environment

An Empty US Cup…

by MyBaconPress

A while back, I wrote that the one thing a person might be able to argue as a “success” for 47 was his “border control.” The reason I suggest it’s only an arguable success is that he accomplished his greatest achievement by being overtly cruel and unreasonable, but, it seems to have worked. NOBODY wants to come to the US anymore. One can only guess at how many want to get the hell out.

So, in a completely unrelated topic, the World Cup is getting ready to play out. Oh, I guess it IS related, since whole blocks of hotel reservations are being canceled at an alarming rate. Well, alarming to the hotel industry. They’re being canceled because of that line up there, ‘NOBODY wants to come to the US anymore.’

The World Cup is being played out this year among three different countries, Canada, Mexico, and the US. I’m thinking two of those countries are going to feel a real economic boom from the impact of tourism. That third country there? The US? Yeah, there’s going to be an economic impact there, too. I just suspect it’s not going to be so much of a boom and more of a bomb. Nice work, Donny. It seems like everything you touch turns to…well, you know…

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Kevin Warsh is the guy 47 wants to replace Jerome Powell as Fed Chair. 47 wants Warsh because Warsh is a loyal toady who will manipulate interest rates as dictated by 47, who destroys everything he touches, or, perhaps, Warsh’s own investment needs. He’ll be the richest Fed Chair in history. He sat for the Senate Banking Committee confirmation hearing and said, get this, that the Fed would be “independent of the White House.”

He managed to say it with a straight face, too. Nobody in the room believed him, of course, but the Republicans all acted like it was straight from God’s lips, near reverential. Powell’s term ends in the middle of May. He says he’s staying so long as he’s being investigated. 47 says otherwise. Sooner or later, 47 is going to get his way. When he does, the dollar is going on a roller coaster that likely ends with deadly crashes…

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I saw a clip of Fox Not-News mouthpiece Jessie Waters, whose own mother doesn’t seem to like him much, saying that Virginia had “gerrymandered the state” in the recent election where Democrats just won a new mid-term district mapping battle. He was close to right. What he meant to say was “RE-gerrymandered the state.” It had already been gerrymandered to the Republicans benefit. That’s okay in the Republican mind. That didn’t become a bad thing until Democrats did it back to them. Now it’s a real outrage…

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Climate change is real. A broad swath of people in our failing nation insist otherwise. Climate change doesn’t care WHAT they say and just keeps getting worse. It’s caused by lots of things but one of the main things is burning fossil fuels. Obviously, making gas and selling it is legal. It just also happens to contribute to environmental devastation, wreaking havoc where ever it goes.

The link between burning fossil fuels and climate change is clear and proven so various environmental groups are suing oil producers, trying to get them to take some responsibility for their actions. Mostly, they want the oil producers to clean up their act – literally. Republicans in Congress are currently working to shield large oil companies from their responsibilities.

They are trying to pass a bill called the ‘Stop Climate Shakedowns Act of 2026,’ because getting the oil companies to clean up their messes is a “shakedown.” If they succeed in this thing, the new federal legislation would dismiss pending climate accountability lawsuits, void all climate Superfund laws, and block similar future efforts. Good for oil. Bad for the planet, worse for humans.

It seems the industry is on the move. Right now, they know they have a small window to use a large-enough group of greedy but stupid people to protect them from their actions. To be clear, they want to keep doing what they’re doing, regardless of the cost. They just don’t want to be held responsible. And the Republicans are working overtime trying to help.

Remember when immoral Republicans in Congress passed the ‘Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act’ in 2005? That one protected gun makers from the consequences associated with the use of their product. Now innocent victims of gun violence can often NOT get redress through the courts because of that law and the oil industry is using it as a model to try and shield themselves from culpability.

Every day, it feels like the Republicans have gone all in. Every day it looks like the cons are close to losing power and they need to get all of their evil legislation passed and in place before that happens. Have you ever seen one of those boxes full of money blowing in the air? A person goes in and for a minute or so tries to grab and pocket as much of the money as they can. That’s how conservative lawmaking looks to me, today. They want it all and they’ve only got a short time left to try and get it.

