, so that getting from your home to another place in the city requires as little exposure to the elements as possible. This could mean bus terminals and train stops in the buildings, or it could mean a network of enclosed, cooled pathways. Crucially, the current arrangement that many cities have, in which underground rail stations are often several degrees hotter than ambient temperatures, seems like a recipe for disaster in a warming world. I don’t think there’s an easy solution to that problem, but that just means it’s all the more important that we start working on it now.

We also need to abandon the just-in-time economy, and actually invest the resources in maintaining significant emergency supplies for the population. This blog has looked at what that takes on an individual level, and it looks similar at a larger scale – food stores need to be cycled, which means some level of integration with whatever a given city or country’s food distribution system. The same with medical supplies. The same with water, which is still being treated as an infinite resource, even as it is declining around the world.

All of this will cost a lot of money, and a lot of energy. Enough that we probably can’t do it, if we maintain anything close the current level of spending on war I think we should continue to lead with renewables and power storage, but this will probably also require an increase in nuclear energy. That obviously comes with its own issues, the biggest being human malice and human error, but as I keep saying, we have left it so long that extreme measures are increasingly all we have left.

And none of this will happen under the current political and economic regime.

I came to that conclusion some time ago, which is why I have spent so much energy on the question of how to achieve revolutionary change. We’re in a period in which change of that scale is being attempted, but as sort of global counter-revolution to end all revolutions, and all hope of freedom. I don’t think that will work, but we should treat it as a real threat nonetheless, because no matter how many times they fail, they will never stop trying to control everything, and the amount of damage they can do and are doing is apocalyptic.

So organize. It feels counter-intuitive at times, to respond to huge, global problems by focusing on the people around you. Surely helping my elderly neighbor carry something can’t help a global problem, right?

Right. Except…

All of our global problems are the result of all human activity combined. There is a degree to which all of that does come down to what we do, as individuals, we’ve just been misled about how to exercise that power. Environmental action has long been sold to us as a matter of individual consumption and deprivation. In a very Christian sense, the idea is that if we want to make the world better, we must deny ourselves the things that make life enjoyable, and those things are material possessions.

Our focus should not be on that. It should be on empowering ourselves and the people around us. I can’t do a lot by myself, but I’m not by myself, even if it feels that way sometimes. There are other people around, but community takes effort, like just everything else worth doing. If you can’t bring yourself to do anything else, reach out to neighbors, get involved in local doings, and as I keep saying, join local organizations. When the fascists come knocking at your door, it’ll be your neighbors who help you, and who protect you.

And if your whole neighborhood is in trouble, or your city, it will be people already accustomed to helping others, who see the value in doing so, who will come to help. I guess what I’m saying is, most us (myself very much included) need to change how we think about things, and one of the best ways to do that is to change how we go about doing things, and how we live with and around each other.

The Automation of Hope

I used to really like The West Wing. I think I first watched it in college, when I was still at the left end of liberal, in US terms. It presented a vision of the world in which the US government was largely run by people of good will, who simply disagree on certain matters of policy or personal morality. Looking back, it feels like the peak of the “end of history” era, in which the fall of the USSR had signaled the triumph of liberal democracy as the final state of human governance. We had developed the perfect system of governance, and all that remained was to tweak around the edges. A tax rebate here, a new slogan there, and we’re on our way to stability! The process worked, and if we just trusted it, things would just keep getting better.

The rise of neoliberalism presented (many of) us with a new vision of how the world could be made better without any real effort to change it.

In essence, the process of making the future better had been automated so that we could spend our time on more important things, like taking care of our own, short-term needs. “Market forces” shifted from a description of how the interplay of supply and demand can “naturally” manage resources, to a quasi-religious dogma, in which market forces were the only acceptable way to change the world. You want things to get better? Do it using the existing system. You can march and demonstrate, with government approval and within proscribed boundaries. You can participate in electoral democracy, and if you win you can nudge things a little; and if none of that works for you, you can start a business about it, or you can stop complaining.

The idea is that the aggregate of all of human activity, put through the machine of capitalism, will produce superior results for everyone than cruder, more old-fashioned approaches like direct action or some sort of revolution. You don’t do things, you prompt the machine to do them for you, and if you don’t like the results, you don’t try to go around the machine, you prompt better.

