Destabilized Saturday Edition #20
The Watergate hearings fantasy, "lone wolf" white power propaganda, brown lawns in LA, Bush 43's guns legacy,
I read a tweet with this quote a couple days ago and it resonated; gave me a sense of moral calm for few minutes:
“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” -Anon
My Work
The immense complexity of saving the world
[L]eaving fossil fuels in the ground reduces supply, which cause prices to rise, and when gas prices rise, popular support for incumbent political leaders falls. This quickly creates a political imperative to reduce gas prices. One key lever to pull is to increase the oil supply; in other words, to take it out of the ground.
In the worst case, the dynamic here is like a life saving surgery where the side effects kill you. More optimistically, in order to sustain the long-term shift to renewable energy, short-term increases in fossil fuel production may be necessary to mitigate political backlash.
Interesting Reads
Why the press will never have another Watergate moment (5 minutes)
“The national newspapers mattered in a way that is unimaginable to us today, and even the regional newspapers were incredibly strong,” Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” told me last week.
…Americans read this coverage in their local papers; many cities still had two or more dailies at that point. Later, they were riveted by the proceedings of the Senate Watergate Committee, whose hearings were aired live on the three big television networks during the summer of 1973. Graff reports that the average American household watched 30 hours of the hearings, which were also rebroadcast at night by PBS.
…[Today’s] media environment is far more fractured, and news organizations are far less trusted.
And, in part, we can blame the rise of a right-wing media system.
Tweets of the Week
Painting:
Extreme Weather Watch
A good indicator of the biosphere discontinuity that is climate change is the margin by which weather records get broken (I documented some a while back in this post).
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
