camp: near Santa Fe, New Mexico
Election
night! And what a shitshow it is. Dems were down 42 house seats and 7
governorships when I went to bed. Murray will pull through, Joe Manchin got
West Virginia (!), Rand Paul in Kentucky (crazy shit), Blanche Lincoln is
getting her ass kicked and Tim Fucking Eyeman’s stupid anti-tax bullshit is
winning as we vote to repeal taxes on soda and candy, not give schools money
for energy efficiency and nor impose an income tax on people making more than
$200,000 a year. We’ll keep the Senate, the House is fucked, redistricting will
be a Republican wet dream and our government will continue to be center-right
and full of crazy people. I’m comforted by the knowledge that even if Democrats
controlled 535 seats in Congress and Obama was still in office, we wouldn’t be
doing shit about climate change anyway.
I
should mention Kendall* and aspen and climate change. How water is stored best
by aspen, how they’re in decline for a number of reasons, many of which go back
to climate change. How she said a lot of people in her forest don’t care about
or even accept climate change, but if you start talking water shortages, they
pay attention. I wish we could get people motivated about mitigation as easily
as adaptation. The climate is changing and people see it. Show them problems
and they’ll support solutions Ascribe causality to those problems and you’re a
communist trying to destroy the American economy. So even for mitigation, we
learn to be bilingual—green jobs, energy security, savings via conservation.
This is our Esperanto. Mention habitat, polar bears, ocean acidification or
taxing carbon and you become the enemy, hostile enough that the best response
is to shoot first. And so it goes—locally, people see things and can talk about
solving them, but nationally, James Infhoe will chair the House Committee on
Energy and Whateverthefuck once Dems lose. And so the long defeat marches
steadily on. Half the army has yet to see the cliff.
*Kendall
Clark, Supervisor for Carson National Forest, who we met with.
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