It’s a form of utopianism that contains within it a rejection of utopianism. Don’t try to make the world better, because it’s already getting better, and if you interfere, you might hurt the machine and make everything worse.

We could look at US history and see a progression of things getting better, from the abolition of chattel slavery, to women’s suffrage, to the Civil Rights movement, to winning the Cold War. Not only that, but we saved the ozone layer, and ended the use of leaded gasoline, and stopped the acid rain crisis, and we were going to solve climate change any day now! The Utopia Machine works! If you think it’s too slow, or it’s not working, you’re just too impatient, too immature to understand.

I believe utopian thinking is important. It’s good for us to think about what a perfect society might look like, not because we believe we can create such a society, but because it provides us with a lens through which we can inspect the one we have. What does our idea of utopia have that the present situation lacks? Or, if we are considering a particular policy, does it bring us closer to, or farther from that utopia?

We’ve been encouraged to accept that the little nudges made by the Democratic Party have been small steps in the right direction, but as the years have passed, that has felt more and more like climate deniers pointing to periodic dips in temperature as proof that there’s no warming. The Democrats may be better than the Republicans, but they seem to have taken no meaningful action to stop the increasingly obvious Republican project of imposing right-wing authoritarianism on the United States.

The dogma became “better things aren’t possible”. We were told, year after year, that even the good things we had were too expensive. We couldn’t afford a social safety net. We couldn’t afford a public healthcare system. We couldn’t afford retirement. All of that was just out of reach, and “serious” people – the ones who understood the utopia machine – knew that we just had to cut back. The only option was austerity.

At the same time, profits kept rising, the rich kept getting richer and owning more of the economy, and there seemed to be infinite money for war, and for police. To refer back to a recent post, the machinery of oppression was already in place for Trump or someone like him to use, because it was deemed worth the investment.

A huge portion of the US was persuaded to hand over the reins to people who, we were assured, knew better than we did. Our responsibility was to look after ourselves. To make money, and pay bills, and vote. We were able to do that, supposedly, because the professionals were taking care of things. We stopped making the future, and became consumers of futures built and imagined by others.

This is not to say that everybody in the past was an activist. American democracy came out of feudalism, a system in which the people have even less power, and fewer avenues for political involvement. American democracy itself was a sham at the nation’s founding, and for generations after, but the notion of “a government of the people, by the people, for the people” was something that began to seem within reach.

Between the Gilded Age and the end of the Cold War, there were many big changes, driven by big movements. The New Deal, for all it’s often framed as a gift from Roosevelt, was a response by the savvier members of the ruling class to protect the bulk of their power by giving a bit of it away. The Civil Rights movement might have been even scarier, because it threatened to close the working class divide that had been maintained for so long through white supremacy. The US government’s domestic mission during the Cold War years was to break the power of those movements, and to “keep progressives out of government“.

And now, as the US left works to build power, the ruling class is working hard to re-impose something resembling feudalism, in which mass surveillance and the threat of increasingly brutal and sadistic agents of the government will keep the peasantry from ever rising up again. It’s the boot Orwell spoke of, stamping on a human face, forever.

It turns out neoliberalism wasn’t a utopia machine, it was a fascism factory.

—-

So what do we do?

We need to destroy it. We need to build something better, and keep building it. Fortunately, there’s already a playbook for this, and it’s to treat democracy as one of the daily responsibilities of adulthood. That does mean voting in elections, but I believe current events make it clear that that cannot be all we do, especially when we have an obscenely wealthy ruling class that is constantly trying to sow division, and increase its own power at our expense. The working class has immense power, but for it to be exerted, it must be organized. That means unions. It means community groups. It means doing activism as a regular practice, not just to make things better, but also to maintain the capacity to act in coordination.

Part of that is also education, which can be arranged through unions and community organizations. Literacy and numeracy are important, but it goes beyond that. We need a higher level of political and historical education in general, so people can understand the systems that surround them. That’s important if you want to apply pressure to those systems, or to dismantle them altogether.

And here’s the important bit: All of this work, especially when done in community with others, builds hope within the people doing it. It’s not going to make you forget all your problems, and it’s not going to magically cure your depression, but it’s a lot easier to have hope for the future if you’re actually doing something to build that future, and you can see others doing the same. If nothing else, it is a form of exercising power, and it’s a lot easier to feel like a better world is possible if you feel you have even a little power over what happens.

