Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

Not all heroes wear capes.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Never forget that he train is barreling down on Trump, even as he dances on the tracks.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

The words do not have to be perfect.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Ron DeSantis, the grand wizard, oops, governor of FL.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

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Reader Interactions

123Comments

  1. 1.

    sab

    Raining like crazy here (NE Ohio) but we were getting into extremely dry territory.
    OTOH I live in the Valley (Cuyahoga) and step-kids live uphill. We might ascend if things get iffy, but I don’t expect it at all

    ETA : My extended family mostly moved to CA. That’s not going well climate wise.

    Canada: please save our water (under treaties our side has consistently ignored.)

  2. 2.

    PsiFighter37

    It’s too late to do anything. Turns out calling Al Gore fat wasn’t the solution after all.

  4. 4.

    Suzanne

    OTOH, it’s been raining softly here and I took a nap and awoke to the soft tapping of rain on the roof. So nice.

    Not happy about our sharp climb in Covid cases.

  5. 5.

    trollhattan

    Yeah, Western European flooding is mindboggling and meantime the weather service warns northern California of dry lightning storms beginning tomorrow. That will be fun.

    Digby has this doozy of an account by a former true-believer telling tales of Ken Starr (with whom she also had an affair, the hypocrite), li’l Brett Kavanaugh, who engaged in screaming at her, and Epstein. Hoo boy.
    An excerpt.

    I can date the beginning of my own rebirth to July 9, 2018, the day Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice on the Supreme Court. I sent Starr a text saying, “You said to me 20 years ago, that Brett was ‘going places’ Clearly!” [punctuation sic] It was my first communication to Starr in memory that went unanswered, and I wondered if he picked up that my message had a bit of an edge. I had met Kavanaugh in 1998 when he was a 33-year-old member of then, Independent Counsel Starr’s team investigating Bill Clinton, and I was a 39-year-old strategic communications consultant hired to help prep Starr to present Congress with his legendary report detailing President Bill Clinton’s sexual interactions with a Monica Lewinsky. One day after a meeting at the independent counsel offices, I was alone in a conference room collecting materials when Kavanaugh entered. He began berating me and invading my personal space in a deranged fury that sent me into flight around the table.

    That monster needs removal from the Court.

  9. 9.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @sab: Hot and dry here.  I went up to the eastern Sierra last weekend for a hike in Little Lakes Valley(suggested by a fellow jackal).  The trail starts out at 10,000′ elevation with about 2 1/2 miles and a 250′ elevation climb to the lake we were shooting at.  The peaks around the lake are about 13,000 feet or more, very little snow.  It was shocking.

  11. 11.

    Martin

    Ok, so, I have a pitch here. A couple of threads ago I indicated I’m retiring. One of the things I’m thinking of doing, just as a hobby is a project to help people address climate change in way I haven’t seen done elsewhere.

    My thinking is this: climate change can’t be solved in DC. They can help of course, but the issue is that you and I and every other human here are to some degree lighting that wildfire match. All DC is going to do is force you to buy the EV you can choose to buy on your own. But we don’t need to be forced – we get it, we just don’t quite know what to do about it. Sure, in sweeping terms, but not where to start, how much does swapping out this light bulb help, etc. It’s like Covid – lots of people want it solved, but do I wear a mask, dip my Fritos in bleach, shove a light bulb up my ass, etc. We need education, advice on where to get a mask or how to make one, etc.

    So, it’s not advocacy, it’s not political action. It’s ‘here’s how to figure out your emissions’, ‘here’s what our shared goal is’, here’s what doing x will get you and how to do x, and here’s what doing y will get you and how to do y. It’s not about berating people for not doing enough. It’s not about making your life unlivable. If you think something needs to be done, start to do it. Find the stuff you can do, don’t sweat the stuff you can’t do, and lets help each other get there while we also lobby Congress and try to destroy Exxon. All progress is progress including and especially individual progress because in the end, climate change turns out to be nothing but individual progress, much like addressing Covid is nothing but individual actions to mask, get vaccinated and not lie to your audience.

