A Lovely Autumn Afternoon

It rained an inch or so this afternoon but the sun is out now. The ONSN office hums and thumps with soothing regularity as the sump pump collects water from a French drain in the crawlspace and spits it onto a slope leading to the street. I’m comfortable; the temp outside is about 80F, inside the AC is set to 74. A lovely autumn afternoon in mid-North Carolina.

About 150 miles from here, in Western North Carolina, my daughter is hunkered down in the dark in a town called Asheville. She and her husband have no power, little bandwidth, no internet, no running water. Here’s something you don’t think about – when the internet is down, credit and debit cards are useless. Need to buy food, shelter, battery-powered anything? Cash. They have no cash. Their basement is full of stagnant and dirty rainwater, useful at best for flushing the toilets. It could be days or weeks before power is restored, the Interstate is closed (and missing, in places), most roads are closed, the only certain way to travel in or out is by air.

Incredibly enough, they’re some of the lucky ones. The trees didn’t crash into their house, their street didn’t turn into a flash flood, their cars and property are mostly intact. They didn’t get injured or join the growing list of missing/possibly dead. They have neighbors and community to help them out. They even have sporadic cell service. Bucking the odds, they’re driving to Atlanta, where her Mother-in-law lives. Mixed feelings. Fingers crossed.

At this point, I need to admonish you – fond as I am of feedback, please don’t. Don’t offer useless sympathy or any sort of advice: They won’t hear it and I don’t need it.

The Atlantic Ocean today is the hottest it has ever been on this date, on record.

Does anyone dare to believe that a monster wet hurricane driving hundreds of miles inland to drop THIRTY FUCKING INCHES of rain in a few hours on the mountain towns of the Carolinas and Tennessee is unrelated to ocean temperatures? Do you have the gall to suggest to me that there’s not a straight line through manmade global climate change, ocean temps, cyclone strength and the situation out there at the state line? Do you need more goddamned data?

The research is in. I have studied it carefully, which is to say, I have looked out the window every day of my life. I’ve seen the changes, the warming, the habitat loss, streets and freeways increasingly choked with commuters, hotter summers, wetter winters, streams drying up, rivers setting flood stage records, glaciers melting, permafrost giving up its frost and methane, making matters worse.

And all the while, the people who could do something about this – the fuckheads in boardrooms and venture capitalists and corrupt politicians – all temporize and tut-tut and dance around swigging glasses of overpriced single malt, the Alfred E. Neumans of the business world – What? Me Worry?

I could give you a long discourse now about how Duke Power, right here in River City, has plans to create 10 more gas-fired power plants over the next few years. I could explain to you in painful detail why it is more profitable for them to do that than to do the responsible thing and switch to wind and solar, because the assholes who slither into the State Legislature every season have made it so.

But I’m not gonna bore you with that.

Instead, let me just point out that you have an important decision coming up. You have to decide whether you want to actively hasten the collapse of civilization, or flail around desperately trying to forestall the inevitable.

Believe me when I say this: Donald Trump’s MAGA crime family is the death knell for any kind of rescue from what appears to be some pretty unrelenting forces of nature. People of that sort justify themselves by acknowledging that most human beings are mindless predators, and everything we touch turns to shit. So, yeah.

Whoa, there, buckaroo – I didn’t say that Kamala Harris is the savior. I seriously doubt that she’s going to be much more effective in managing the crisis we face than any of her predecessors. All she buys is a little more time, maybe opportunity for a miracle. I probably won’t be there to see it, but by my calculation you’ve got two choices. One, a modern administration devoted to the dismantling of unrestrained capitalism – a real democracy, similar to the Social Democracy of the Scandinavian countries (unlikely), or Two, a miracle.

Make no mistake about it – any vote that favors a “conservative” approach to climate activism is a vote against your own children – and mine. If you’re on that road, please unsubscribe. I don’t have a button for that, but you can probably figure it out.