None of this is easy. All of it requires time and effort, and very often money. Not only that, it’s slow to get results, especially in the early stages. It’s like building a rail network: You can’t go anywhere at speed until you’ve done the monumental work of laying the rails. It’s a big ask, especially when everything’s going to shit, and everyone’s worried about their ability to look after themselves and their families. That’s kinda the point. It’s not an accident that it’s getting harder to make ends meet. It’s not a coincidence that that has come along with the rise in fascism. It has both helped to drive some to embrace fascism, and helped to suppress resistance. It’s all very hard.

The thing is, it’s going to get harder from here no matter what you do.

Not only will the fascists not stop their destruction until they are forced to, the planet is warming fast, and it’s hard to overstate how much worse that will make everything. If you can find a way to get involved in collective action, you will be building the power needed to make things easier.

I’m a big fan of modern technology and automation, when it helps people live fuller lives. When it’s being used to force more people into poverty and servitude, on the other hand, I think it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Somewhere along the way, most of us allowed the knowledge and skills of collective power to fade away, while we were under the mistaken impression that we no longer needed them. The good news is that in my lifetime, there have never been more people actively and collectively working to build a better future for themselves.

Post delayed

This week’s blog post, “The Automation of Hope” will be a day or two late, because this week has been unusually busy. If you find you cannot possibly wait to read this fascinating article, or you just want to support my work, I have a draft up for my paying patrons.

Blame Canada!

I had other plans for this week, but they’ll have to wait because some Republican politicians just offered bait too good to pass up.

Many years ago, climate activists began predicting that as anthropogenic global warming became undeniable, those who had worked so hard to keep the temperature rising would start to blame everyone else – including climate activists – for the problem. I’ve seen one version of that pop up over the last few years, in which someone who recently began to accept reality blamed everyone else for not convincing them sooner. We didn’t push hard enough. We pushed too hard. We were too annoying, or too easy to ignore. We didn’t say it right, and so it’s our fault that they weren’t convinced.

Now we’ve got a new version of that, courtesy of the Republican Party of the USA, and their reliably bizarre understanding of science and politics.

Canada has been dealing with massive wildfires recently, primarily fueled by climate change. They’re not alone in this, of course. The US has the same problem, as do many countries all over the planet. Because the whole planet’s temperature is rising. This might not be a huge issue, of course, if it weren’t for the disrespectfulness of smoke. Smoke doesn’t care about borders or immigration policy, which is why all good national leaders know to control their local smoke, so it doesn’t bother anyone else. From the office of Jack Bergman:

Dear Prime Minister Carney,

We write today as members of Michigan’s congressional delegation to raise our voices on an issue that has already drawn letters from our colleagues in past years: wildfire smoke drifting across the border from Canada into our communities. Additionally, last year, Reps. James and Bergman each wrote letters to your government to raise the alarm about wildfire smoke pouring across our border from Canada into our communities. We write jointly this time because a year has passed, the season has come around again, and nothing has changed except that our patience has run out.

Our constituents in Michigan are once again under air quality alerts. Our hospitals are once again treating children, dialysis patients, and older residents for the effects of smoke that did not originate anywhere near them. This is the third consecutive year we have had to write to Canadian officials about a crisis that Canada has the tools to prevent and has chosen not to.

I might be more persuaded of this letter’s sincerity if Republicans gave a single shit about the health of their constituents at any other time. If Michigan had universal healthcare, and a system funded to ensure that everyone had access, then everyone’s baseline level of health would be higher, and the system would have more capacity for emergencies. The Republican party, on the other hand, seems committed to following the advice of famous eugenicist Thomas Malthus. They are building a country in which the poor are denied access to vaccines, safe food, functional infrastructure, safe workplaces – pretty much everything that has been responsible for the increase in human life expectancy over the past century or so.

We were told last year that this would be treated with urgency. It was not. We were told the causes, chronic under-investment in forest thinning, fuel reduction, and prescribed burns, along with inadequate enforcement against arson, were being addressed. They were not, or not adequately enough to matter to the people we represent. Provincial leaders have offered excuses instead of results, and in some cases have openly dismissed the health of American citizens as an inconvenience to their own summer. That attitude is unacceptable from a neighbor and an ally.

It’s true, this is not the first time they’ve complained like this. Canada is very bad for allowing there to be wildfires, which the US would never do, because God-Emperor Donald Trump personally vacuums every forest by hand, and orders all the trees to stand farther apart.

We are done accepting apologies in place of action. If Canada will not manage its forests to prevent these fires, the United States will look elsewhere, and act on our own, to protect our people. That means our own agencies exploring direct involvement in cross-border fuel reduction and firefighting capacity. It means reconsidering how much benefit of the doubt this relationship continues to earn on an issue where American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year. Sovereignty comes with responsibility, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another country’s airspace has not been met.

Sovereignty comes with responsibility, you see, and the responsibility to prevent a foreseeable disaster from crossing into another’s airspace…

I never cease to be astounded by conservatives’ capacity for projection. The United States is a foreseeable disaster crossing into other countries’ airspace. It has been for decades. Its foreign policy is one foreseeable disaster after another, and every one of them is proudly championed by the Republican Party. But hey, let’s ignore the millions murdered in the name of capitalism and the US empire. I’ll even pretend the US armed forces aren’t one of the biggest polluters on the planet.

The US is the biggest single reason for the lack of appropriate action on climate change. The Republican party is the biggest single reason for the lack of appropriate action on climate change within the US.

That’s not to say other countries don’t pollute, or that everyone else is blameless in all this, but the nations to which we’re often compared on emissions, like China and India, not only have triple our population, they will also never reach the per-person greenhouse gas emissions of the United States. China passed the US as the biggest annual emitter a few years back, but they’ve also been ramping up renewable power faster than anyone else, while working hard on mass transit and electric vehicles.

Further, the bulk of historical emissions (because remember this is a cumulative problem) come from the US, and as the world hegemon after WW2, the US has had far more opportunity to change, in terms of available resources and technology. Had the US begun to do so after the first televised warning about global warming, back in 1956, or even after the congressional hearings in the 1980s, the rest of the world would have followed suit, and the US would have been in a position to help them do so. Instead, the Republican Party declared war on the environment and anyone defending it, and the Democrats mainly provided lip service and a list of excuses. That’s not to say they did nothing, but nothing they did was able to do more than slow the increase.

It’s like when politicians tell you that the economy is doing fine because inflation is down, as though that means prices are down, rather than the reality, which is that prices are just rising more slowly.

So.

For 70 years, we’ve known that we were making the planet hotter. For 70 years, we’ve known that the problems caused by that would be planetary. For 70 years, we’ve known that it would affect every nation on the planet, that the US was the biggest single perpetrator, and that other, poorer countries would almost certainly bear huge costs in resources and lives for a problem that they didn’t cause, and couldn’t have stopped.

Batman fans will be familiar with Uncle Picard’s catchphrase: With great power comes great responsibility. If you have the means to stop harm, or to solve a problem, then you have a responsibility to do so.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party is the party of personal responsibility, which means they only acknowledge their responsibility to their own personal needs and desires. Anything like a responsibility to other people, or to humanity as a whole? That’s communism, and they would like to use the Pentagon to murder it please.

So these are the people – from the very party most responsible for global instability, global warming and everything that comes with it – who are scolding Canada about their responsibility to other nations. Who are demanding immediate, specific action on an environmental issue.

We are asking for specifics, not sentiment. What funded, measurable steps has your government taken since last summer to reduce fuel loads and wildfire risk in the provinces responsible for the smoke reaching the American Midwest? What accountability exists for provincial leaders who treat this as someone else’s problem? And what will genuinely be different by this time next year, rather than another season of statements followed by the same result?

Here’s one specific: We can strap every Republican down, Clockwork Orange-style, and force them to learn climate science and actual world history.

Here’s an even better one: Take the hundreds of billions spent on war, and instead invest in ending the use of fossil fuels to power our society, not just in the US, but across the planet. Do it because it needs to be done, and because we can, and because we’ve spent generations spreading our poison to the corners of the earth, and making life hell for others.

There is no single country, in the last 70 years, that has done more to pollute, and destabilize the whole planet, than the United States. There is no country on the planet that has violated its “Sovereign” responsibility to others anywhere close to as much as the United States. And, before we finish the letter, I’ll add that that there is no country on the planet, in the last 70 years that has more reliably acted in bad faith, seemingly whenever possible.

