Endgame
“First, what’s so great about stuffing your pockets with millions or billions of dollars just so you can live in a bunker while the world burns down and everyone suffers and dies and burns?”
“Second, it’s really hard to talk about the GOP—one of the GOP’s most powerful weapons against progressive forces is that the GOP’s activities are so ineffably and cartoonishly and preposterously evil that you can’t articulate what’s going on without sounding like a complete wacko.”
“So this is the endgame—the GOP is playing for keeps, and there’s not much time, and they’ll be in their fancy bunkers as the people in India become cooked things.”
There’s an inferno raging and the GOP is pouring massive amounts of time and energy and resources not into doing something about the crisis but instead into making sure that present and future action—regarding global heating—is impossible.
The Inferno
Global heating is clobbering us—I read a spine-tingling 9 June 2022 piece about India’s situation:
I took these notes:
there’s a resident of Chennai—Lakshmanan—whose “job involves standing for long hours outdoors at construction sites, pounding screws with careful precision onto steel rods”
“Ever since temperatures in March hit a sizzling 38 degrees Celsius—4 degrees above normal for Chennai—the conditions have been stifling.”
“The metal frames Lakshmanan works with have been too hot to touch, the steel burning his fingertips and leaving behind painful sores.”
“He has seen construction workers, especially women, collapse around him, and has had to take breaks during the workday to cope with fits of dizziness and nausea.”
“When faced with these conditions, our bodies call upon a well-known mechanism to keep us from overheating: sweating.”
“As perspiration evaporates from the skin, it cools the body’s temperature.”
“But if the air is not only hot but also already filled with moisture, less sweat can evaporate, and this safety feature fails.”
“In India, high temperatures and humidity are increasingly combining to pose a deadly threat—one the country isn’t prepared for.”
“This danger to human life is measured using ‘wet-bulb temperature’—the lowest temperature that air can be cooled to via evaporation.”
“It’s determined by wrapping the bulb of a thermometer in a wet cloth and seeing what temperature is recorded.”
“Essentially the bulb is you—or me, or Lakshmanan—the wet cloth is our sweating skin, and the temperature recorded is the coolest we can hope to get by sweating.”
“When heat and humidity combine to push wet-bulb temperatures past 32 degrees Celsius, physical exertion becomes dangerous.”
“Consistent exposure to high wet-bulb temperatures—35 degrees Celsius and above—can be fatal.”
“At this point the sweating mechanism shuts down, leading to death in six hours.”
“On May 1, 2022, the wet-bulb temperature in Lakshmanan’s home city of Chennai hit 31 degrees Celsius.”
“The same day, the district of Ernakulam in the Indian state of Kerala recorded a wet-bulb temperature of 34.6 degrees Celsius—a record high for the area.”
“Raise your internal temperature by 3 to 4 degrees Celsius, and you’ll start to struggle.”
“Blood vessels dilate and circulation slows, particularly to the extremities.”
“Not enough blood will flow to the brain, affecting its functioning.”
“You lose alertness, become drowsy, and don’t feel thirst anymore.”
“Soon organs shut down, one by one.”
“It’s also not just workers who need to take care when wet-bulb temperatures are high.”
“Rising humidity and heat lift nighttime temperatures as well, which affects everyone.”
more humidity means more cloud cover, which means less heat dispersion at night, which means less temperature reduction at night
hotter nights mean less ability for the body to “recover from the daytime assault of heat”
hotter nights also means disruption of “cellular and metabolic activities”—this disruption “can be a driver of disease” and “can even be fatal itself”
“only an estimated 8 percent of Indian households have access to air conditioning”
“South Asia is also not the only area at risk.”
“Potentially fatal mixtures of heat and humidity have been increasing around the globe.”
“Coastal cities on the Persian Gulf seem particularly susceptible to very high wet-bulb temperatures in the future, says Luke Harrington, senior research fellow in climate science at the New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute.”
“According to data from NASA, other countries will experience more critical wet-bulb temperatures in the future too, including the United States.”
“States such as Arkansas, Missouri, and even Iowa are at risk.”
“while some places may have more resources to handle the issue, people outside of India might not be so adapted to cope”
I have friends who live in India—I think a lot about this harrowing and disturbing and frightening excerpt from Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future:
The night passed. Only the very brightest stars were visible, blurs swimming overhead. A moonless night. Satellites passing overhead, east to west, west to east, even once north to south. People were watching, they knew what was happening. They knew but they didn’t act. Couldn’t act. Didn’t act. Nothing to do, nothing to say. Many years passed for Frank that night. When the sky lightened, at first to a gray that looked like clouds, but then was revealed to be only a clear and empty sky, he stirred. His fingertips were all pruney. He had been poached, slow-boiled, he was a cooked thing. It was hard to raise his head even an inch. Possibly he would drown here. The thought caused him to exert himself. He dug his elbows in, raised himself up. His limbs were like cooked spaghetti draping his bones, but his bones moved of their own accord. He sat up. The air was still hotter than the water. He watched sunlight strike the tops of the trees on the other side of the lake; it looked like they were bursting into flame. Balancing his head carefully on his spine, he surveyed the scene. Everyone was dead.
