I’m writing you from the haze of a 35 degree day (95F) after a muggy night with two hours of sleep. We don’t have any A/C units, but it didn’t help that our fans slowed down and dehumidifier shut off because of the brownouts. Why were there brownouts? Given the heatwave, a lot of homes and businesses had their A/C on full blast and the grid couldn’t handle it. Across the Midwest, the Mississippi Valley, Appalachia, and along much of the East Coast, government agencies issued extreme heat warnings and power grids went down.
Clearly, it’s a sign that global warming is unfolding faster than the major scientific agencies predicted, which also means the overall impacts of the ecological crisis will be worse than they claim.
Hopefully, the implication is just as clear: in North America as in Europe, where a recent heat wave killed thousands, governments do not have the infrastructure to deal with even the early, relatively easy stage of the ecological crisis. And that’s in two of the richest regions on the planet.
We can be even clearer: those in power and those with access to the media and to significant funding have absolutely no feasible plan for getting us through the ecological crisis that they helped cause.
“super high-intelligence but low in practicality and empathy” Just look at the brains behind the “Dark Enlightenment” and the “Network State”… and those at the Heritage Foundation… their agendas are all bankrupting scams from which the USA might never recover, which would only be poetic justice after what that they’ve done over the past centuries… and I said this despite all my love for certain extraordinary figures and acts of counter culture from there…
Considering the projections that the Atlantic might slow down… and a large part of Europe will suffer soon from a climate spanning more than one extreme but very little suitable architecture… the tables might turn to such a degree that some of us who happen to live in Europe – …but I struggle to call myself an “European” when the European Union is so strangled now by far-right thinking about migration and identity and by privacy-hostile policymakers, on top of all the nations refusing to let go of ethnonationalism – might have to migrate, not so many years from now, to an African, Asian or South American country and live more like the common people there, not like some douchebag Dubai-style expat…
Oh dear, those “third world” countries some people still mock out of pure ignorance rather than ideological slant… I may be wrong, but those countries seem in at least some ways better prepared for what’s to come… from sticking to traditional architecture that makes sense in the region… to making use of solar panels from China and whatever low tech discarded by the West they can make hold of… Most certainly, not everything is rosy, but we’ll be surprised. At least I’d very much like to see tables turning like this. “Europe” has learned nothing good from history. Western supremacy is stupidly suicidal.