Small but mighty
Another way the lunatic right is destroying everything:
Through a wave of pandemic-related litigation, a trio of small but mighty conservative legal blocs has rolled back public health authority at the local, state and federal levels, recasting America’s future battles against infectious diseases.
Because that’s what we want, right? To be helpless in the face of pandemics?
Galvanized by what they’ve characterized as an overreach of COVID-related health orders issued amid the pandemic, lawyers from the three overlapping spheres — conservative and libertarian think tanks, Republican state attorneys general, and religious liberty groups — are aggressively taking on public health mandates and the government agencies charged with protecting community health.
Because it’s bad to protect community health. What we want is more disease and early death!
In Wisconsin, a conservative legal center won a case before the state Supreme Court stripping local health departments of the power to close schools to stem the spread of disease.
Let the kids get sick and spread the sickness! That’s freedom!
In Missouri, the Republican state attorney general waged a campaign against school mask mandates. Most of the dozens of cases he filed were dismissed but nonetheless had a chilling effect on school policies.
Good good good. We don’t want schools trying to slow the spread of disease.
Although the three blocs are distinct, they share ties with the Federalist Society, a conservative legal juggernaut. They also share connections with the State Policy Network, an umbrella organization for state-based conservative and libertarian think tanks and legal centers, and the SPN-fostered American Juris Link, described by president and founder Carrie Ann Donnell as “SPN for lawyers.” In the COVID era, the blocs have supported one another in numerous legal challenges by filing amicus briefs, sharing resources and occasionally teaming up.
Their legal efforts have gained traction with a federal judiciary transformed by Republican congressional leaders, who strategically stonewalled judicial appointments in the final years of Democratic President Barack Obama’s second term. That put his Republican successor, Trump, in position to fill hundreds of judicial vacancies, including the three Supreme Court openings, with candidates decidedly more friendly to the small-government philosophy long espoused by conservative think tanks.
Just in time for global warming to kick into high gear. Genius.
We’ve known for a long time that money was more important than human life to the GOP; this is just another manifestation. They end abortion for votes; they end public health mandates for money. They don’t give a shit about anyone else…and apparently believe they are immune in a pandemic, even as some of their own have died from COVID.
What’s next: outlawing spped limits, traffic lights, and gated railroad crossings? I can hardly wait to see the results of removing safety regulations and quality control from the automotive and aircraft manufacturing industries. Ditto for restaurants, water treatment and fire codes. This would be the logical conclusion of reflexive “REGULATION BAD!” policies. Do these people realize that the Mad Max movies were dystopian fiction and not a model to emulate? I guess they’re keen on having the freedom to make life nasty, brutish, and short.
Some time ago a US cigarette company ran a series of highly successful ads featuring a man with a black eye, who declared: ‘Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.”
The political Right appeals to that spirit of frontier individualism, wherein I believe lies the mass approval of the Western movie genre. (I can never get enough of ’em myself.) Thus one Australian political dickhead, an antivaxxer and ex-furniture salesman by the name of Craig Kelly, had as the slogan for his campaign for the 2022 Federal election “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”
He lost. He might say the voters did him a favour, and set him free. (Look on the bright side, I always say.)
Antivaxxerism and climate denialism also fit neatly together in that scheme of things.
The Left, on the other hand, has traditionally appealed to the collective spirit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Kelly
It’s kind of weird though, since “conservatism” is more collectivist than “liberalism”. Traditional values, the nuclear family, the Church; all these don’t really jive with individualism. Likewise the rights of individuals are in tension with a desire for collective action.
America is just fucking weird…
YNnB, that fits with Dick Cheney wanting to ramp up nuclear power by removing safety regulations so we could build ’em faster and cheaper. Now, I’m not against nuclear power per se, though it has limitations and will never be more than a part (probably a small part) of our energy mix because of those limitations. But I also am not in favor of lots and lots of Chernobyls. The reason we don’t have many major nuclear accidents is because of the safety regulations. Okay, I am willing to agree that it is ridiculous to tell me I have to fill out a worker’s comp form just because I got a paper cut, but that isn’t what they want to cut out…they want to cut out big regulations, the only things that keep us from one disaster after another.