We remain ready to work with Canada in good faith, as two nations with a long history of standing together. But that history does not entitle Canada to another year of excuses. Our constituents are breathing the consequences of this failure right now, and they deserve better than to be told, again, that it will be handled

I agree on that. Your constituents deserve far better than anything the GOP has offered in my lifetime.

But I have to ask, what do these bold American leaders propose to do, exactly, when they say the US will “look elsewhere”. For what? The Republicans have already been putting tarrifs on Canadian imports, as a display of machismo and as yet another way to steal from the American people, so… what? Are they threatening to build a bubble over the country, so they can source our air from other places? Maybe they think they can bomb the fires into submission?

I think there is merit in international cooperation on issues of ecosystem maintenance, climate adaptation, and controlling emissions, but the Republican Party is violently opposed to all of that. If anything their version of “cooperation” would be strong-arming Canada into letting American corporations clear-cut Canadian forests.

I don’t think these politicians actually believe there is anything Canada can do about the wildfires. Maybe I’m over-estimating their grasp on reality, but I think this is far more likely to be the same fascist trick the Republicans always use: When a problem comes up, find a scapegoat so they don’t have to do anything. They rant non-stop about responsibility because if they can blame everyone else for all the problems they either created or are responsible for solving, then they can focus on their real priority, which is making themselves and their masters richer. Heck, if we go with the hypothesis that they really are trying to turn the US into a Malthusian nightmare, then stopping the smoke is the last thing they’d want to do.

This letter is funny, in that it is deeply silly, but it’s also further evidence that the Republicans will do literally anything other than actually serving their public.

These fires will continue. They will get worse. The world still has a lot of forests, despite the relentless deforestation. The higher the temperature, the more the forests dry out, and the more fires there will be. This is not a problem that can be solved with forest management. It is also not a problem that can be solved by any one nation.

We have entered an era in which a lot of people are going to die, because of the decisions of the ruling class, across generations now. We’ve gotten good at dealing with natural disasters, but they are going to keep getting worse. The Republicans who wrote that letter were complaining about having done the same last year, and the year before. Next year is almost certainly going to be worse, for everyone.

And we’ve barely started. The speed at which the temperature rises keeps increasing, we’ve got decades of warming already baked into the system, and while there is a lot we can do about it, we’re currently at the mercy of people who seem to think they can bully fires into not starting.

Now, for those who are dealing with wildfire smoke, here are a few tips and resources that might be useful.

The first is to filter your air, as much as you can. Any smoke is harmful to not just your lungs, but your cardiovascular system in general, and even your brain. That combined with keeping doors and windows shut can keep your home air safer. For going outside, if you have to, try to pick up some n-95 masks. Even better, make peace with the fact that you now live in a cyberpunk dystopia, and get a respirator, and make sure to get extra filters. They can provide better protection than a disposable mask, and because they’re not disposable, you can personalize them with LEDs and other stuff to make your aesthetic match the genre we’re all forced to live in.

If you can, get air purifiers for your home. Good ones aren’t cheap, but clean air is priceless (currently)

Keep an eye on local air quality. If you’re in the US, the EPA has a tool that the Republicans don’t seem to have destroyed yet, and the AP just told me about this global air monitor powered by community science. If the air quality is bad, cancel plans if you can, and stay indoors. If your home doesn’t provide protection, or you don’t have a home, maybe look for public facilities that do have air filtration, and see if you can spend some of the day there just to give your system a rest. On that same note, don’t exercise more than you absolutely have to, so long as the air quality is bad. I feel like it should be instinctual, but breathing hard when the air is poisonous isn’t going to make you stronger.

And, most importantly, get involved in politics!

This shit is only going to get worse as the temperature rises, and individual people and families will not be able to protect themselves from a global catastrophe. Individual towns, cities, and even some nations won’t either. We need global cooperation. We need governments to be actively investing in adaptation, as well as reducing emissions. That includes enabling people to stay cool indoors when it’s too hot to survive outside, and it also involves ensuring that people have access to clean air, when bits of the planet are on fire.

See what’s happening around you. If you’re in the US, that might be anti-ICE organizing, it might be the local DSA, it might be community groups, or school boards, or something else. The better-organized everyday people are, the more power they have to force politicians and capitalists to behave, lest the workers shut down the economy.