    Thoughts?

  16. 16.

    Mathguy

    WaPo has a story about the morons living with the Bootleg fire in Eastern Oregon that illustrates perfectly Cole’s point about the 40%.

  17. 17.

    hilts

    Yes, lots of horrible news virtually anywhere in the world you look:

    As Frozen Land Burns, Siberia Fears: ‘If We Don’t Have the Forest, We Don’t Have Life’

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/europe/siberia-fires.html

    Coastal flooding projections have been ignoring the wobbly moon problem

    New research finds that variations in the moon’s orbit will lead to a burst of sunny-day flooding in the mid-2030s.

    https://grist.org/science/coastal-flooding-projections-have-been-ignoring-the-wobbly-moon-problem/

    As I read all these horrible stories regarding extreme weather and natural disasters, I take great comfort in the fact that Biden won in 2020.  As bad as things are right now, they’d be even worse if that raving lunatic Trump were still President.

  18. 18.

    sab

    @Martin: I think you will have useful thoughts. But remember you are retired. You can have important input, but please remember to relax. I know lots of retirees ( especially the male variety) who over-committed. Don’t be a slug, but also don’t go nuts.

    ETA : But I do agree you have a lot to offer, and should, within reason.

  21. 21.

    trollhattan

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    We camped northeast of Tahoe at roughly 6,500 feet this week and it got into the 90s each day. So weird. Needless to say it’s dry as a bone among the ponderosas.

    Turned out returning to Sac got us out of the heat–was at least 15 degrees cooler.

  22. 22.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @sab: About 6 months ago, on one of Adam’s posts, I was excited about seeing rain here.  Adam didn’t seem to understand that it really doesn’t rain here between mid-May and mid November.

  25. 25.

    sab

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: We “adopted” my dad’s (now blind) cat from the neighbors when it was 10 degrees below zero in Ohio at Christmas, and the neighbors tossed him out to fend for himself overnight when they had company. He fended by pounding on our window.

    It hasn’t been that cold in 10 years. I can’t even remember when it was below freezing. Seed and plant catalogues have moved us into a different climate zone. Scary.

  27. 27.

    trollhattan

    @Mary G:

    A third consecutive year with effectively no winter puts us into uncharted territory. Here’s hoping it remains theoretical.

  28. 28.

    mrmoshpotato

    @PsiFighter37:

    It’s too late to do anything. Turns out calling Al Gore fat wasn’t the solution after all. 

    If only the orange shitstain could’ve magically brought the coal industry roaring back after decades of decline…

  30. 30.

    sab

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: When I worked in SF I remember being at a company picnic in May on Angel Island and it rained. Everyone was shocked. It’s May. And an island. We were stuck.

    Ohio April showers always leech over into May showers. July showers, OTOH, are very weird. Two hour thunderstorm yes. Two day drizzle is weird.

  31. 31.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Martin:

     If you think something needs to be done, start to do it. Find the stuff you can do, don’t sweat the stuff you can’t do, and lets help each other get there while we also lobby Congress and try to destroy Exxon.

    That has been my approach. I haven’t said much about climate change because I haven’t wanted to get into the never-ending fights about Exactly What We All Must Do. But we’re getting to a point where we have to do something, and I think it’s getting more politically possible.

  32. 32.

    Mary G

    @Martin: You would be great at that. Are you going to start your own organization or could you join an existing one that’s floundering?

    Also, I know you’ve told me four or five times already who installed your solar panels and I swear to Dog I wrote it down or saved it every time and cannot find it anywhere. My massive main drain project is finished and the bathroom reno is almost done. I am getting bids on the roof. Even though it’s 20 years old, everyone says it’s mostly in good shape. The solar panels are next after that. Do you still think it’s too soon to get a whole house battery?

  33. 33.

    KBS

    I’m trying to advocate at my local level as best I can.  Of course we need national and international action, but local mitigation is going to be a huge issue.  It’s tough to balance my freaking out over the enormous things we need to do with the incremental changes I can help with, but I know I’m doing what I can.

