Destabilized Saturday Edition #21
The 1/6 hearings bring hope, wildfires and taxes, fascist mindsets are spreading, the internet's unpredictable ripples
This week I wrote about why Republican states are likely to fare worse than Democratic states in the climate change era. Tl;dr: Republican voters don’t think climate change is a big problem and Republican politicians loathe higher taxes, which are needed to generate revenue for essential infrastructure upgrades.
Relatedly, a few weeks ago the New York Times wrote an article on wildfire risk focused on Dammeron Valley, Utah, a small town in Washington County in the southwest corner of the state.
A cattle ranch until 40 years ago, the town is almost absurdly pretty, cupped by gentle hills and carpeted by sagebrush and juniper. The only commercial property is a small vineyard that grows malbec and pinot noir. On the valley floor, many properties have horses. Curving roads lead into the foothills, where newer olive-colored houses with picture windows peek out from clusters of pinyon pines. A constant breeze helps keep the town a few degrees cooler than St. George, Washington County’s main city, 15 miles south and 2,000 feet lower.
But as the climate warms, the rolling hills and foliage that make Dammeron Valley so attractive are increasingly making it dangerous.
The article underlines that last sentence with this ominous visual:
Dammeron Valley’s population is growing despite the fact that Washington County’s wildfire risk is among the highest in the country. The risk is so high, in fact, that local officials eventually decided to hire a professional fire chief. It seems like a prudent decision given that the likelihood of wildfires is high, and when fires happen the fire department is the last line of defense protecting people’s homes.
Dammeron Valley residents saw it differently:
To fund the position and upgrade services, officials had to double the annual fee that residents pay for the Fire Department, to $480.
The reaction was not positive. “You would have thought we were taking babies away from their moms,” said Mack Sorenson, chairman of the county-appointed board that oversees the Fire Department.
To summarize: in this highly wildfire-prone area, which had multiple near-miss fires in just the last couple years, residents had a strong negative reaction to being required to pay an additional $240 per year ($20/month) for enhanced fire protection.
Though just one story, it may be representative of places like Washington County, which in 2020 voted for Trump over Biden by more than 51 percentage points.
My Work
Red states are a bad climate bet
A cold-eyed assessment of which places are most likely to thrive in the years and decades ahead leads to the hard-to-avoid conclusion that Republican-controlled states are a bad bet. No tax increases, no additional revenue, no infrastructure upgrades, no climate ruggedization.
Interesting Reads
The January 6th hearing was horrifying. It also gave me hope.
For a couple hours on Thursday evening, I felt something that — amid the brutal onslaught of recent mass shootings, including in my hometown of Buffalo — I haven’t felt in a while. Deep pride in being American and at least some slight hope that our nation might be able to right itself.
Our Predictions About the Internet Are Probably Wrong
[Historian Elizabeth] Eisenstein described much of this in her writings. Her larger point is that the world was never the same again. As she explained to me, we no longer register the impact of the printing press because we have no easy way to retrieve the ambient sensation of “before,” just as we can’t retrieve, and can barely imagine, what life was like when only scattered licks of flame could pierce the darkness of night.
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