I, for one, don’t think governments should be protecting industries from the effects of their businesses…

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Ah, Capitalism. “Build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” Right? Not so much. Still thinking about climate change, the world should be pushing to get off of burning fossil fuels as quickly as it can and electric cars are one good source to do that. If we continue the mousetrap-as-car metaphor, the best mousetrap in the world is made in China.

US car manufacturers DID beat a path to a door, too. The door to the White House, where a corrupt President slapped such high tariffs on the Chinese cars, they can’t be brought into the US. The US manufacturers know they can’t compete with the Chinese cars. Can’t? Won’t, more likely. And now, because of mealy-mouthed politicians, they won’t have to.

But nobody gets to tell me we live in a Capitalist society when competition is NOT king. If the Chinese build a better car, they build a better car. If competing car companies can’t match that car, the Chinese are going to clean up. Capitalism. The minute you ban that open competition, you’re banning Capitalism. Regardless of the stories you might hear, this is why American-made electric vehicles cost so much.

I suspect if this were a truly Capitalist nation, the Chinese car company BYD would have dealerships in every city and ‘Tesla’ would only describe Nikola again…

Predictable…

by MyBaconPress

I have questions…
Huh. A glacier collapsed? It wiped out a whole town? Now there are other areas threatening to do the same? Wow, who could have predicted? What? The vast majority of the world’s climate experts predicted exactly this kind of calamity? Not JUST this but other kinds of natural catastrophes, too? And they’re ALL coming true, exactly as warned?

Wait a minute, isn’t there a huge number of people who insisted for decades that climate change isn’t real? What about them? Doesn’t it all just go away if we collectively don’t believe in it? Didn’t 47 “solve” it all by removing any reference to climate change on government websites and firing the people who study the problem? And… didn’t he ALSO eliminate regulations intended to battle climate change? Won’t THAT fix the problem?

Come to think of it, wasn’t that ALSO his big strategy for dealing with Covid-19? I mean, didn’t he suggest that if we just stop testing for it, Covid-19 would just go away? Didn’t he say that? Doesn’t that also suggest that if we don’t look, it isn’t real? Didn’t that idea boost the body count to just over a million people when every other country on Earth couldn’t get anywhere NEAR that body count? Didn’t we have the best body count, the biggest body count?

Wasn’t that brought to us by 47, thanks, mostly, to his astounding lack of understanding of reality and the way things work? So why shouldn’t his clever strategy of ignoring it and hoping it goes away while declaring it ‘fake news’ work? Do you supposed the Swiss faked the crushed village just to make the Orange Man look bad?

Isn’t it at least STARTING to feel like ignoring it isn’t working? Doesn’t it seem like we should be at least TRYING to do something to protect ourselves? Wouldn’t it be the most outrageously stupid, monumentally moronic, ridiculously irresponsible choice – to pretend a problem that’s causing deaths and billions of dollars in destruction doesn’t exist for no other reason than shareholder value? Isn’t that the dumbest thing you’ve EVER heard of in your life?

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This goes with that…
I saw two articles, side by side, in the Guardian this morning. The first was, ‘One day I overheard my boss saying: ‘just put it in ChatGPT’: the workers who lost their jobs to AI’ and the second was, ‘Are there billions more people on Earth than we thought? If so, it’s no bad thing.’

I think the first story suggests the folly of the second. Full disclosure, you can put me, firmly, in the “We’re WAY too overpopulated” camp. 47’s regime is trying to encourage people to have more babies. White babies, to be sure, but more. People who would bear the responsibility for those babies seem… concerned about the future 47’s regime is offering those babies. The birth rate is down. But only in developed countries.

