Devi Lockwood, Editor of the digital news site Rest of World - The New York Times
Stephan: We are going to see in our lifetimes whole communities, even countries, disappear under the waves. How are we going to deal with that? Is anyone seriously thinking about this? This article lays out a bit of what is coming.
Igloolik, Canada. Credit: Devi Lockwood
Tuvalu
A little more than 10,000 people live in Tuvalu. Generations ago, Polynesians navigated here by the stars, calling the sprinkles of land in the vast blue of the South Pacific home. With 10 square miles of total area, less than five miles of roads and only one hospital on the main island, Tuvalu is the fourth-smallest country in the world. Disney World is four times larger in area. Tuvalu’s capital city, Funafuti, sits about 585 miles south of the Equator.
By some estimates, Tuvaluans will be forced, by water scarcity and rising sea levels, to migrate elsewhere in the next 50 years. This mass exodus is already happening. Large Tuvaluan outposts exist in Fiji and New Zealand.
I came to Tuvalu with a question: What does it mean for a whole nation to become uninhabitable in my lifetime?
Tauala Katea, the director of Tuvalu’s meteorological service, sat in his office near the airport and tilted a monitor to show me an image of a recent flood when water bubbled up under a field by the runway. “This […]
Marc Verville and Michael Jolly, - Santa Monica Mirror
Stephan: Let's say it all together: Water is destiny. I have been telling my readers for almost 20 years this was coming, and that it was going to have an enormous effect on the world, including the United States. And that if it is not handled by policies that are comprehensive and oriented towards wellbeing things are going to become violent.
Lake Powell, note the huge decline in the water level. Credit: Getty
In this dangerous ecological moment the State of California is mandating that our City permit the construction of 8895 unnecessary new units that will supposedly increase our population about 20% over the next eight years. Depending on how those nominal 18,000 people are housed and their demographics, we can expect the water consumption of our 91,000 person city to rise between 17 and 23% from 2019’s potable water demand of about 11,030-acre feet. According to the City’s 2021 Draft Water Management Plan, the following populations and water demand requirements are anticipated without adjusting for additional conservation measures:
Until it rains again, all the western states (including California) are being fried by a deadly drought. We have seen this before: seven years ago we had to reduce the entire State’s water consumption by 20% to get through that crisis. No one knows how long this newest drought will last. But we all know the symptoms: super heated air setting temperature records everywhere (116 degrees in Portland, Oregon), ash and […]
Stephan: Do you think about concrete in terms of climate change? Not much? Not surprised. But you should be aware that cement could play a major role. Here is an unusual, and very interesting look at something to which most of us never give a thought.
Fast-forward Earth about a million years. Humanity has come and gone—perhaps wiped out by a pandemic or some cataclysmic event, like the dinosaurs before them.
Aliens or maybe even intelligent descendants of today’s apes are digging for clues to what happened long ago. They may or may not find human bones, and they may or may not find metallic remnants of our modern lives. But what they almost certainly would find are crumbling, angular gray blocks covered with dust and tinged with a reddish chemical formed by the oxidation of steel rebar.
If there is a signature material of the Anthropocene, it is concrete. It is the most common human-made substance. We build houses, skyscrapers, bridges, and memorials from it; we drive on it; and we even bury our dead in it. But most of us hardly give the stuff a glancing thought.
Except Robert Courland, that is. He wrote the book on it, quite literally. In Concrete Planet, Courland—a retired tech executive turned writer and historian—traces the nuanced and intertwined history of concrete and modern human civilization. The […]
Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Senator from Massachusetts - The Washington Post
Stephan: Here is what an intelligent person committed to decency and fairness, who actually understands America's corrupt and rigged tax system has to say about how to fix it. I completely agree with her.
Now that the Senate has passed a budget resolution, we’re one step closer to realizing President Biden’s transformational agenda: a once-in-a-generation investment in child care and Medicare, combating climate change and other efforts that would actually make our government work for families. The other half of the package — how to pay for these investments — is equally important.
The already huge gap between the 0.1 percent and everyone else is just getting wider. Billionaire wealth surged by $1.8 trillion from the early days of the pandemic through last month. The 400 richest Americans had more total wealth, as of 2019, than all 10 million Black American households, plus a quarter of Latino households, combined. Yet the ultrarich pay only 3.2 percent of that wealth in taxes, while 99 percent of families pay 7.2 percent. And scores of giant U.S. corporations pay zero.
I’ve proposed measures that would raise more than $5 trillion in revenue — far more than we need to enact the Biden plan. Though not every Democrat agrees with every one of my ideas, Biden campaigned aggressively on a suite of progressive tax policies, and voters embraced these changes at the ballot box. No matter how loudly Washington lobbyists bleat otherwise, progressive tax […]
Stephan: The MAGAT Party has this ongoing myth about deficits. When Eisenhower built the interstate road system it had nothing to do with deficits; it was about preparing America for the future. The infrastructure bills the Democrats are pushing to pass, with the exception of a few Democrats like Manchin, are the same thing again, preparing for the future. American roads, bridges, water systems, and on and on, are woefully dilapidated. Because most Americans never leave the country they have no idea how desperately shoddy our infrastructure is compared with the rest of the developed democracies. And what amazes me is that the MAGATs in Congress vote against a host of things that would improve the lives of the vast majority of Americans. And yet those Red state Americans vote for these incompetents again and again. I think it is the most important thing to realize about American politics today.
Failing bridges Credit: The New York Times
Thirty Republican senators voted against the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill when it passed the U.S. Senate on Tuesday—turning their backs on billions that their states stand to gain from the package.
Many objected to the price tag or specific items covered in the massive proposal, which has been hailed by President Joe Biden and other supporters as an historic effort to address the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.
It contains money for upgrades to federal highways, bridges, broadband and water systems, among many other major projects.
“After years and years and years of ‘Infrastructure Week,’ we’re on the cusp of an infrastructure decade that I truly believe will transform America,” Biden told reporters Tuesday after the Senate’s 69-30 vote. “I know compromise is hard for both sides, but it’s important—it’s necessary—for a democracy to be able to function.”
Nineteen Republicans joined all Democratic senators voting in favor of the Biden-backed bill.
But former President Donald Trump has hinted he’ll target those GOP members and already has blasted U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, for supporting the proposal.