Or, you know, we can just blame Canada.

Writer’s Block?

You get a bit of a ramble this week.

Growing up, I understood writer’s block to be a lack of ideas, and that always seemed odd to me. For whatever reason, I’ve never been short on ideas. Maybe it’s different for some people, but in my case, it tends to be a mixture of other things. Part of it is perfectionism. If I have something worth saying, I want to get it right, especially with how often misunderstandings occur. Some of it is also doubtless an issue of executive function. I’m pretty sure I have ADHD, but I’ve yet to make myself invest the energy and money into what seems to be an iffy and often arduous assessment and diagnosis process. It can be hard to “just do it” when your brain isn’t doing chemicals right.

And I think some of it is because I’ve always had a hard time staying on just one topic (which could relate to the ADHD). More often than not, I see everything as being connected to everything else, and while it’s a perspective I wish more people shared, it does make it hard for me to draw lines around a particular topic.

When I was writing about how the US was oppressive before Trump came along, I left out uncountable examples, some of which I’ve written about before. I also didn’t go into as much detail in making my argument as I could have. Concepts like freedom and oppression don’t have universal definitions, and they so often seem to depend on cultural norms and some level of collective agreement. The US is full of people who would doubtless consider themselves to be free, either because they don’t understand the source of their problems, or because they are like the dog who, never having pulled against its leash, believes it has no bonds. Olayemi Olurin has talked a lot about her work as a public defender, and one of the things she has said is that white people are often difficult clients, because it’s not until they’re in the system that they realize they don’t have a lot of the rights they thought they did. Should I have included a couple paragraphs about that sort of thing? I don’t think so, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no cost in choosing not to.

So I have several drafts that apparently need to age a little before I can finish them, and instead of the intended article, you’re getting this.

And on the note of leaving things out, there was one thing I don’t think I covered well in my recent El Niño piece, which is that this summer, despite all of its records, is not the one to worry about. The heat won’t really hit till this coming winter (for my fellow northern hemisphere types). What we’ve seen this summer is probably better seen as the baseline from which El Niño will raise the temperature. That’s why climate scientists are pretty freaked out. Global warming is already causing crop failures to the tune of billions of dollars (to say nothing of lives lost), and now we’re headed into a major global heat event.

The planet hasn’t seen CO2 levels this high since Lucy’s era four million years ago, and the rate of increase has gone up recently. If we account for amplifying feedbacks, we’re moving past the time when our ancestors looked like apes, and toward the time when our ancestors looked more like rats or squirrels. This is going to affect everything, and it will be used as a weapon against most of humanity, by those who care only about power.

One of the points I’m fumbling around, in a draft that I hope to finish some day soon, is that if we do not change our political and economic systems, humanity will not survive this. We depend on reliable weather patterns that no longer exist. We built for extremes that are starting to seem mild. We developed our societies on the assumptions of infinite natural resources, and an infinitely resilient natural world. We’ve had to deal with problems caused by those assumptions plenty of times, but we’ve only ever tinkered with the system. It’s debatable if that was ever enough, but now it’s definitely not.

We have all the tools we need, but our political and economic systems will not let us use them, because the people running those systems do not value life.

I’ve said all this before, but I’m trying to learn to be OK with repeating myself. I’ve made a small study of rhetoric, and how messaging can be used to change people’s minds, and there seems to be universal agreement that repetition is key. To quote Frank Luntz, who bears more responsibility for the climate crisis than most:

“There’s a simple rule: You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again, and about the time that you’re absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time. And it is so hard but you’ve just got to keep repeating, because we hear so many different things–the noises from outside, the sounds, all the things that are coming into our head, the 200 cable channels and the satellite versus cable, and what we hear from our friends. We as Americans and as humans have very selective hearing and very selective memory. We only hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.”

I don’t know what’s wrong with Luntz’ moral compass that has led him to do so much harm with the tools he has, but he’s absolutely correct about this, and the cacophony he described in that quote has only gotten worse in the 21 years since he said it.

Maybe the thing to do is find a point worth saying again any time the piece I want to publish isn’t ready.

Life is busy

No actual post this week. Thanks to this wonderful world created by US hegemony, I had to spend most of this week’s energy trying to find a new source of income. If anybody wants to cover my rent going forward, I’ll be sure to post more regularly.