BKiSA, I agree. America is fucking weird. The problem is, it’s what most of us in America are used to, so most Americans think the rest of the world is fucking weird.
iknklast:
Except that as nuclear power spreads, and as its short-term focused proponents’ wishes come true, that will increasingly be the outcome. The laws of probability and the Second Law of Thermodynamics govern that. Maybe the Russians will never have another Chernobyl (in Ukraine, anyway.) But how about all the tin-pot dictatorships and dodgy regimes in Africa, Asia and Latin America; and the ME after their oil runs out in about 50 or so years’ time? As time goes by, the world becomes only as safe as the least safe of those.
As well, nuclear power came out of military nuclear programs as an add-on afterthought. A bit like a fully-laden jumbo jet taking off for the summit of Mt Everest, itself a most worthy objective, but with all on board hoping to blazes that by the time it gets there, someone will have built an airport.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/01/what-should-we-do-with-radioactive-nuclear-waste
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synroc
Yeah, I’m aware of that. And nuclear is not renewable and requires invasive mining. There is nuclear waste to deal with. And the process requires a lot of water. That’s why I don’t think it’ll ever be more than a small part of whatever mix of power sources we end up with…if we last long enough to end up with any power sources. In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive….
And nuclear is not renewable and requires invasive mining.
And so do all the alternatives.
Solar panels – lots of silica sand.
Wind turbines – lots of steel, concrete and aluminium.
Hydrogen – lots of electricity and mountains of salt.
Electricity – mountains of steel, mines of copper.
Batteries & EVs – rare earths and minerals.
Not to mention we still need oil for plastics. Sure, we can reduce, but we cannot eliminate the use of plastics.
Reducing fossil fuel use can be done, but all the above still put massive strains on finite resources.
Perhaps the GOP is correct and the only solution is to massively reduce the human population, return to banging rocks together and living short, brutish lives. No doubt there GOP will claim this as their success and ensure they get to pick who has the best rocks to bang together.
Yourt Reverence:
Except that we are burning those carbon polymers for power station fuel as if there is no tomorrow. Farming these days depends on cheap polythene pipe for irrigation and stock watering. Also, the hydrogen input for the Haber Process whereby ammonia is made comes from gas wells: far cheaper energy-wise than via electrolysis of water. And ammonia is feedstock or the synthesis of urea and ammonium sulfate: the most commonly used nitrogenous fertilisers, which go on to form proteins in plants and animals. So we eat and wear petroleum.
Omar, I concur.
Reverend, I’m not going to disagree with you. I am on record as saying there is no solution available at this point, but I try not to be pessimistic (oops…didn’t mean to tell a lie. I am pessimistic by nature. It’s who I am. I come from a long line of pessimists.)
Realistically, reducing population is our only solution, but that’s not going to happen. And we don’t have to go back to banging rocks together. There are different extremes, and too many people think if you are not at one extreme you are at the other.
By the way, where in my earlier post did I suggest that the other means of energy production don’t require those things? I was addressing only nuclear, but the thing is, there are too many people who think nuclear is the answer…the extreme expense, compared with the limitations I mentioned above, render it unlikely to be more than a part of the answer, but in reality, I do not believe there is an answer. We have overwhelmed our resource base, and without massive changes, we won’t be able to reverse anything. We will not do massive changes, because we don’t do long term thinking. And we all want it to be someone else’s sacrifice.
That doesn’t go very well with the “pro-life” stance, does it. I happen to think the most hostile, malevolent, evil thing one can possibly do to children at this stage is to bring them into this world in the first place. Indeed I suspect that’s part of the reason (the main reason being punishing women of course!) why the GOP are so hellbent on making sure no one escapes the impending crash landing. It can roughly be summed up as the polar opposite of the utilitarianist doctrine: The Greatest Evil for the Greatest Number.
You didn’t, and I wasn’t inferring you did. I was expanding the conversation and attempting to point out that reducing fossil fuel use alone will not solve most of our problems. Everything we use is finite, and reducing the population will only extend the life span of resources.
I am, by nature, a cynical optimist, which is why I went as far as cynically imagining the GOP being happy banging rocks while optimistically believing even they aren’t THAT stupid.
I am losing some of my optimism, and reading an article this morning just dropped another corner of my optimism into the sewer.
Forget Zager and Evans, umair haque makes a compelling case that we don’t even have until 2025.
The temperature’s already rising so fast that most models didn’t expect it to get this hot until 2050. So how hot is going to be in 2050? Actually, forget that. 2040. No, forget even that. Let’s just try…2030. We’re already at 45 degrees Celsius in Europe. 50 degrees in Asia. That’s for a few days here and there. At this rate? By 2030, that’s not just a few days anymore — it’s weeks at a time, maybe, spells of weeks at a time. What happens then?
