The old saying is that one should not watch how politics are done, or sausage is made. I’ve seen the latter and it wasn’t too bad, but a visit to the cheese caves in Roquefort, France, put me off cheese for a long time. The smell was unforgettable. I imagine that I’d feel the same way about politics if I sat in on some meetings.
The COP26 meetings are over and they turned out exactly as expected. There were some particularly horrifying moments, such as when Nobel Price recipient Barack Obama, who earlier said:
“You wouldn’t always know it, but it [oil production] went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas – that was me, people.”
… decided to lecture everyone about how bad fossil fuels are. You can’t make this shit up.
As I predicted, the aspirational goal of +1.5C is in the toilet: coal and oil producing countries are talking about “tailing off” new production, meaning “we’re going to keep drilling and digging and we’ll tail it off in a decade or two once it’s no longer our problem because we’re old people and we’re going to slide into our graves and leave you kids holding the bag.” +2.5C is the new aspirational goal and, frankly, I think humanity will blow that one, too.
Blogging is not my “job” but it has forced me to become a dedicated follower of news. There was a time years ago when I read the front page of Google news and the New York Times and thought I was pretty tuned-in to what is going on. Since then I’ve learned not to congratulate myself and to seek, instead, the news that’s not fit to print: The Intercept, Counterpunch, Al Jazeera, and local/topical news. Putting customized search strings in Google news is another good trick – in case you’re wondering how I manage to scavenge up so much horror about the F-35 program: it comes to me automatically.
I had never heard of this, though it happened in my lifetime. Perhaps the news cycle was all about the reactor explosion and fire in a place that is often called “Chernobyl”, which happened earlier that year.
My official policy on book recommendations is, briefly: you will find it worthwhile or I’ll refund your money. [stderr] I note that nobody has ever taken me up on that offer in many years (I had a similar offer on my personal website before I started stderr here) so either my recommendations are awesome, or nobody cares. And, my official recommended books list, with this new entry, is [stderr]
Leaking oil and gas wells are going to be the future’s asbestos crisis and lead paint rolled up in one.
I’m referring, of course, to humans.
In Zen practice, a koan is a puzzling question or comment that a student is given to meditate upon, usually intended to help them break out of dualist-mode thinking.
US corporate bankruptcy laws are tuned to make it easier for polluting companies to walk away from their mess, wash their hands, and move on.
Every single thing I read about the worsening climate change disaster is scary. They all add up to very, very scary, taken together.