    This essay helps me remember why it’s worth it:

    https://medium.com/@maryheglar/home-is-always-worth-it-d2821634dcd9

  34. 34.

    Josie

    This winter in Houston, I spent a week with no electricity and no water,  walking around in three layers of clothes and sleeping at night in those same three layers, gathering snow and ice to melt so we could flush the toilet and eating cold food since there was no way to cook.  I’ve been through hurricanes before and know how to prepare, but I had no way of knowing how to prepare for what happened.  If anyone tells me that our weather is not changing, I will be tempted to spit in their eye.

     ETA: And now it is raining almost every day, and I wonder what is in store for us next in this uncharted adventure.

  36. 36.

    PsiFighter37

    @Omnes Omnibus: We should certainly do what we can do mitigate it, but the consequences of the past several decades are baked in, and all evidence points to there being a negative feedback loop as changes manifest. Changing things now will help slow down the more terrible consequences of climate change, but I am not convinced that there is anything permanent we can do that won’t result in mass migration and death at some point during my lifetime.

  37. 37.

    Emma from Miami

    @trollhattan: I hate Starr with the force of a newborn supernova. If I ever get to Heaven and see him there, I will have words with the Almighty.

  38. 38.

    Martin

    @Mary G: Here’s the company I used. https://aikyum.com

    Whole house battery is tricky. If you have SCE and solar, the whole house battery will almost certainly never pay for itself. Our power bills are already $0. I can’t save more than that.

    But, it can reduce my emissions a fair bit, so I need to ask myself if I’m willing to pay to reduce them. I probably am, at least when the generation of batteries hits with much longer lifespan, and I install the equipment that allows the house to be islanded, so I keep power in a blackout. Those are still a year or more out, but I could have had the electrical set up for it when they installed the solar.

  40. 40.

    Tim C.

    @PsiFighter37: all is not lost yet, but I think we are absolutely at the point where will be needing to undertake geo engineering projects in the near future.  All of them have terrible side effects but might be better than anything else available

  41. 41.

    Ruckus

    @Martin:

    I think it’s a great idea. We all are a part of what got us here, we have to be a part of what makes it better, or at least slow it down as much.

  42. 42.

    Barbara

    @Martin: Yes. Good idea. I think messaging around “you can do this” can be valuable.  One thing I say to people who express concern about whether it’s “worth it” to go solar is that every time you increase the solar footprint you make it more feasible for everyone else over time, and who’s going to spur that change if not people who can afford it?

  43. 43.

    Geminid

    @Josie:  Curious: do you think Texas Democrats can make February’s power outage an effective campaign issue next year?

  46. 46.

    Martin

    @sab: Yeah, I’m retired, or will be, but mostly because I want to contribute and I’m not quite getting the opportunity to do so in the manner I want. This would be a way to do it that shouldn’t be overly taxing (famous last words).

  47. 47.

    CaseyL

    @Martin:  You might try putting together a workshop and then let continuing education departments at local colleges, climate advocacy groups, and even utility companies know what you’ve got.  Partner with them to get the workshop space and advertising.  Maybe a demo of “How to do X,” – if you can get some sponsorship from companies, you could give people who take the workshop a coupon for a discount on the materials or installers for doing X.

    I’d love to put up solar, but I’m in a townhouse complex.  Either everyone gets it or no one does.  I would be interested in whether I could put out some portable solar panels – my decks get decent sunlight during the summer – and collect the energy somehow.  But that means installing a converter and batteries and how do I merge them into my existing electrical service?

    See, this is the sort of thing you could put together.  Hell, I’d go to that kind of workshop!

  48. 48.

    Josie

    @Geminid: ​  I’m not sure. There are a lot of people in the red sections of Texas who would vote for the person with an ‘R’ after his/her name, no matter what.I think a good campaign issue would be to emphasize the fact that Abbott and company are spending time and money on voting restrictions, abortion restrictions, and a border wall instead of climate change, the power grid and expanding medicaid.Whether or not that would do the trick is anybody’s guess at this point. I guarantee you that I will be working on it.​

  49. 49.