In places where more hands are required to get the work done or there’s a high mortality rate, people still have lots of kids. On balance, the population continues to grow. People often associate that problem as a resource management issue. Those of us who are concerned that there are too many of us worry that there aren’t enough resources for 10.3 billion people, the number we’re expected to reach by the mid-2080’s.

It should be noted, that’s even a concern for the people who think more babies would be better. The guy who wrote the article defending the increasing population, Jonathan Kennedy, included in his story a line that reads, “That many people will put considerable stress on the Earth’s resources, but if consumption is managed responsibly and sustainable technologies are developed, the world will avoid an apocalyptic catastrophe.”

Isn’t that great? IF consumption is managed responsibly and sustainable technologies are developed? Dude, have you ever MET a human being? Since when do we manage consumption responsibly? IF we can develop sustainable technologies? That ‘If’ is doing a LOT of heave lifting. What IF… we can’t? Or maybe just… don’t? Shareholder value, you know. If we’re not going to address overpopulation – and, surely, we are not – I’m putting my money on ‘apocalyptic catastrophe.’

But even before then, the other story, the side-by-side partner of the overpopulation story was about people losing their jobs to technology. And of course people lose their jobs to technology. That’s the way it has always been. Why wouldn’t that be the way it will always be? My best example, right off the top of my head while I blearily drink my morning coffee, is the coal mining industry.

When politicians run for office and get into coal country, they LOVE to promise one-time coal miners that their jobs will be restored. THAT particular politician has the plan and he or she will get those miners back into the mines, digging coal and dying of Black lung in no time at all. 47 promises “Two weeks. We’ll have it done in two weeks.” (Why is it always “two weeks” with this guy?)

But coal miners didn’t lose their jobs to regulations. The didn’t lose their jobs to environmental concerns. They lost their jobs to technology. Coal companies started using open pit mines. A small team of munitions experts blow up a huge swath of coal-infused earth and giant backhoes fill giant dump trucks that take the load to largely automated processing plants. Where once 100 were needed, now 25 can do the job. The other 75 are left without work.

Estimates for the work force to build the Great Pyramid range from as low as 7,000 to as many as 30,000. I would imagine we could build the thing, today, with only a few hundred. Modern technology would easily replace the rest. That would leave a LOT of people standing around with nothing to do.

That’s exactly the problem we have today. Too many people with nothing to do. AI is coming for jobs many people didn’t expect. When it seemed it would only be robots displacing blue collar workers, that didn’t bother too many people – at least, those not wearing the blue collars. But AI is coming for WHITE collar jobs. Who expected that? (I’m raising my hand. You just can’t see me.)

But the problem is the same. If a robot inserts tab A into slot B and then bolts them together, the blue-collar human worker is out in the cold. If AI becomes the accountant, the white collar worker is out in the cold. Same difference. It will take a fraction of the current human population to maintain the machines – at least until they learn to maintain themselves.

I am NOT a proponent of forced population reductions. China tried that. It looks as though the results are shaping up to be disastrous. I prefer educating people and letting them make their own decisions – exactly the problem that creates the future dystopia depicted in “Idiocracy,” I know. It’s still the right answer.

People who are looking at the world around them and holding off on babies are doing the right thing. Humans have never stopped doing pretty much the same things: we build roads and bridges, we build houses and other buildings, we produce food for the masses. The thing is, technology allows us to use fewer and fewer people to do those things. Population reduction seems the only rational choice. Sadly, being rational is NOT a human strength…

Doing The Right Thing – And Not…

by MyBaconPress

I guess the right is viewing it as a flip-flop but if you didn’t know Ole’ Sleepy Joe was going to pardon his son, Hunter, you were living in a dream world. (And, as it happens, MAGA is starting to discover the world they’re expecting is, in fact, a dream. A pipe dream, to be sure, but that’s still a dream…) I’m glad Joe did it.