A lot of things do. Megafires start, and don’t go out. Today’s crop failures are that much worse. Systems begin to shatter, and the drought America’s West faces is more or less everywhere that’s not lucky enough to be right next to some kind of permanently self replenishing water source. Inflation spikes even harder than now as a result of all this, and people can’t afford the basics, so taxes have to be cut, which means that…there’s nothing left over to invest in the very systems we need to fight all the above.
Bang. Collapse.
I’m not saying that will happen by 2030. LOL. Maybe you missed my point. I’m saying that’s already happening.
https://eand.co/were-not-going-to-make-it-to-2050-5398cf97b805
I don’t think you have to be particularly “pessimistic” (as in “biased/predisposed towards expecting the worst”) to look darkly at the future at this point, though. A lack of delusional optimism will suffice. It’s not “pessimism” for me to assume I’m almost certainly not going to win the lottery (without having bought a single lottery ticket in my life!) or that I’m probably not going to inherit a seven-digit sum from some previously unheard of uncle in America. Nor is it “pessimism” to assume that governments all over the world are almost certainly not going to collectively decide to start cutting greenhouse gas emissions far more aggressively than any of them is currently even considering, beginning yesterday.
Well, we are running an uncontrolled experiment on the only planet we have. Arguably our sister planet Venus serves as a control, but as it has an atmosphere of ~96% CO2 and a surface temperature higher than that of Mercury, closest planet to the Sun, it does not exactly occasion a call for drinks all round.
BUT (and I am flying by the seat of my pants here) it might just be that when the last of the glaciers and polar ice sheets of Earth are gone, and the temperature of its one ocean really starts to rise, evaporation will also rise to such an extent that for most of the time in most locations the Sun will be blotted out by cloud, the Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) will rise, and the whole system will self-correct to a new equilibrium state. (Gaia triumphant!)
Maybe then Greenland (which Donald Trump as I recall wanted to buy outright from the Danes) or balmy Patagonia and/or the pleasant sub-tropical slopes and plains of continental Antarctica will have remnant populations of humans hanging on (perhaps to the strains of Hawaiian guitars) for the millennia needed for the global atmospheric CO2 concentration to fall to somewhere around the ‘normal’ 350 ppm, and giving the more adventurous of the said humans a chance to mount expeditions Equator-wise to inspect the storm damage done to the rest of the world; by the burning of fossil carbon.
Though GOP success in gaining the support of poor people who would actually benefit from programs funded by a tax on wealth seem to be predicated on those people believing exactly these things. Or, as Ronald Wright once put it, “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”*
*Though apparently Steinbeck didn’t apparently say that. Whether or not he did, I think Wright’s formulation has something to it.
I am, by nature, a cynical pessimist. And I see so much on the far left that actually fits this scenario, the idea that going back to our idyllic beginnings is what we need. Those beginnings weren’t so idyllic; that’s why we worked so hard to control nature. But we overdid it, to the point that we may be forced into a return to a brutal life. And we certainly can’t all get our own little patch of land and live off the land. There are too many of us. That would be worse than our current situation.
Omar, that’s a possibility. Not a strong one, though. Water vapor in the air acts as a greenhouse gas, but can be offset to some extent by the clouds. It’s a difficult thing to predict. But keep in mind, water vapor doesn’t remain in the air very long, only a matter of days. We keep on building up greenhouse gases, which can last centuries. So we continue getting more and more and more, while clouds will never have the build up of more than a few days worth. There is only so much that can be offset.
But I could be wrong. Like I said, there are a lot of unknowns, because we haven’t done this experiment before. But keep Venus in mind. Venus is permanently covered by clouds. They are believed to be sulfuric acid, which is different than water vapor, of course, but the mere existence of clouds may not prevent sunlight from penetrating. I wish it could.
Re: regulations in general
It is worth looking at the question of to what extent particular regulations actually increase safety & to what extent they just increase costs without helping safety much if at all. I think this is a particular issue with nuclear.
I don’t see any reason nuclear can’t provide a *large* fraction of our energy needs. In France & Ontario it provides the majority of the electricity & I see no reason they *need* to be exceptions.
See https://electricitymaps.com/
click on the link to the map at the top of the page.
Kevin Drum has a good post today about climate change:
Geoengineering is (probably) in our future