    Feather

    @Martin: Yeah, that’s what my ex who did home theater/smart home said. On any home project, put every wire that might be needed in the future into the walls. Document where they are. You don’t need to connect them, just have the extra length to be able to do the work later. Bumped into an old neighbor. They had done a renovation years back and put CAT 5 in the walls. Wife had complained about the expense, because WiFi came along right after and they never used it. But when they started working from home, they were able punch through the walls to the wires and get super fast internet, not interfering with the kids streaming.

  51. 51.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Josie: With respect, for sure [I grew up in TX, fled long ago, am always in awe of decent people who can stand it there]  but I’m skeptical that the sorts of people who always vote “R”, are going to be swayed by finding out Abbott is spending time/money on voter restrictions, forced-birth laws, etc.  I’d think it’d make ’em more, y’know, rabid.

    I mean, I get why it’s odious: it’s part of why I won’t set foot in the state, after all.  But committed progressives aren’t the target audience for the adverts, yes?

    Again, Idunno.  Certainly to reach suburban women, highlighting the existential threat of these forced-birth laws is important.  But after that, I guess I understand the idea that elections are won on bread-and-butter issues, and the swayable independents are going to be won over by those.

    But again, idunno.

  52. 52.

    ?BillinGlendaleCA

    @CaseyL: This is something I harp on as a renter.  There is no incentive for landlords to do solar, since the renter pays for power.  Now if you changed the economic equation so that the landlord would be economically effected by the power consumption of the tenant, that might change the equation.

  53. 53.

    Chetan Murthy

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: Huh. You’d think, with “net metering” or whatever, that there could be a way for the landlord to get paid for the solar power they provide to the renter, instead of it going to the power company.

  54. 54.

    trollhattan

    @Geminid:
    [Scary, super-deep voice narrator]:
    “Democrat Joe Biden steals the White House and less than a month later, Texans are freezing to death from a Democrat-caused power outage. Joe Biden is bad for Texas, bad for America.”
    “Stop the deaths, stop the steal, stop the Democrats, before they kill more Texans. Elect every Republican to every office, everywhere.”
    Something like that should do the trick.​

  55. 55.

    CaseyL

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: I think there would be a pretty good market for residential “portable solar.”  Portable panels already exist for RVers and tent campers, but the storage/usage equipment is specific to RVs and tent campers.

  57. 57.

    Josie

    @Chetan Murthy: ​
     I don’t think they will be swayed either. They are lost to us. The thing is, though, that there are tons of people who still don’t vote because the Republicans have been very successful at suppressing the vote over the years. The challenge is to get people to the polls who have not been voting for the last 20 years or so. It’s going to be even harder now with the new restrictions. That is why our representatives ran away to D.C. – to get help from congress and to get people’s attention in Texas so that they will come out and vote.

  58. 58.

    FlyingToaster

    @Martin: You should check if you have a local PIRG (Public Interest Research Group), who would welcome the advocacy without overwhelming you with work :)

    Where I live we have MassPIRG, where I went to college we had InPIRG, where I grew up we had MoPIRG.

    A couple of MassPIRG kids knocked at my door last night to remind me to renew my membership and sign the “Whole Foods reduce your plastics like you promised already” petition.

  61. 61.

    Dan B

    Dry for months in Seattle.  And it’s been 80 to 100+ except the last two days.  It was a miracle we didn’t have an inferno on the 4th.

    And, we did Solar and much more.  We have a gas range we rarely use because of portable induction burners.  The only other gas is for the dryer.  I do laundry every other month so the gas bill is under $12.

  62. 62.

    debbie

    I just got back from walking around the neighborhood. I usually listen to music, but didn’t today. It was very, very quiet, not even birds. Do they generally go to sleep this early?

  68. 68.

    Martin

    @CaseyL: Yeah, integrating solar into an existing setup when you don’t have access to the panel is difficult to say the least.

