Today I’m going to take a stab at a topic I’ve been avoiding. It’s a topic that provides (I hope) the context within which my political choices make sense.
Let’s talk about climate change.
Pop quiz for the curious
Okay here is the pop quiz.
Adolf Hitler had two utopian dreams, both of which were evil and both of which constituted the core of Hitler's political philosophy.
The first one, more familiar to today's masses, was Judenfrage, translated as the "Jewish Question." Hitler's answer to the "Jewish Question," initially, was to remove all Jews from Germany. Eventually this became kill them all.
Yan Lianke's (2010) novel The Four Books is about a re-education camp in China during the Great Leap Forward.
"…much of the conversation about Hurricane Dorian—including most media coverage—ignores climate change. That's a mistake. It's akin to talking about lung cancer and being afraid to mention smoking, or talking about traffic deaths and being afraid to talk about drunken driving." ~ David Leonhardt
Welcome to Tuesday’s Open Thread. A few days ago there was a news article in Joe’s EB about the media's coverage of Hurricane Dorian. The concern voiced in the article was that the kind of storm-porn the media loves to feed us, negates any real discussion over how to prepare our cities in the face of these extreme storms. This type of reporting isn't new. I watched the same coverage when I was living in New York after Superstorm Sandy. What is new are the storms themselves. So why aren't we talking about them in a more relevant way?
This piece appears on my feeds today:
We don’t have 12 years to save the climate. We have 14 months.
Since when did climate experts become experts on "political reality"? At any rate, Joseph Romm is a prominent climate expert, and his thesis is:
-- can we channel it?
Originally published on my blog: Hanna Writes.com
I'm a proponent of Robert Frosts's poem fire and ice, which I was fortunate enough to hear Frost himself recite a month before he died. I don't know how this globe itself will end--a cold, dark death when the sun dies. A solar super flare. Who knows? It sure ain't me. I would like to see the nightly smirk on Al Gore's face every night when he counts the silver. An inconvenient truth, Mr. Gore and co-dependents, is that climate always changes over time.
