Destabilized Saturday Edition #41
An assassination attempt, the brave new world of the Saudi golf tour, "you should have been a doctor", the Mighty Mississippi runs low
Late on Thursday night this week, a violent right-wing lunatic (with the social media posts to prove it) broke into U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked her 82-year-old husband, Paul, with a hammer yelling “Where’s Nancy!?!” Fortunately for Speaker Pelosi, she wasn’t home. The most powerful woman in American history is still alive. Paul Pelosi is also still alive, after having surgery Friday to repair a fractured skull and other injuries.
With fascism rising in the United States, this is an ominous development.
My Work
Insurance companies are climate change truth-tellers (link)
Because it has no choice but to adjust its prices to reflect the actual underlying risks, the insurance industry is one of the most reliable truth-tellers about climate change. Put another way, the insurance business model hinges on accurate assessments of climate risks. The large number of insurer bankruptcies show us they’re far from infallible, but they have serious skin in the game and no incentives to obscure reality.
Interesting Reads
Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View (link)
Neither of those futures looks all that likely now, with the most terrifying predictions made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse.
Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.”
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
Creeping Fascism Watch
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch is now Creeping Fascism Watch. A depressing change, but necessary to accurately describe our evolving political context. -EF
Progress Joy and Hope
This video is very funny:
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