    But these are the kinds of topics I want to cover. If you can’t do that, what else could you do? Can you conserve? Can you make your gains in transportation instead? This is a problem that doesn’t just have a million solutions, it needs every one of them. So some of it is about fitting ideas to your specific situation, where the ‘but what about this scenario…’ argument won’t apply. Do you tow a boat? No? Then get an EV. Do what works for you. Let the boat guy put up solar.

    Part of it too is that energy production is not the most urgent problem. Transportation is. That might be a much easier thing for you to tackle.

    To Cheryls point above, if the choice is between doing nothing and living in a yurt eating tree bark, people will do nothing, even if they’re desperate that something be done. But lots of easy stuff helps. Sometimes we’re surprised at what’s big and what’s small. My electricity is pretty darn small,  and was before we put in solar. Turns out my utility does a decent job on renewables so that could have gone down the list for me. For me, the biggest was by far the cars. I can improve that too. But it turns out food/meat shows up  higher on the list than I had expected, and I have two picky eaters here. They’d rather live in a yurt than give up their cheeseburgers, so that’s generally going to be a no-go for us. But that’s fine! Do what you can do. We don’t need to even worry about that stuff right now, and we may never need to. But its important my household not feel bad that they can’t contribute in that area right now, because it’s important I keep them on board for the stuff they can contribute to.

  70. 70.

    Spanky

    @RSA: The Chesapeake region as a whole is something of a canary in a coal mine wrt sea level rise. Besides rising sea levels from melting ice, the edge of the tectonic plate is sinking, effectively doubling the rise.

    The year-on-year effect is noticeable here in Calvert County, because we’re surrounded on 3 sides by the Bay and the tidal portion of the Patuxent River. Even the Republican county commissioners are directing the county govt to mitigate as best as science allows.

  71. 71.

    debbie

    @Josie:

    I can’t believe, after last winter’s blackout, that TX still isn’t on the national grid. How can even RWNJs not be outraged?

  72. 72.

    Kent

    @debbie: Aren’t they yelling at FEMA to help them?

    FEMA trailers would actually be a big improvement for many of these dirt poor rural rednecks.  But after a year or so, most of them would have traded them in for more guns and ammo.

  73. 73.

    Geminid

    British climate scientist Myles Allen gives a good overview of the problem of global warming and the challenge of reducing carbon emissions in his article, “The Green New Deal: a Climate Scientist’s View from Across the Atlantic,” published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March 2019. The challenge in macro: we put 40 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, and according to the models Allen and others examined, we can reduce this by 2 gigatons per year with a concerted effort.

    Allen was one of the authors of the UN’s IPCC Report on Global Warming of 1.5° Celsius released in the fall of 2018, which called for net-zero carbon emmissions by the year 2050.  I could not do Allen’s Bulletin article justice by summary, but it is short, to the point and well worth reading. Besides scientific and political issues, Allen addresses questions of pessimism and defeatism.

  74. 74.

    Suzanne

    @Martin: Window replacement is a big one. Most houses, being older, don’t conform to current building codes for continuous insulation, and therefore they require a lot of climate control. HVAC is a huge, huge contributor to carbon levels. Putting continuous insulation on a whole house is beyond most homeowners’ reach, but replacing windows with higher-performing ones is feasible.

  77. 77.

    Josie

    @debbie: Same reason they believe TFG won the election.  They were sold a bill of goods by the Republicans, which they bought hook, line and sinker.  It remains to be seen if it costs the liars at election time.

  78. 78.

    Suzanne

    @Kent: I am increasingly of the opinion that we should not use federal housing resources to allow people to stay in the same area in the event of a climate-induced disaster. This is going to be, quite frankly, beyond our means to maintain places like Miami and Houston. I think we obviously need to help the citizens there, but we need to help them get to somewhere more stable.

  80. 80.

    Spanky

    @Suzanne: Renovating older windows and adding storms provides nearly the same efficiency at lower cost and without spending the embodied energy in trashing old windows to put in new ones.

  81. 81.

