On Unregulated Capitalism

"[The Gilets Jaunes] have refused to be mollified by what they perceive as crumbs tossed from the throne of power. Their war against the rich, in the age of climate change, is one driven by an understanding unique among protest movements in France: that the privilege to lord and the privilege to pollute are one and the same, and that confronting the climate crisis means a confrontation with unregulated capitalism. It is a call to arms that should resound around the world.”

 Christopher Ketcham, “A Play with no End” from the August 2019 issue of Harper’s Magazine

This quote really got me thinking about the problem of unregulated capitalism. There’s a case to be made that capitalism as a whole can’t get us out of the climate change spiral, but I don't know enough to go there yet. However, the damaging aspects of unrestrained deregulation seems obvious to me, especially with respect to the inequities such a system engenders. Instituting guardrails around capitalism to protect those without power and voices, and the environment in particular (trends like recognizing ecosystems as people are an interesting trend), should let us know if capitalism can be redeemed in an era of finite resources. (Those of you that would promote the "free" market, you'd need to explain to me how the overwhelming power of corporations in the new gilded age is indeed free.)

Antarctic Ice Synchronicity

So I'm getting close to the end of Green Mars, when the revolutionaries are waiting for a trigger - the best time to try and take down the multinational corporations that control both Earth and Mars. Spoiler alert: the trigger comes when a volcano erupts underneath the glaciers of West Antarctica. In the book, the melting of this ice is projected to occur relatively rapidly, throwing an already chaotic Terran society into chaos. But guess what? Other than the volcano, this ain't just fiction:

Scientists studying huge glaciers in Antarctica have found that they are already in the early stages of a huge retreat, and—although the entire event may take more than 200 years—this melting may also be unstoppable. By the time this plays out, it could cause a sea level rise of more than a meter, which would be very bad indeed.

For us Americans, one meter is ~3.3 feet, a big problem considering how much of humanity is crammed into our coastlines. (The CPO sez that "More than 8 million people live in areas at risk of coastal flooding. ") One can see why KSR it as a tipping point. Scary stuff. Read Bad Astronomy's excellent synopsis for more information, including a slick video explaining what's going on.

Friday Tab Dump

The Guardian's George Monbiot has a great rant about what's behind the incredible flooding in Britain this season. After detailing what's happening, he concludes:

It's hard to get your head round this. The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.
...
So why did government policy change? I've tried asking the environment department: they're as much use as a paper sandbag. But I've found a clue. The farm regulation task force demanded a specific change: all soil protection rules attached to farm subsidies should become voluntary. They should be downgraded from a legal condition to an "advisory feature". Even if farmers do nothing to protect their soil, they should still be eligible for public money.
You might have entertained the naive belief that in handing out billions to wealthy landowners we would get something in return. Something other than endless whining from the National Farmers' Union. But so successfully has policy been captured in this country that Defra – which used to stand for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – now means Doing Everything Farmers' Representatives Ask. We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.

The Guardian keeps the optimism flowing with an interview with the prescient James Lovelock who predicts that climate change has already reached the tipping point:

It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don't have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can't say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do." ...
What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

Weird magna short horror stories! Just some creepy stuff. I can testify to how powerfully macabre Junji Ito's Uzumaki is. Shudder.

This seems interesting. I know nothing about Bartók, and my library has none of his music. Any suggestions to what I should listen to first?

Dorthe Nors muses on solitude being a condition for art:

Solitude, I think, heightens artistic receptivity in a way that can be challenging and painful. When you sit there, alone and working, you get thrown back on yourself. Your life and your emotions, what you think and what you feel, are constantly being thrown back on you. And then the “too much humanity” feeling is even stronger: you can't run away from yourself. You can't run away from your emotions and your memory and the material you're working on. Artistic solitude is a decision to turn and face these feelings, to sit with them for long periods of time.
It takes the courage to be there. You run into your own pettiness. Your own cowardice. You run into all kinds of ugly sides of yourself. But the things that you've experienced in your life become the writing that you do. And there's no easy way to get to it, if you want to write literary fiction. 

Extreme Rain due to Climate Change

To follow up a bit on my last post, we should be clear about the cause of the torrential rainstorms that southeast New England just suffered through: the scientists say it was due to climate change. To wit, here's Dr. Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, talking on NPR:

Mr. TRENBERTH: The fact that the oceans are warmer now than they were, say, 30 years ago, means there’s about, on average, 4 percent more water vapor lurking around over the oceans than there was, say, in the 1970s.
JOYCE: Warmer water means more water vapor rises up into the air. And what goes up, must come down.
Mr. TRENBERTH: So one of the consequences of a warming ocean near a coastline like the East Coast and Washington, D.C., for instance, is that you can get dumped on with more snow, partly as a consequence of global warming.

Climate Progress has an extensive post detailing how extreme this weather event was, especially in Rhode Island. It's staggering:

Record rains from a slow-moving and extremely wet Nor’easter have triggered historic flooding in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts, with several rivers exceeding their 100-year flood levels. The 16.32″ of rain that has fallen on Providence, Rhode Island this month is the most rain recorded in any month, besting the previous record of 15.38″ set in October 2005. ... The Rhode Island all-time state record for heaviest precipitation in a month was smashed as well, thanks to the 19.62″ observed this March at North Kingstown. The old state record was 16.70″, set at North Foster in October 2005. Many locations in the Northeast recorded their wettest March ever, including New York City and Boston.

This is not the time to live in denial. Climate Change is real and it will continue to affect us all.

If there's Global Warming, why is it so cold?

I love people that respond to a cold winter, or even a cold day, with the title of this post. The phenomenon is unfortunately titled, because, as Matt Yglesias points out, what climate change - or "global warming" - really means is much more extreme temperature.