Maybe we deserve a five foot sea level rise.
According to NOAA, the government agency which helps us see hurricanes coming, the passing winter has been the warmest since records began to be collected in 1880.
If the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1995—as they have—then, with China christening a new coal-fired power plant every week, using old technology to feed its enormous appetites for a consumer society like ours, we predict the next decade will be a lot hotter.
But don’t blame China. We can’t get our own house in order.
Florida Power and Light wants to put a dirty coal-fired power plant at the edge of Lake Okeechobee, where we have committed to spend $11 billion to “restore” the Everglades. What’s another couple of hundred pounds per year of methyl mercury in the atmosphere above the Everglades?
Never mind poisonous fish. (Jesus couldn't do much good with them, here.)
The more people born with learning disabilities from toxics, the fewer people there will be to rationally think about the mess we’re making. Somewhere, that must be the point.
It turns out that one of FPL's divisions is the nation’s leader in wind power, but in Florida it crept into Glades county on cat’s paws and ran off with the county commission.
It doesn’t take much. There is news in today’s Miami Herald that the cost overruns at Miami International Airport are going up again: this time, to $6.8 billion. Who remembers the original cost was slightly over a billion.
$6.8 billion is an interesting number: it was the number once put on the cost of restoring the Everglades.
Where the number is real is at Miami International Airport, to benefit the lobbying class and local legislators.
Speaking of aviation, we read the good news yesterday that America’s balance of trade deficit shrank in the fourth quarter last year, lead by America’s exports of civilian aircraft.
Boeing may be America’s most valuable exporter, but global warming from jet aircraft contrails may be the most serious and fastest growing source of life-threatening pollutants.
Add to Boeing's contrails, private jets so numerous as to be virtually uncountable, and you have a pretty picture: instead of exporting technology to reform our energy economy, our economy relies on exporting a climate-changing manufactured good.
We’re in a drought cycle in Florida. Looked at from the point of view of climate scientists, Florida is roughly on the same latitude as the deserts of Africa.
We are kept wet in contrast to Africa by a confluence of atmospheric currents that draw moisture from the Caribbean.
With climate chaos in place, the warmest weather in centuries could also be the driest in Florida. So it is all about water. (Water restrictions are today's top story in the Miami Herald.)
The big battle shaping up in Miami today is over the South Dade Watershed Study: the most comprehensive science ever assembled, or attempted for that matter, on the effects of suburban growth on limited natural resources, and conversely, the capacity of a watershed to accommodate more suburban growth.
The bankers and big farmers are bringing brick bats to wreck the study before the county commission. They'll bus in poor farm workers in colored T shirts to fill the Chamber.
That’s what they do, whenever a plan emerges to deprive them of their property rights—which they believe is the right to build wherever, and whatever, they want. If the highest and best use is suburban tract housing over a fragile and limited watershed, so be it: whatever happens next is someone else’s problem... until the sea rises high enough and washes away every controversy and complaint.
9 comments:
Kinda reminds me of the "civilized" Roman elites who urged their children to eat with utensils, only they never realized that the lead forks and spoons were making each generation of leaders dumber and dumber. Ah, the negative side of technology and civilization is only becomes clear when it is too late to stop. Well at least we won't have worry about protecting the Everglades anymore.
Last reader:
Your post made me think of the Barry Gibbs/Barbara Streisand song:
Never Give Up
Maybe we should be walking around in the colored t-shirts. "What happens next is someone else's problem..." printed across the chest!
You wrote: "The bankers and big farmers are bringing brick bats to wreck the study before the county commission. They'll bus in poor farm workers in colored T shirts to fill the Chamber."
Busing in farm workers in colored t-shirts...really...how do you come up with these astute predictions? Miss Cleo? Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends Network?
Because everyone pushing anything goes the colored T Shirt route.
Home Depot and Lowes are the kings of colored T Shirts. they drag people out with the promise of jobs and they put them in a colored T Shirt. And the Unions love them too. SEIU is purple. Obviously, last reader, you don't go to county hall much. I have had dozens of these T shirts. All you do to get one is say you support the issue and they give you one.
I give my brother-in-law all the T Shirts I collect, and he wears them at the dog park. They must think he is petty odd.
Genius, you are very correct. Reminds me of all the people who wore the green shirts in support of the Hold the Line campaign. Any wack-job who wanted to save a bird got a free shirt that day.
Does that mean that the Hold the Liners are no different than the other interest groups wearing shirts?
I wonder how you will exempt yourself from your comments.
Maybe because your cause is so noble and heroic. After all, you are so forward thinking doing all you can to preserve what is left for future generations. My, oh, my, the sheer selflessness brings tears to these aging eyes.
What's in it for you?? How many lobbyists do the Sierra, Audubon, Friends of the Everglades, etc. have? They must have lobbyists who file these lawsuits to stop everything they don't like.
Had enough, or you want more?
Noble and heroic? I thought that was the domain of mortgage lenders selling subprime loans in farmland. Hey, those Hold The Line activists saved you all a lot of money, didn't they?
No, I don't think I can give the Hold the Line people credit for saving homeowners money. Maybe they should concentrate their efforts on property tax reform or insurance reform. I'd love to see what kind of shirts they come up with for that crusade.
Study after study shows the real costs to a city of supporing a "Growth Mahcine" are very often bore by the low income residents least able to bear them. Read anything by Harvey Molotch esp. his article "The City as a Growth Machine" Urban Affairs Quarterly.
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