    Mary G

    @Martin: Thanks. That’s what I want. I’ll get the panels and the wiring for the better batteries to come later. I have SDGE and need to check how it works with them. Assuming there’s water, I’m planning to stay in this house until I’m dead so the peace of mind is more important to me than financial considerations, but if it’s a year or two I can wait.

  83. 83.

    steve g

    This is a link to a Smoke Forecast, which I like because it just keeps showing where the smoke is or will be over a period of a few days. I checked in on it a lot last September when Portland OR had air quality index > 500 for a week straight, due to forest fires.

    Smoke Forecast

    The thing we can all do about climate change is to prepare for the various disaster scenarios, especially floods, fires, tornados, earthquakes, and such. The act of doing so begins to help people realize that these threats are real and are going to pound us in the coming years. Updating insurance policies and preparing for evacuation can clear the head regarding whether or not doing something about climate change is worth it.

  84. 84.

    Spanky

    @Suzanne: This is the model created for the Outer Banks decades ago, and absolutely not sustainable on the scale we now have to deal with.

  85. 85.

    Geminid

    @Josie: Good luck with your efforts. I appreciate your perspective. Politically, Texas (and Florida) have some elements in common with my state of Virginia, but they are very different in other respects.

    Up until 10 years ago, Virginia Republicans still had the upper hand, but this has changed, and pretty quickly over the past five years.

  87. 87.

    RSA

    @Spanky:  Besides rising sea levels from melting ice, the edge of the tectonic plate is sinking, effectively doubling the rise.

    Thanks, I didn’t know this.

  89. 89.

    Martin

    @FlyingToaster: It’s a good idea. This is CA. We love that stuff.

    But this isn’t advocacy. I’m not going to try to convince people we need to do something. I figure half the country is already on board, they just need help.

    So, I’ve done a lot of work that involves participation rates, and I wrote about this back related to Covid.

    Any time you have a problem like this, you have people that will volunteer to solve their part of the problem. Half of the country didn’t need lotteries or free donuts to get a covid shot. But some wouldn’t take the initiative to make the appt, which was more unpleasant to them than getting the shot, so they needed drop-ins. Some needed the shot to come to them. Some need convincing etc.

    Generally, you get let’s say ballpark half the population volunteering. They’re super easy –  give them instructions and  they’ll just do it.  But then you need to start chipping away with increasingly expensive approaches – mobile clinics, door to door, etc. You don’t want to do the expensive bits until you’ve  exhausted the cheap bits.

    My focus is on that first half, and only that first half. I’m not the motivator, or the policy advocate – that’s where the government increasingly comes into play. If you want to help, here are ideas, maybe some services that will allow you to better engage, make some progress, and get positive reinforcement around that. It’s about solving Cole’s problem – climate change is making me anxious – I’ll be less anxious if at least I know I’ve done what I can directly to address it, and that I can see I’m not alone in that. I’ll ignore the 40% and uplift and empower the 60% to do what they  can in the area that they have control over.

    I’ve said that if everyone in the US was doing the degree of energy conservation that CA has been doing, there wouldn’t need to be a single operational coal plant in the US. That’s just light bulbs and EnergySTAR appliances and scheduling. That stuff is pretty easy for almost everyone to do.

  90. 90.

    jonas

    even if it means good paying job

    This. A huge roadblock in responding to climate change in this country seems to be the fact that we’re hung up on the idea that anything to do with producing and/or combusting carbon is manly and patriotic, whereas anything solar or electric, even if it pays just as well or more, is for limp-wristed socialists. Working hundreds of feet off the ground on a massive turbine is about as bad-ass as a job can get, but what do I know. Spending your life 1000 feet underground getting black lung disease is apparently what real men do.

  92. 92.

    Suzanne

    @Josie: Houston…. gets hit by hurricanes, which would probably be OK if they had urban planning to protect flood zones. But they don’t, so they don’t.

  93. 93.

    Josie

    @Spanky: ​
     That is not just a Houston problem. It’s a problem for the whole state. Moving people out of Houston would not solve it.

