Wrong, Again
Did any of the dinosaurs ever look up?
About 20 years ago, a good friend speculated that “We’ll be the last generation to enjoy global warming.” As I’m sure you’d assume, we’re both Boomers and were expecting a sooner-than-later use-by-date, too. The fact is that, regardless of Republican and Religious Right denials, the climate is changing at a record only beaten by giant asteroid planet-killing extinction event. Of course, with Trump and Musk’s decimation of NASA and their Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) and the SpaceX and Starlink clutter, we could be in for a planet killer strike, too, and won’t know it until we see the billionaires heading for their rabbit holes. This summer, if it is an example of what we’re heading into, has not been enjoyable. It has been hot, dry, and even our semi-rural Minnesota city’s air has been as polluted by smoke and factory emissions as the worst I ever experienced in L.A. in Reagan’s environment-denying-and-defiling 80s.
Seeing these kinds of environmental changes in my own lifetime is (and should be) startling. For example, in the late-1970, I was working for an agricultural equipment company that maintained test plots in northern-central Florida. Having grown up and suffered the “real Midwest” for all of my life, at that point, the only running water I’d ever seen that had any visibility at all came out of a tap and, even that, was cloudy. One weekend off, one of the welders I worked with and I decided to canoe the Ichetucknee River, which was at that time the source of the most pure water in the country. It was, in fact, like canoeing in a really large bathtub or aquarium. We were surrounded by tropical plants and animals (especially the occasional alligator and snapping turtle and, often, several water moccasins) and, when our boat drifted over a spring outlet we could see scuba divers 30-40 feet down as clear as you can imagine. That was my first experience with a canoe and it became one of my favorite, regular activities for the next 50 years. However, in those same 50 years, Florida’s clear water springs and creeks have been decimated by agricultural pollution and over-development. Florida is not and has never been a place anyone sensible would call “environmentally responsible,” but with 1,000 new residents every day the place is in need of a new, much larger handbasket in which to travel to hell. You have to wonder if the dinosaurs were this irresponsible and that is what attracted the Chicxulub asteroid that hit the Gulf of Epstein 66 million years ago and put an end to their overpopulation?
One of the less-often-discussed reasons for climate change denial, not just in the uneducated, dumbed-down United States but in other declining and fool-filled civilizations, is that nationalism eliminates any possibility of international action to preserve a climate that humans can live in. In fact, nationalism has zero answers for all complicated world-wide problems, so the only “logical” approach is to call those problems “a hoax” and ignore them until they are impossible to ignore and way beyond the point of no return. That kind of “solution” works for bills that we can’t afford to pay, like the national debt or balloon payment home loans, why not for world-wide catastrophes? Since the Nixon Regime, Americans have grown so used to putting off responsibility to the next generation that it’s just a reflex now. We haven’t even begun to pay off the Vietnam War debt and Reagan treated the national debt like it was a pile of chips someone had given him to play with at a casino. Carter, Clinton and, to a lessor extent, Obama made an attempt to convince Americans that either taxes had to increase or spending had to decrease before the debt became unsustainable (which it is far past today), but Reagan’s gift to the 1% of control of the national media kills that discussion before it gets real. And, like global warming, we’re just going to let that problem creep up on us until someone with a bigger stick calls the debt due.
If we’re lucky, we might be the last generation to enjoy spending the American dollar, too.