We have to keep in mind that what we’re seeing right now in 2022 is only the faintest indication of what’s to come—people are being pushed to the limit in 2022, but what will happen when things start to really heat up?
The GOP’s Activities
We’re far from WW2-style mobilization. I wrote previously about the dangerous—and maybe terminal—push to block efforts to deal with global heating:
“HUMANITY’S DEATH WARRANT?” (7 May 2022)
And I just read a shocking NYT piece—which everyone should read—about this effort:
Here are my notes on the 19 June 2022 piece—the hyperlink that’s outside of quotation marks is my own hyperlink:
there’s been a “coordinated, multiyear strategy” on the part of “Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders”
this strategy is all about using the judicial system to “rewrite environmental law” in a way that will weaken the “executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming”
there are climate cases coming up through the federal courts—each climate case has been “carefully selected for its potential to block the government’s ability to regulate industries and businesses that produce greenhouse gases”
one of these cases—West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency—is “notable for the tangle of connections between the plaintiffs and the Supreme Court justices who will decide their case”
“The Republican plaintiffs share many of the same donors behind efforts to nominate and confirm five of the Republicans on the bench—John G. Roberts, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.”
“‘It’s a pincer move,’ said Lisa Graves, executive director of the progressive watchdog group True North Research and a former senior Justice Department official. ‘They are teeing up the attorneys to bring the litigation before the same judges that they handpicked.’”
you see this same pattern in “other climate cases filed by the Republican attorneys general and now advancing through the lower courts”
plaintiffs are—in these other climate cases—“supported by the same network of conservative donors who helped former President Donald J. Trump place more than 200 federal judges”
many of these 200 federal judges are “now in position to rule on the climate cases in the coming year”
“At least two of the cases feature an unusual approach that demonstrates the aggressive nature of the legal campaign.”
“In those suits, the plaintiffs are challenging regulations or policies that don’t yet exist.”
“They want to pre-empt efforts by President Biden to deliver on his promise to pivot the country away from fossil fuels, while at the same time aiming to prevent a future president from trying anything similar.”
“Victory for the plaintiffs in these cases would mean the federal government could not dramatically restrict tailpipe emissions because of vehicles’ impact on climate, even though transportation is the country’s largest source of greenhouse gases.”
“The government also would not be able to force electric utilities to replace fossil fuel-fired power plants, the second-largest source of planet warming pollution, with wind and solar power.”
“And the executive branch could not consider the economic costs of climate change when evaluating whether to approve a new oil pipeline or similar project or environmental rule.”
“Those limitations on climate action in the United States, which has pumped more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, would quite likely doom the world’s goal of cutting enough emissions to keep the planet from heating up more than an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with the preindustrial age.”
“That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic hurricanes, drought, heat waves and wildfires significantly increases.”
“The Earth has already warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius.”
“‘If the Supreme Court uses this as an opportunity to really squash E.P.A.’s ability to regulate on climate change, it will seriously impede U.S. progress toward solving the problem,’ said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.”
“In total, Mr. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices, 54 appeals court judges, and 174 district court judges. By comparison, Mr. Biden has, to date, appointed 68 federal judges.”
“Relationships between untraceable money, politicians and the judiciary are not unusual.”
“Like its Republican counterpart, the Democratic Attorneys General Association is a political action committee that raises money to help members win elections.”
“The attorneys general in both parties pursue cases that are aligned with the interests of their donors and constituencies.”
“During the Trump administration, Democratic attorneys general repeatedly, and often successfully, fought dozens of Mr. Trump’s policies, particularly his weakening of environmental rules.”
“But legal experts say that the Republican attorneys general and their allies have taken such strategies to a new level, in their funding and their tactics.”
“‘They’ve created out of whole cloth a new approach to litigating environmental regulations, and they’ve found sympathetic judges,’ said Richard Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University.”
there’s a case “pending in two different circuit courts” that “challenges the way the federal government calculates the real-life cost of climate change”
“If the attorneys general succeed in blocking the use of that metric, they could strip the federal government of its legal defense for almost any future climate policy.”
“Sally Katzen, co-director of the Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic at New York University School of Law, said that a Supreme Court victory this month for the Republican attorneys general and their allies would just be a taste of what’s to come.”
I have a couple thoughts about this effort on the part of the GOP to snuff us all out.
First, what’s so great about stuffing your pockets with millions or billions of dollars just so you can live in a bunker while the world burns down and everyone suffers and dies and burns? I really don’t get how the GOP crew thinks that this will all play out for them—I just don’t get the appeal of living in a fancy bunker as the inferno rages and it frankly sounds like a life that isn’t worth living.
Second, it’s really hard to talk about the GOP—one of the GOP’s most powerful weapons against progressive forces is that the GOP’s activities are so ineffably and cartoonishly and preposterously evil that you can’t articulate what’s going on without sounding like a complete wacko. What are critics supposed to say in response to behavior like this?
So this is the endgame—the GOP is playing for keeps, and there’s not much time, and they’ll be in their fancy bunkers as the people in India become cooked things.