  94. 94.

    Martin

    @Suzanne: And if you can’t replace windows, basic weatherstripping goes surprisingly far. My idea is to show just  how far, so if you don’t have much money, do the cheap thing. All progress is good progress.

  95. 95.

    Suzanne

    @jonas:

    A huge roadblock in responding to climate change in this country seems to be the fact that we’re hung up on the idea that anything to do with producing and/or combusting carbon is manly and patriotic, whereas anything solar or electric, even if it pays just as well or more, is for limp-wristed socialists. 

    The solar and electric jobs require, quite frankly, smarter people.

  96. 96.

    Kent

    @debbie: Oh yeah.  FEMA basically botched the job during the Trump era in responding to western wildfires.  I guess the OR Democratic congressional delegation is trying to hold their feet to the fire and get their shit together under Biden.

  97. 97.

    Dog Dawg Damn

    Not on topic but a little PSA:

    I got Covid. Long after Moderna second dose.  Felt like a head cold for 5 days until I lost all smell.  So, vaccinated people are getting sick, and if you think it’s a cold, act like it’s Covid until proven otherwise.

    Masking up indoors is a good idea as well.

  98. 98.

    Josie

    @Suzanne: ​
     The hurricane did not cause the flooding here. It was the decision to release water from the floodways that caused it. The city is working on solving that so it doesn’t happen again. This city has survived everything that the weather and the Republicans have thrown at us and is thriving.

  99. 99.

    Suzanne

    @Spanky: Sometimes, yeah, you’re right. One of the challenges with building improvements is that what works in one place might not be sufficient or feasible elsewhere for any of a hundred reasons. Even filming windows in some places can be a big improvement.

  101. 101.

    Kent

    @jonas: Honestly it isn’t the blue collar workers who are resisting wind and solar jobs.  Most of the folks doing that sort of work in states like TX come from the oil industry and other similar jobs.

    It’s actually the suburban assholes from places like Dallas who have never held a wrench who are mostly whining about this shit and it is mostly pasty middle management types working in call centers and the like who spend their days listening to Rush Limbaugh and his progeny.

  104. 104.

    Spanky

    @RSA: Yeah, turns out the continental tectonic plate is rebounding from the weight of the ice in the last ice age. Still. Where the center was sunk, the edges were tipped up. Now the center is rising and the edges are sinking.

  105. 105.

    Suzanne

    @Josie: Houston allowed a major home developer to build a huge development right in a flood plain that protected other neighborhoods. And this was after Hurricane Harvey dumped all that rain water on the city. Nope. I think climate change is going to do a number on it.

  106. 106.

    Josie

    @Suzanne: ​
     Yes, but that was one neighborhood that flooded out of a huge city. It is true that all places affected by hurricanes will have problems due to climate change, but you can’t just move millions of people out of their locations. I can see it if you were talking about sea level rise, but that is not the case here.

  107. 107.

    Geminid

    @Spanky: The Navy is in the process of raising piers at the Norfolk naval base by one meter. This project was initiated in the Obama years.

    I’ve read that the current land subsidence in the Chesapeake Bay area began when Ice Age glaciers further north receded. The weight of the ice had squeezed up the plastic mantle of the earth to the south, and now it is subsiding.

  108. 108.

    Gravenstone

    @debbie: You can change what displays using the other tab in the filter. I choose to just block the posts, so I only see a blank space where their blathering would be.

  109. 109.

    Suzanne

    @Josie: I’m talking about not providing money to people whose homes are destroyed to rebuild in place. Not like we would shut off the city overnight. But many places cannot carry as many people as they have, in the fashion that they have.

    TBH, many places are just going to become uninsurable.

  110. 110.

    Suzanne

    I will also note that Hurricane Harvey distorted the residential construction market in the US for about a year. Drywall went up a lot in price all over the country and a lot of construction workers from all over went there for the rebuilding effort, which drove up prices. If another disaster had happened that year, the entire country would have been simply screwed.

  111. 111.

