Living Well in a Burning House

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During the final three decades of the 20th Century, the world experienced at most 100 major disasters — both natural and industrial —  every year, with annual damages averaging $70 billion. During the most recent two decades, the world has been afflicted with up to 500 major disasters every year. Annual damages have averaged $170 billion — in 2011 and 2017, over $300 billion. The upward trend is expected to continue without interruption.

Remarkably, this mounting crisis is on just about no one’s radar, except the United Nations, whose Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has been screaming the alarm for years. Its most recent annual report on the situation begins with these words: Continue reading →

It’s My Narrative and I’m NOT Sticking To It

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Like tiny rivulets of meltwater trickling off March snowbanks, small but growing narratives are beginning to flow against the tides of the opinions that have dominated the talking heads and writing hands for many months. Contrarians are popping up in more and more places to say, wait a minute! Stop clutching your pearls and gnashing your teeth, things are not quite as bad as we thought. Continue reading →

It’s Their Narrative, and They’re Sticking To It

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It is widely accepted now that there are two kinds of news in circulation in the world: relatively accurate news, and fake news. A number of cable channels and Internet sites have chosen sides, and put out either all real or all fake news. The “real” news outlets — The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN etc. — and their adherents congratulate themselves constantly for their objectivity and neutrality.

But there is a third category of information driving all of this, on both sides of the real-vs-fake debate, and that is what I call the narrative. This is not the content of their broadcasts or articles, but the assumptions that underlie their decisions on what to cover and what emphasis to give it. Contrary to what many people outside the news business believe — that these decisions are handed down by corporate executives for the working stiffs to execute — the reality is more subtle than that. Continue reading →

Gaslighting the Gas Prices

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Every talking head in the MSM universe and on social media is fulminating about rising gas prices and falling petroleum supplies. Everyone has a favorite cause to invoke and a favorite person to blame. Everyone has a solution: ramp up American production, cut a deal with Argentina, ramp up OPEC production, ramp up renewable energy sources. Ramp up something, and do it fast so I can keep my eight-cylinder pickup truck topped up. Not one word about the silver lining this black cloud is offering us — a chance to survive as a species.

Instead of ramping up, relaxing environmental controls and breaking the budget to make sure no one has to change their way of life, we should embrace this fundamental change in the petroleum economy. Accept it. Address it by reducing our consumption of petroleum. Forego the gas-guzzling pickup truck and buy a hybrid. Take the bus. Continue reading →

The Uber Driver and the Fracker

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A hydraulic fracturing drilling rig creating a new well on the Niobara shale formation, one of the most intensively fracked areas in the United States.

One way to better  comprehend the current state of the oil business, and gas prices, is to look more closely at the situation of an Uber driver. (Our example is imaginary, and the numbers are made up, but I think realistic.)

As he begins his employment, our Uber driver is quite pleased with the job. At the end of most days he has a nice wad of cash (or its equivalent) in his pocket and feels optimistic about his prospects. But he is entirely on his own, and must pay for his own gas, oil, maintenance, tires, insurance (including, not incidentally, health insurance), etcetera. Still, by working long hours and being thrifty, he keeps his head above water. Continue reading →

Bombs, Away!

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It is exceedingly strange how the notion persists — among, for example, the Russian geniuses who planned the Ukranian invasion — that bombardment breaks the will of the people bombed, when almost every chapter of human history contradicts it. 

For example, during eight years studying and writing about the American Civil War, I found no evidence that any battle was decided by artillery. The largest bombardment ever conducted in the Western Hemisphere — by Confederate gunners on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, just before Pickett’s Charge — inflicted a single casualty, injuring a steward in a rear area. Continue reading →

We Need an Outrage Outage

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The raging inflation that is grinding this country down is not monetary, it is rage inflation. Everybody, it seems, is outraged by everybody else; foaming at the mouth over tweets, texts, posts, remarks, books, 40-year-old high school yearbook pictures, items of clothing, wearing or not wearing masks, getting or not getting vaccinated, race, religion, politics, real or imagined insults, assaults, and multiple other umbrages.  Continue reading →

Cuba Should be Libre

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El Malecon in Havana, on Cuba’s north coast.

It may well be the best-governed country in the world. It has won worldwide acclaim for handling the COVID pandemic better than any other country with the exception of the United Arab Emirates. It is doing more for its people and its infrastructure to prepare for the ravages of climate change, and has done so over a longer period of time, than any other country. Health care is not only free, it is readily available froom clinics located in virtually every rural village. It has been widely regarded for many years, by any number of international studies, to be as the most sustainable country in the world.

Yes. Cuba.

I hear your hiss of outraged denial. I see you making the sign of the cross and retreating into a corner to assume the fetal position and whimper, “But they’re Communists. We hate them!” Both of those things are true, or have been true since the revolution of 1959. And neither of these things matters — except for the fact that they are used as excuses for the U.S. maintaining brutal embargoes and sanctions on the entire country. Despite those shackles, here is what Cuba has accomplished recently: Continue reading →

Climate Mission Accomplished, 2021

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It’s been another great year in the war on climate change. With a combination of forceful inaction, concentrated inattention, strenuous ignorance of facts, strategic amnesia and just plain orneriness we have once again succeeded in not losing to this implacable enemy which, in our humble opinion, does not really exist. Consider this year’s milestones in our epic non-struggle: Continue reading →

I Am the Last of My People

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My name is Chingachgook. I am an editor. I am the last of my people. 

Once we were as numerous as the buffalo. We roamed the corridors of every communications company, preventing people who could not spell, or punctuate, or speak the language, or who simply did not know anything, from bothering you.

We editors became endangered when the people who paid us discovered that you didn’t care, you were happy to pay for sloppy writing, speaking and thinking as long as it did not challenge your opinions or trouble your mind. We were further endangered when the social platforms opened up and people realized they could transmit their rantings to the world — for free, where it used to cost thousands if not millions of dollars to build a radio or TV station, or establish a newspaper or magazine.   Continue reading →