I’m not defending Hunter’s actions. He broke the (very minor) law and a punishment was recommended that was in keeping with how these things are handled. So, first, there’s a “how these things are handled,” suggesting Hunter Biden is not the only guy to check off the box that says he’s not buying a gun while being a drug user and, as a rule, people don’t go to jail for it. Well, unless they’re the son of a President currently under attack by political opposition.

When MAGA heard Hunter was going to get the same thing other people get for the same offense, they were outraged and insisted on something worse. You know, because of how much they hate, hate, hate abuses of the law. So, Hunter found himself in deeper trouble than he should have been in – for political reasons. Why, it’s almost as if the cons were weaponizing the law…

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I was born in the LA basin and I don’t remember ever seeing a truly blue sky until I was about eight years old – when we moved out of the LA basin. There was a time in this once-great nation when the air pollution in some cities was so bad, people were dying of smoking-related diseases – even though they had never smoked. The air quality was so bad, there was a concern it would cause birth defects. There was a river near Cleveland, Ohio, the Cuyahoga River. It was choking with chemical contaminants. It was said that if you accidentally fell into that river, you went straight to the hospital – and God help you. It had spontaneously burst into flames.
“Wait, did you just say a river burst into flames?”
“Yes. A river burst into flames because of chemical contaminants.”

Cons like to pretend these issues should be handled on a case by case basis. As it happens, that had been the way various cities and states had been forced to handle it prior to 1970. The case-by-case approach had created a mish-mash of rules that made it hard to know the law in any given area – and that made it difficult to enforce the law. Mindless human activity, combined with very mindful corporate activity had damaged the environment so badly, it was becoming unsafe to breath the air, drink the water, or dig in dirt.

So, in 1970, Republican Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. The idea was to pull together responsibility for the various environmental efforts from around the country and set common standards. He even spoke of the need in his State of the Union Address from January of that year. Remember, this is a Republican speaking:

“Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later.

Clean air, clean water, open spaces-these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be.

We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.”

Yes, there is still work to do. Corporations are forever finding ways to pollute as “cost cutting measures.” But we came a LONG way in cleaning things up. The EPA has the power to clean up areas that had become SO polluted they couldn’t sustain human life anymore, the so-called Superfund sites. (Look up Love Canal.) The companies that DID the polluting – when it wasn’t the military – often just walked away. Too costly to clean up their mess, you know. So the EPA forced them to.

Hmm, the EPA has the power to force corporations to clean up after themselves? Oh, the huMANity! But…but…what about the cost?!? What about maximizing shareholder value? What about the plight of the CEO, who might have to try and get by on only $350 million dollars a year if he has to clean up after himself? Maybe less. Oh, weep for the struggle.

All of that probably explains why corporations haven’t been too keen on the EPA since the day it was formed. As a result, corporations have wanted the EPA gone pretty much since the day it was formed. Fortunately, they have Donald Trump, now.

He hasn’t even taken power yet and his people are already gleefully attacking the agency, working to weaken it’s ability to do it’s job if they can’t get rid of it entirely. They plan to attack scientists who disagree with Trump, who knows nothing. They plan to eliminate protections from political interference with the agency’s work. They don’t LIKE that the EPA knows about – and works to prevent – climate change.

They think if they can make the EPA stop warning about climate change, climate change will just…go away. They think this because they randomly decided climate change is a fraud – even as summers get hotter and hotter and winters get wetter and wetter and storms get stronger and droughts last longer. LIVING the reality of climate change isn’t enough to convince some people climate change is real.

So, here we go. The thing is, climate change IS real. Denial won’t change that. With these actions, efforts to protect the environment will fall off and corporations (and you can bet your ass on this) will start dumping toxic wastes and other contaminants all over the environment as quickly as possible. Sure, it kills everything and everyone, but it saves money. Get your priorities straight, people!

I guess if we’re looking for “bright” sides, what I can come up with is, now that MAGA is sidelining the EPA, humanity will likely NOT survive long enough to suffer many of the other extremes I hear MAGA threatening.
“That’s a bright side?”
I suspect it’s a bright as we’re going to get from this crowd…