Debate Disaster

The debate was painful. However, much more pain awaits if Trump prevails.

How many of us felt this way watching the Presidential debate this Thursday. Photo by Valeriia Miller, Unsplash

When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind. —C.S. Lewis

Against my better instincts, or perhaps out of responsibility, I watched the Biden Trump “debate.” As I expected, it was a sad spectacle. After an hour and ten minutes, I could take no more, and turned it off. Trump of course lied incessantly and hurled insults, strongman tactics from beginning to end. Biden was hoarse and appeared feeble. His stutter, which has nothing to do with his mental acuity, although I suspect that is diminished, compounded his deathly appearance, while Trump, glowering in his orange makeup, appeared vital and strong. As usual, he was out of control, sidestepping questions. Shame on the moderators, who made no attempt to keep the maniac under control. Polls will come out for whatever their worth (problematic in themselves in influencing outcomes). Regardless, the evening was a disaster, an utter failure to discuss the life and death issues in the world, first and foremost as far as I’m concerned, climate change, which undermines any attempts to fix our myriad, eternal human behavioral problems that have led to our dilemma.

I am appalled that these two are the choices we have, a complete indictment of a political system I have seen completely undermined by money in my lifetime. I’m deathly afraid of what comes in November. The climate crisis is my primary subject, but there are so many other threats. In just six months, a narcissistic, insecure, half-wit sex offender with no human feelings could be running the country again. This is a man, a creature, who overturned more than 100 environmental protections when in office, and proclaimed there were good people on both sides when he encouraged Nazis, the KKK and heavily armed white supremacists to march in Charlottesville, VA in 2017, inciting two days of violence. Three people died, including one dead and nineteen injured, when rally goer James Alex Fields Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of pedestrians.

We are quickly moving to a world where there will be less energy, not more. That is a physically non-negotiable reality. Screw the electric car ads. Fossil fuels which are burning up the planet are now approaching the point of becoming economically unviable to extract.

Far more frighteningly, if Trump attains office again, he will become the figurehead of Project 2025, the 900-page plan by the ultra-right wing Heritage Foundation to turn our nation into a theocratic dictatorship, by people far smarter than Trump. This plan will dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, and destroy our social safety net, in a country that favors bombs over people as climate change just begins to destroy agriculture, the foundation of any civilization or society. In 2017, Trump pushed through the Paul Ryan engineered $1.5 trillion dollar tax cut for the ultra wealthy which dropped the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, giving meager scraps to the middle class and even less to the poor as usual. It has increased our national debt of course, something Republicans are supposedly against. Bullshit. Every dollar stolen lines the pockets of the billionaire class. This bill even had language in it to give tax cuts to specific billionaires, pressured by reprehensible Republican Senator Ron Johnson, Wisconsin.

The Republican solution to our grotesque national debt as a result of 50 years of tax giveaways to the wealthy is to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, should Trump attain executive office again. These safety nets you and I have paid for, will be on the chopping block yearly until they can be voted away forever. Our money, our labor, will become another windfall for the oligarchs, whose solution to our problems is to see all of us dead. Eliminating these programs are the openly stated goals of vampires like Rick Scott, Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Ron Johnson.

How many of my American readers have loved ones who paid into these programs and are now dependent on them to stay alive? Why don’t MAGA supporters understand they are supporting their own deaths and the furthering of wealth disparity and impoverishment? How can they think billionaires have their backs?

Repeatedly, I have stated my words could one day endanger me. Trump has vowed vengeance on his enemies. Should he work his way far enough down the list, I would certainly be identified as one. Peasants always become victims after the top state threats are eliminated. Consider Chile, the first experiment in neoliberal capitalism. 3,200 people were disappeared, executed or tortured, 80,000 imprisoned, and 200,000 fled from political persecution. I wrote about it in The Economy We Need to Save Ourselves. I chose this path because the wealthy owned, ever more homogenous mainstream media is an abject failure in communicating the dire threats we face. That was on full display Thursday night on CNN, with climate change barely addressed, an hour into the farce debate. It was also on display in the sheer incompetence and cowardice of the so-called moderators, allowing lie after lie to fly by the Orange One, each one dragging democracy closer to its grave.

Biden’s efforts on clean energy have been inconsistent at best. The Green New Deal (a myopic vision itself) gave way to the Inflation Reduction Act that made unacceptable concessions to Big Oil. I wrote about in The Inflation Reduction Act: Climate Change Farce. To be fair, the self-serving bastard Joe Manchin was an enormously destructive impediment, as was equally self-serving Kyrsten Sinema. However, it’s still clear even so-called progressive Democrats don’t get it or are afraid to tell the truth. Biden’s approval of Willow in Alaska which I wrote about in Massive Alaska Willow Drilling Project Approved, was further evidence of a failure to grasp the gravity of our situation, a quid pro quo deal struck because of Alaskan Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski in exchange for her support of the nomination of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a development that left many of us gasping. I am similarly gasping as I hold my breath on the massive LNG deposits of CP2 that were declared “paused,” which I wrote about in Giving Pause to Disaster. Paused leaves the door open does it not, and billions of dollars are at stake. The emissions of CP2 would produce twenty times the greenhouse gases of the Alaska Willow project yearly, and is just one of seventeen such LNG terminals proposed or currently under construction on the Louisiana Gulf coast.