    Martin

    @jonas: It’s even more basic than that. It had been taken as an ironclad rule of economics that increasing GDP required increased energy generation and resource consumption. Conservation or reduction of those activities would result in a drop in GDP. At least  inside the US, California disproved this a few decades ago by demonstrating continuous growth of GDP that was decoupled from energy and resources. Virtually the entire country has yet to catch up with this, but pollution got equated with manliness because men were willing to club baby seals so you could have an Amana Radar Range, and even when you dispel the underlying association the derived association remains as some perverted zombie cultural element.

  112. 112.

    quit

    @sab:

    We “adopted” my dad’s (now blind) cat from the neighbors when it was 10 degrees below zero in Ohio at Christmas, and the neighbors tossed him out to fend for himself overnight when they had company. He fended by pounding on our window.

    That’s despicable! So glad he was able to find your window to pound on, and that you were able to save him.

    Some people!!

  114. 114.

    Josie

    @Suzanne: ​ I agree with that. I don’t know if it is a state or national law, but here you can’t build or buy in a place like a flood plain or even a neighborhood that floods if you don’t have flood insurance. The government should not have to pay for those damages. Once a location is not insurable, people should not be able to live there.​
     ETA: Evidently the same thing (over use of supplies) happened due to the freeze in Texas. The stores were out of plumbing and repair supplies for a long time after it was over.

  116. 116.

    RSA

    @Spanky:  It sounds almost like an oscillation, with a frequency of millennia. Cool. (No scientific thought involved here; I’m probably influenced by having watched an ultra-slow video of a wine glass being shattered by sound waves.)

  117. 117.

    Delia

    @debbie:  Those were last year’s fires which happened in areas like Ashland (famous Shakespeare festival every summer that things aren’t burning or locked down for pandemic) or in the northern areas around Eugene and Portland. Entirely different sets of people.

  118. 118.

    gwangung

    @Delia: Ashland is nirvana for theatre geeks, and they’ve been plagued over the past few summers by smoke from forest fires. Got pictures where the foothills (a couple miles away) are completely shrouded in smoke.

  120. 120.

    The Pale Scot

    @Suzanne:

    we should not use federal housing resources to allow people to stay in the same area in the event of a climate-induced disaster.

    The flood insurance subsidies have to be killed. Buy out the property at same price they bought it for. People have been told this was the way it was going to be for twenty years +. Politically inspired stupidity on your part is not an emergency on my part.

    LBI NJ where I lived for on and off for decades use to have cottages without heat or AC. That were expendable. Now the cottages are gone, replaced with year around monstrosities

  121. 121.

    raven

    (CNN)Around 65 people were sickened Saturday afternoon at a Houston-area water park in what local officials called a chemical incident.

    “In the area around the kiddie pool in this water park, a lifeguard was sick, and soon after that, more and more people began becoming sick,” Harris County Judge Lina Hildalgo said in a news conference outside Six Flags Hurricane Harbor Splashtown in Spring, Texas.
    “What began as a fun family day has turned into very much a nightmare for many families,” she said.
    Public health officials are ordering the park to remain closed until they determine exactly what happened.

  122. 122.

    The Pale Scot

    FEMA tried to update it’s map of vulnerable flood areas years ago to account for climate change. Then the RE business went bonkers, agents, owners, developers. Rates would have quadrupled in some areas, private insurance would have refused to insure, leaving only federally subsidized insurance, making the homes and buildings unsellable. Congress intervened and FEMA backed off, leaving the federal government with obligations it will not be able to afford.

    Hub FEMA maps may unleash flood of anger

  123. 123.

    Gvg

    @?BillinGlendaleCA: there must have been some incentive because there are some apartment complexes here in Florida that went solar. I think their were some utility companies promoting it for awhile and Federal subsidies or tax breaks….I think it was around 2008. Newer ones aren’t doing it that I have noticed, but it did happen These were older apartments being retrofitted and I think they were part of re roofing. I seem to remember ads about something expiring…

    whatever it was could be done again.

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