AC-DC HIGHWAY TO HELL 

“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on Monday as the COP27 climate conference began in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. How firmly humanity’s foot stays on that accelerator will depend partly on the outcome of midterm elections in the United States.

Andy @Revkin in in his excellent SUSTAIN WHAT Substack suggests we should move on to the real problems in America before we start yammering about the next horserace, the 2024 elections and whether Biden will run or Trump will run, and so forth, but we at HOT GLOBE™ simply can’t resist a Friday Fish Wrap about this week’s electoral puzzle.

THERE WAS IN FACT A RED TIDE for Republicans but to put it in scientific terms, it turned out to be a red tide more like Kerenia brevis, the poisonous red tide that kills manatees and sickens swimmers and, evidently, puts off independent voters. too.

Republicans in 2022 thought all Americans were concerned about was inflation, gas prices and crime (even though 8 of the 10 high crime states are all Red) and forgot that maybe hobbling reproductive rights and reducing Social Security and Medicare might bother many voters. That much is talked about but what is only now coming to be understood is that a real youth wave came to shore this week with Gen Z’ers skate-boarding to vote in historic–nay!—record numbers.

The issues most important to these activist kids riding the curl (to keep our wave metaphors flowing): Guns, Climate, and Abortion, as reported in Covering Climate Now:

Youth organizers from the climate, gun violence, and other progressive social movements predicted a “youth wave” election-night surprise, Mark Hertsgaard* reported in The Nation (“Can Gen Z Save the Midterms for the Democrats?”)— and the youth were right. [Point of liquidity: I’ve known the Norwegian-American journalist Mark Hertsgaard since Rio Eco 92.]

             Exit polls show that 63% of young Americans voted for a Democratic candidate for the US House, while 35% of young Americans backed Republican candidates, Rachel Janfaza reported for Teen Vogue. The strongest support came from youth of color, with 89% of Black youth and 67% of Latino youth voting for a Democratic candidate. 

Also, a certain former President seems to have stayed too long at the beach–like a wet fart.  Even Foxies Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan gagged at the smell. (See “Murdoch Outlets Turn on Trump After Midterms” in the National Review.) The Murdochs own “The Network” (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, ad nauseam,) literally and symbolically.  When the Trump Show begins to hurt the ratings, well, bottom line this is what those immigrants, Rupert & Son, are all about, their $-money-$ and so when the numbers fall, time to box up the frothing apprentice like the old silent screen star Norma Desmond in the movie Sunset Boulevard, and send him packing to his luxury retirement home. 

Problem is, Mar-A-Lago is at sea level and this election week, as a rare November hurricane crashed ashore, residents of Palm Beach were put under an evacuation order.  It is delicious to think that Ron De Sanctimonious may have signed off on the evacuation order and to wonder whether his 2024 rival Trump refused to go, seeking refuge on the third floor to wait out the storm, in his tanning bed.

Share

Have Republicans Always Been Toxic for the Environment?

Hold the guffaws.  ‘Twas not always thus.  Teddy Roosevelt founded many of our national parks. Gilbert Pinchot did the same for national forests at least until the 1950’s post-WWII building boom when the forest service came up with the “mixed use” euphemism which pretty much means more roads and more logging.  There were always wilderness mavericks and conservative outdoors folks like Northern California Republican Pete McCloskey, Adlai Stevenson Republicans such as David Brower, who saved the Grand Canyon among many other wild places of exquisite beauty (“In wildness is the preservation of the world,” as the now mildly canceled John Muir put it) and don’t forget America’s most Shakespearean President, Richard Milhous Nixon and his convicted domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman, who, nevertheless, did much to develop the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act, partly out of a love of nature but mostly to garner votes in a very different time. On the negative side Herr Ehrlichman criminalized marijuana and psychedelics in order to put millions of black, brown, and hippie youth in prison. Those folks didn’t much like the Vietnam War and rarely voted for the boss.

Climate makes for strange bedfellows. The sun sets over us all, and only the most philistine Republican are unable to appreciate a green flash or a bugling elk.

At an early EPA banquet, Nixon once even turned to Russell Train, who was the second head of the EPA and the founder of the World Wildlife Fund, and made a plea for climate justice in the inner cities. 

Then came the Old Tree Cutter himself, Ronald Reagan, and his Interior Secretary James “Paul Bunyan” Watt.  Reagan said trees caused more air pollution than automobiles, which gave rise to the ”killer tree” meme of early late-night comedy. 

It’s been downhill ever since, as 85% of political contributions from fossil fuel companies go to Republican candidates so that they might continue to obfuscate the role of fossil fuels in global warming.  In my own district in California,  the Fighting 49th, Republican candidate Bryan Maryott was funded by big oil after Democrat Mike Levin co-sponsored the Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax. At press time Mike is leading by 3 points.

Share

By the way, this “Highway to Hell” reference is intriguing (click the link for the official recording.) UN Secretary-General António Guterres graduated from the Technical University of Lisbon in physics and electrical engineering in 1971, before later becoming prime minister of Portugal. AC-DC wrote “Highway to Hell” in 1979 with Aussie Angus Young contributing the killer guitar riff.  Was Guterres, then 29, rocking out in the clubs of Porto to AC-DC and so retained the reference in his mind? Data point: probably not. He was part of the “Club of Light” in college, a Catholic Franciscan group.  But who knows? Remember that our last Substack featured Dr. V. “Ram” Ramanathan, who influenced Pope Francis to issue his Climate Encyclical.

That’s it for HOT GLOBE™ ‘s Friday Fish Wrap on the elections. 

NEXT FRIDAY we walk down the hall from my office at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and begin An Informal Chat with Ralph Keeling about how important a part “carbon land sinks” play in global warming compared to the abject nakedness of fossil fuel burning.  Ralph works on the big picture and like Ramanathan, he’s worried.  “We’re locked into such massive changes that it would be irresponsible not to be working really hard to get ready.” 

I ask him what his father Charles Keeling, he of the Keeling Curve, might think:

“My guess is my father would be horrified by the politics of it all,” Ralph Keeling.

We are now at 416 parts per million of CO2, as measured by the Keelings’ Curve, speeding down (I can’t resist) a highway to—well, let’s make some changes, kids, and quick, before it’s too late.

Don’t forget to subscribe and share.  Thanks.

…

Steve Chapple runs HOT GLOBE