All of these supposed solutions require heavy machinery and fossil fuels particularly diesel to be mined, transported, transformed into workable materials, manufactured, transported again to installation sites, and erected. Never is the idea of conservation or degrowth discussed.

Sadly, as mixed and possibly ignorant the Biden administration has been about the cold reality of the climate emergency, and the limitations of what so-called renewable energy can and can’t do, with its own profound environmental downsides which need to be carefully weighed, it’s game over for an inhabitable planet should Trump assume power and Project 2025 be enacted.

We are quickly moving to a world where there will be less energy, not more. That is a physically non-negotiable reality. Screw the electric car ads. Fossil fuels which are burning up the planet are now approaching the point of becoming economically unviable to extract. I have written about that, too, in The Vanished but Inevitable Return of Reality.

The push for solar and wind is not some altruistic mission. Big Oil knows the writing is on the wall, and mining companies are salivating and trampling human rights all over the world in the lithium white gold rush.

These multinationals wish to continue their hegemony in renewables. Renewables, however, are much lower in energy density and much less dependable. Battery storage is being pushed to solve the dependability problem, but mining lithium, cobalt and other metals and minerals for batteries uses vast amounts of water in a world where water is an increasing crisis. In fact, harvesting one ton of lithium requires 500,000 gallons of water on average in competition with agriculture and drinking water. Mining also notoriously pollutes our shrinking supply of over pumped groundwater, easily evidenced by massive sinkholes everywhere. For a primer in the realities of lithium mining, read Showdown at Thacker Pass. Mining also heinously employs slave labor in the Congo and Lithium Triangle of South America, consisting of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, where severe drought and devastating fires are on the rise.

Baltimore, Maryland sinkhole. Doh!

Guatamala sinkhole. Whatever.

China sinkhole. LMAO.

Wind turbines require massive amounts of steel and giant concrete pads. A single GE 1.5 megawatt tower weighs in around 164 tons of steel alone. Designs are growing larger. The Gamesa G87 is twice as massive at 334 tons, and more gargantuan designs are on the board. The pads to anchor these monsters require 1000 tons of concrete or more, and blasting mountain tops to level surfaces. Dragging these machines to the summit frequently requires reengineering roads to get components to the top, such is the length of the blades and superstructures.

All of these supposed solutions require heavy machinery and fossil fuels particularly diesel, to be mined, transported, transformed into workable materials, manufactured, transported again to installation sites, and erected. Never is the idea of conservation or degrowth discussed. Read about the principles of degrowth in Degrowth: The Vision We Must Demand. It’s our only true hope to avert complete disaster. These machines, this corporate vision fantasy however far it’s built out, will require maintenance and eventual replacement from age, requiring more fossil fuels. Will there be any? Giant solar arrays have many of the same problems and also destroy natural environments as we bear witness to the tragic and unforgivable Anthropocene caused disaster called The 6th Extinction. Never before has a species accomplished this. Do we really think we can escape the laws of nature while so much dies around us? The dependence on fossil fuels to build and maintain a renewable energy system is the giant elephant in the room, few talk about.

We are headed to a world of degrowth, one way or another. Wealthy nations’ vision of the future fails to grasp reality or far more chillingly are guided by a few, looking forward to the crash, to a brutal reduction in population as a solution that leaves what’s left to them. Those that ascribe to MAGA ideas and Trump have no idea they are being harvested.

There is plenty of blame on the Democratic side, too. They have participated in the rise of the oligarchs who are destroying the world. Grotesque wealth inequality drove January 6, and is driving the ever faster destruction of our only planet.

As non-existent as Biden has been in telling these fundamental truths, if he sees them at all, weak as he is, our immediate priority is to defeat Trump and Project 2025. If we don’t, it’s game over for freedom and our survival. You and I must exert our influence on millions of independents and disaffected Republicans who in their entire lives could not imagine voting for a Democrat, as shitty as Democrats are now.

You and I must express the bigger picture to them, the dire trouble we’re in hidden by the Illusion of Fossil Fuels. Now is the time to have conversations with these people before it’s too late. Please read the articles I have linked to here. Share them. I am not going to say I am the penultimate expert on everything, but I have dedicated the last three years of my life to educating myself about the climate crisis with a deep feeling of responsibility to make any difference I can. We’re in deep trouble, hidden from most. My work is only as effective as you carry it forward. I am a fighter, and we all need to fight now because our leaders are taking us over the cliff.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your courage. This is make-or-break time for a future on this planet which we can still restore and save, an astonishingly lucky place that appears to have few similar, if any, in the universe. We were gifted this tiny blue and green ball in a vast, cold abyss. Humility and thankfulness should fill us every day. Ultimately, our Earth grants life or death. There is no more time for half measures or looking away. Please spread my words and those of others doing similar work. We must fight to save ourselves. It’s not coming from the top with their warped ideas about what’s important about being alive and aware.