Reflections on climate change from the heartland of the Empire, Summer Solstice 2023

Spring is finally over, but it promises to be a long hot summer. Let’s take a quick look at some happenings of late.

My home town of San Antonio has had highs over 100F for days now and it’s not going to get any less hot for at least a week. When I grew up there in the 1960s and 70s, it seldom got over 93F at this time of year, and some years it only reached the 80s.

I just learned that NASA released a 35 year study in 2016, reporting the following:

An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.

Since then, there’s been various models saying the greening will come to an end and we must cut carbon emissions now or we’re all gonna die. The thing is, I’m with Jimmy Dore on this one—I don’t trust models much anymore. Models tend to predict whatever whoever is paying for the grant wants because corruption permeates damned near everything in an Empire ruled by theft and bribery.

When ruling elites genuinely believe national habits must change or disaster will strike, they lead be example. Even Louis XVI, when he learned that a blight might wipe out the grain crop for years, urged French peasants to plant potatoes because the were both healthy and not susceptible to the wheat and rye blight. To demonstrate his sincerity, he and the French court switched to potato dishes, and French potato recipes were born.

The peasants mostly refused to comply because everybody knew that anything that grew below ground was suspect because it was from the Devil’s domain, the crop did fail and the Revolution did come, but at least Louis tried to do something about how the weather was affecting his people’s lives.

Our ruling elites, by contrast, have done nothing to indicate they take the “climate emergency seriously at all. I don’t see them cutting back on private jets, business trips of all sorts, or yachts(whose population explosion the orcas are taking hilarious exception to), and the biggest emitter of all—the US military.

No, they tell us to buy electric cars, not to eat meat, not to grill, not to take a road trip.

Bugger that.

How about we close 6 or 700 military bases around the world and stop fomenting wars and, you know, see how much carbon reduction we can get out of it if it’s so all-fired important to you. If not, then STFU about farting cows and stop demanding that small farmers be crushed.

And forget about any power generation technology that relies on batteries. The carbon costs of extracting the elements and minerals needed to make them are astronomical, the locations of those deposits provide a reason for imperial war.

There are better ways to transition away from fossil fuels, and some fossil fuels are cleaner than others and natural gas is cleaner in the long run than some “green” energy sources.

I don’t know what all to believe about climate change anymore, not when people like Larry Fink and Klaus Schwab are driving government and media narratives. I do know it’s happening because I live here and pay attention, but I also know the solutions they impose amount to serfdom at best and slavery at worst.

We can do better than this, and I think Step One is to stop automatically trusting any credentialed expert and start learning some basics about this stuff ourselves.

Thank you for reading, good night, and good luck.