Destabilized Saturday Edition #2
January 29, 2022
Welcome to the Interesting Reads Saturday edition of Destabilized. Every Saturday morning I share a few of the best things I read on climate change, politics and stability, and adaptation.
My Work
Climate impacts ripple out: event, disruption, reaction, from this past week.
Internet incentives and GOP authoritarianism, this article from the fall expands on my “Meta-messages” posts.
Interesting Reads
Lumber Prices Are Off the Rails Again. Blame Climate Change.
“This is a supply-side problem. This is unlike any other market that any of us lumber traders have ever experienced.”
How to Make Sense of Our Covid Losses, Big and Small
I have been struck, throughout the pandemic, by how conscientiously many people have calibrated their losses, always framing them against the toll of Covid writ large: “I’m lucky, no one I love has died; I’m lucky, I haven’t gotten sick; I’m lucky, I didn’t need to be hospitalized; I’m lucky, I wound up in the hospital but I have good health care; at least my family is OK; at least I still have a job; at least I’m not alone.”
These are important and generous reactions. They attend, as we too seldom do, to life’s uneven allocation of suffering, and they remind us to be grateful both for what is going well in our lives and what could be going worse.
Flooding will get worse in Tampa Bay. Tropical Storm Eta showed how.
The unlucky circumstances that made Eta’s floodwaters so brutal could be normal by 2050.
“That came in because the tide was really high,” said Linda Portal, the community development director of Madeira Beach, which was hit hard by Eta.
“Well, what if the tide is always high?”
(Definitely worth clicking on the tweet for the full view)
Thinking about new climate infrastructure:
