13 July 21
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12 July 21
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here comes a moment in every good gangster movie when all of the villains come together in a remote hideaway to make nefarious plans. If the good guys are smart, this is the moment they swoop in and arrest everyone. In real life America, though, we consistently squander these opportunities, opting instead to sit back and gawk at the villains like a bunch of dazed paparazzi. It’s never too late to change that.
Did you make it to the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho this past week? If you did, go directly to jail. The investment bank sponsors the annual schmooze-fest and “summer camp for billionaires” for the same reason that companies give away their luxury products in Oscars gift baskets: because if you spoil rich people enough, they may develop sufficiently warm feelings towards you to throw you some business one day. At Sun Valley each year, the billionaires are feted by the mere millionaires; the millionaires drum up enough deals to allow them to buy their third and fourth homes; and somewhere down the line, you can get a job as a housekeeper for one of those homes. This is the wondrous model of American capitalism in action – a tiny handful of wealthy people eat cake, and an entire nation gathers downstream, hoping to snatch up a few falling crumbs.
The Sun Valley conference is primarily known as a place where tech and media moguls gather to do a little fly fishing and strike multibillion-dollar merger deals, while various members of the financial press flit about the periphery of the resort like a bunch of tabloid hacks desperate for a snapshot of Mark Zuckerberg in the season’s latest fleece vest. More fundamentally, the conference is, like Davos, a mechanism for the concentration of wealth, dressed up as something friendlier. Here, America’s wealthiest mega-billionaires gather with the chief executive of America’s most powerful companies, the director of the CIA, and America’s most worthless pseudo-journalists (hello, Anderson Cooper) to develop the social and business connections that allow the top 0.00001% of earners to continue to accumulate a share of our nation’s wealth that already exceeds the famously cartoonish inequality of the Gilded Age of Rockefeller and Carnegie. Everything that happens at Sun Valley will contribute to the ability of attendees like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mike Bloomberg to increase their society-warping fortunes. They and their fellow billionaires got more than 50% richer during the pandemic year, by doing absolutely nothing but sitting back and watching their capital grow as millions around the world suffered and died. Their power over the course of this country grows ever more unassailable and unaccountable to anything other than their own whims. We are developing a private class of billionaire kings whose will is omnipotent and untouchable by any democratic force. This is the state of affairs that the Sun Valley conference serves to intensify. It is, by any reasonable measure, a threat to the long term stability of our country that far exceeds anything the Taliban could ever dream up.
Yet there is a noticeable lack of Special Forces troops rappelling into the scenic Idaho woods to capture Oprah Winfrey and Tim Cook as they go whitewater rafting. The collective wealth of the small group of people inside that Sun Valley resort is estimated to be a trillion dollars – meaning that confiscating it all could end homelessness in America for the next decade, with a few hundred billion left over. Instead of pursuing this obviously good idea, we opt instead to leave all of that wealth in the hands of the rich, so that Sun Valley attendees Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson can use it to race one another to become the biggest asshole ever to go to space.
It is odd that a nation obsessed with identifying threats has developed such a blind spot to the existential threat posed by the rich getting infinitely richer. Americans stockpile guns to fight off imaginary home invaders, flee to gated exurbs to hide from imaginary street crime, and launch doomed forever wars to battle imaginary foreign terrorists. But 40 years of wage stagnation, rising inequality, and the nightmarish gig-ification of all aspects of economic life are not enough to prompt us to cast a wary glance at an annual confab of all the people responsible for creating the conditions that have made it impossible to work one job and retire with dignity. The people who have, in fact, sucked up all of the money that no longer belongs to the mythical American middle class cavort openly in Sun Valley while we fearmonger about antifa breaking the windows of some coffee shop. It is enough to make me think that we are not so skilled at threat assessment, after all.
There is always next year. In 2022, the billionaires will return to Sun Valley. By then, they will almost certainly be richer, and more powerful, and control an even more grotesque share of the fruits of everyone’s labor. They will have continued to bust unions, consolidate control of industries, and wield disproportionate influence over all of our lives, solely for their own benefit. The case for rounding them up and redistributing their wealth will only have grown more convincing. And fortunately, we know exactly where they all will be.
Jane Goodall. (photo: CBS News)
Goodall, 87, first found fame in the early 1960s for her paradigm-busting work as a primatologist. Studying the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, she was the first to observe those entrancing animals eating meat and using tools, thus expanding our understanding of primate capabilities. While that work is likely to remain what the public primarily associates her with, Goodall’s career as an activist is arguably her more important legacy. She has spent 44 years leading conservation efforts through her Jane Goodall Institute and seeding the future with like-minded souls via the Roots & Shoots educational programs for young people, which can be found in more than 60 countries and have nurtured millions of students. “You just plod on and do what you can to make the world a better place,” said Goodall, speaking via Zoom from her childhood home in Bournemouth, England, and whose “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times” will be published in October. “That’s all I can do. I can’t do more, I don’t think, than I’m doing.”
The stories you tell about the planet and conservation have to do with instilling hope. But all we have to do is look around to see the persuasiveness of stories built on fear and anger. Have you ever wondered if tapping into those emotions might be useful? No. It’s one of my big complaints when I talk to the media: Yes, we absolutely need to know all the doom and gloom because we are approaching a crossroads, and if we don’t take action it could be too late. But traveling the world I’d see so many projects of restoration, animal and plant species being rescued from the brink of extinction, people tackling what seemed impossible and not giving up. Those are the stories that should have equal time, because they’re what gives people hope. If you don’t have hope, why bother? Why should I bother to think about my ecological footprint if I don’t think that what I do is going to make a difference? Why not eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die?
Are there ideas you have about conservation that you feel are too radical to express publicly? Absolutely. I would never approach people about the crisis of the billions of animals in the factory farms and say you’ve got to be vegan. People have to change gradually. If you eat meat one less day a week, that’s the beginning. Bad zoos, you want to close them down, but you’ve got to work out what are we going to do with the animals when we do get it closed down. You have to make compromises. When I’m talking to people about eating animal products, I tell them that I read Peter Singer’s book back in the 1970s. I didn’t know about factory farms. I was shocked. The next time I saw a piece of meat on my plate, I thought, Goodness, this symbolizes fear, pain, death. Who wants to eat fear, pain and death? So I just tell them my story. I don’t ever want to appear holier than thou. You’ve got to be reasonable. If you tell people, “You’ve got to stop doing that,” they immediately don’t want to talk to you. The main thing is to keep a channel open. Young activists, sometimes they’re inexperienced and demand something. They ask my advice, and I say: Talk about how the issue is affecting you. How you feel about it. I think that’s the way forward. But that’s just my way.
Ad for Ronald Reagan's talk against Medicare in 1961. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
his month marks the fifty-sixth anniversary of Medicare, signed into law by president Lyndon Johnson on July 30, 1965. The effects of the program were expansive and immediate: three years after its creation, some 96 percent of those sixty-five and older had hospital insurance, up from only 54 percent in 1963.
Today, despite decades of attempts to undermine it, it remains among the most popular of all government programs — vastly outperforming private alternatives in a huge survey recently published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. A June poll also identified high, and in some cases stratospheric, levels of support for various proposed enhancements currently being debated in Congress, including one which would lower the age of eligibility to sixty.
Predictably, even the faint prospect of Medicare expansion has sent the private insurance racket into a tizzy, with corporate astroturf groups like the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF) taking out seven figure ad buys to defeat it. The kinds of arguments deployed by PAHCF — formed in 2018 with the explicit goal of neutralizing large-scale health care reform — are by this point quite familiar.
In the present context, PAHCF has mostly run with the claim that expanding Medicare will be unduly expensive, necessitate tax increases, and lead to all kinds of spooky and unintended consequences. More broadly, its messaging has condemned all proposed expansions of public health insurance as heavy-handed attempts to impose a “one-size-fits-all system . . . whether you call it Medicare for All, Medicare buy-in, single-payer, or a public option.” (One wonders how an “option” could be “one size fits all.”)
As to its own priorities, the group cites exactly five, all of them vaguely defined and innocuously positive: expanding access, providing better care, protecting the vulnerable, strengthening coverage, and empowering patient choice — each of which PAHCF and its Uruk horde of lobbyists insist will be imperiled by even the smallest expansion of public health insurance.
It’s nonsense, of course: the formalized agitprop of a vast and profitable industry that would become substantially less vast and less profitable if something like Medicare For All ever became a reality. With access to the same data and polling the rest of us can see (and probably much more besides), the industry and its PR flacks know all too well that Medicare is both efficient and popular, and that any expansion would be difficult to roll back for exactly these reasons.
When it comes to the provision of health care, there’s ultimately an irreconcilable divergence of human needs and private profit — a divergence which historical evidence suggests becomes patently obvious to people who experience the socialized version (Britain’s NHS, to take an obvious example, was found to be more popular than both the army and the monarchy in one 2013 poll).
It’s for this reason that efforts to arrest the march of socialized medicine have always been so absurdly histrionic and alarmist: characterized by dire warnings about the unintended consequences of humanitarian ambition, the threat of Orwellian government overreach, and the destruction of personal freedom that supposedly await all Americans just beyond the next proposed Medicare expansion. Though liberal and conservative politicians throughout the decades have assumed different rhetorical postures in making the case against universal health care, it’s striking how little the underlying arguments have actually changed.
For proof, we need look no further than the iconic 1961 screed recorded by none other than Ronald Reagan under the aegis of the American Medical Association as part of its wider campaign against the proposed Medicare program (commonly known as Operation Coffee Cup). In the just over ten minute recording, Reagan (then still known as a figure of the silver screen) showcased the basic template still employed by industry hacks, right-wing talking heads, and centrist Democrats to this very day.
Minus a few of the more explicit anti-communist talking points born of its Cold War context, the core ideas of “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine” can still be found in industry press releases, presidential primary debates, and on cable news panels to this day.
You can read the full transcript here, but the crux of Reagan’s case can be summed up in a few representative highlights:
One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project, most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it…
Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States…Walter Reuther said, “It’s no secret that the United Automobile Workers is officially on record of backing a program of national health insurance.” And by national health insurance, he meant socialized medicine for every American…
…in our country under our free-enterprise system we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to choose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other. But let’s also look from the other side . . . The doctor begins to lose freedoms. . . . From here it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay, and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go, or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do…
What can we do about this? Well, you and I can do a great deal. We can write to our congressmen and to our senators…If you don’t, this program, I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country…
In Reagan’s rather paranoid telling, then, the creation of Medicare was nothing less than a stalking horse for the indefinite expansion of the federal government and its intrusion into every area of life. Though this sort of hyperbole is mostly confined to the Right today, his suggestion of an irreconcilable conflict between public health insurance and personal freedom has found unexpectedly broad buy-in on the liberal side of the spectrum — the specter of “one-size-fits-all“ health care being wielded as a cudgel against Medicare For All throughout last year’s Democratic primary.
The same bogus conception of personal freedom — in this case, the freedom to choose between various pricey insurance plans and to lose all access to care the moment you’re fired or laid off — has animated opposition to public health insurance since the days of Operation Coffee Cup and before. It’s a reminder, among other things, of the lengths a powerful and entrenched industry will go to protect its balance sheets.
Given the consistency and hyperbole of the talking points (regardless of whether what’s being debated is a relatively small Medicare expansion, a public option, or actual socialized medicine) it’s also a reminder that what motivates opponents of public health insurance is less the fear that it will fail than an understanding that it will inevitably succeed.
One immigrant who had to wear an ankle monitor called it 'a modern day scarlet letter.' (photo: Brynn Anderson/AP)
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, speaks to the media on March 25. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Getty)
A judge in May dismissed the NRA’s bankruptcy case, ruling that the advocacy group cannot use the bankruptcy code to move from New York, where it is the subject of a lawsuit, to Texas, a more gun-friendly state.
The court determined that the bankruptcy case was not “filed in good faith” because “it was filed to gain an unfair litigation advantage and because it was filed to avoid a state regulatory scheme.”
The group filed for bankruptcy in January and sought to reincorporate in Texas by “utilizing the protection of the bankruptcy court.”
The legal action followed an August lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), which called for dissolving the organization.
Schumer on Sunday said the NRA continued spending large sums of money on advertising efforts criticizing proposed gun proposals and the nomination of gun control lobbyist David Chipman to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, contending that those pursuits bolster the allegation that the bankruptcy claim was motivated by legal, not financial, concerns.
“They recently told the judicial branch of government that they are bankrupt after the lawsuit by Tish James, and at the same time they’re saying they’re bankrupt, they’re spending millions of dollars on ads to stop universal background checks,” Schumer told reporters, according to The Associated Press.
“That demands an investigation by the Justice Department,” he added.
He specifically cited a $2 million advertising push announced by the NRA in April, when the bankruptcy case was still pending, which targeted gun control proposals, the AP reported.
The organization said it was showcasing ads on TV and digital platforms, placing mailers in the field and hosting town hall meetings in at least 12 states.
“How can you say you’re bankrupt at the same time you have millions of dollars to spend on ads throughout the country trying to prevent universal background checks, fundraising and other things that will stop the killings on the streets?” Schumer asked, according to the AP.
“The bottom line is the NRA shot itself in the foot when they declared bankruptcy and still have millions of dollars,” he added.
The NRA reacted to Schumer’s comments in a statement to The Hill, calling his plea for a DOJ investigation a “weak, tyrannical threat.”
“The NRA has said repeatedly in public forums that we are financially stronger than ever. We have also said that we will continue to wage, and win, the public debate over ‘gun control.’ It is regrettable that Sen. Schumer chose to ignore those salient facts in his press conference Sunday,” Andrew Arulanandam, managing director of NRA Public Affairs, said in a statement.
“And unfortunately for Sen. Schumer and his gun control money masters, our winning arguments are protected by the First Amendment. That’s why Sen. Schumer’s weak, tyrannical threat of DOJ retaliation fails,” he added.
William A. Brewer III, counsel to the NRA, accused Schumer of “promoting a false narrative,” contending that the group filed for bankruptcy and sought to reorganize in Texas “to streamline its financial and legal affairs”
“The truth is, the proceedings in question confirmed what the Association disclosed from the outset – the NRA is financially solvent, and the filing in Texas was part of its long-term plans to effectively serve its members. Although the bankruptcy court did not believe the filing was for a proper bankruptcy purpose, it specifically did not find the NRA acted in bad faith. The facts speak for themselves, despite the political gamesmanship of the NRA’s adversaries,” Brewer added.
The Department of Justice declined to comment to The Hill.
Assassinated president Jovenel Moïse of Haiti. (photo: AP)
The Hennessey fire in Napa County. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
On an unnaturally hot late June day in the Northeast, my eight-year-old grandson was walking back to a broiling car to continue a long trip. It was in the mid-nineties and he and his three-year-old sister were complaining about how miserable they were when, out of nowhere, he said, “This is why climate change is important!”
Startled, his mother agreed, and then he suddenly added, “And imagine what it’s going to be like when I’m 50 years old!”
Imagine indeed! When it comes to climate change, my grandchildren have long been on my mind. I’ve certainly worried about the nightmarish world they might inherit, if we — my generation and the ones just below mine — don’t do what’s needed to stop this planet from becoming a hothouse of the first order. And yes, since I do my best to follow the news on the subject, I’m aware that, from a melting Greenland to an overheating Middle East, this planet is indeed changing more or less before my eyes.
But here’s what I didn’t imagine: that, at my own advanced age (I’m almost 77), I would live to see something of the genuine blast-furnace effect of that phenomenon. Now, it seems, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Not just my children and grandchildren, but I am likely to be living through climate change in a big-time way. After all, this is happening remarkably fast, as the recent soaring temperatures and fires in the northwestern U.S. and Canada have so shockingly made clear, as has the staggering mega-drought, unprecedented in human memory, that now extends across significant parts of this country. As Jonathan Watts of the Guardian observed recently when it came to weather events in the Canadian and U.S. Northwest that were already exceeding the worst-case scenarios of climate scientists, “More people in more countries are feeling that their weather belongs to another part of the world.” How painfully true. Canada, it seems, is now the new Persian Gulf.
And given those blazing temperatures in our own backyards, including the Northeast where I live, who had time to notice that the ground (not air) temperature at one spot in Siberia (Siberia!) hit 118 degrees recently as heat waves scorched the region; or that, however grimly historic last year’s 30-storm Atlantic hurricane season was (as its naming system ran through alphabets), we’ve just experienced the earliest fifth-named storm of any year on record? And who even registered the record number of Arizona senior citizens dying in overheating mobile homes in the midst of the ongoing heat emergency there or the scourge of grasshoppers swarming across the American West?
How germane, then, was my grandson’s unnerving comment. As TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon suggests today, as she reports in from the burning West Coast (the “world’s most extreme heat wave in modern history”), make no mistake about it, global warming is here and, if we don’t act fast, god knows what it may be for our grandchildren.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
n San Francisco, we’re finally starting to put away our masks. With 74% of the city’s residents over 12 fully vaccinated, for the first time in more than a year we’re enjoying walking, shopping, and eating out, our faces naked. So I was startled when my partner reminded me that we need to buy masks again very soon — N95 masks, that is. The California wildfire season has already begun, earlier than ever, and we’ll need to protect our lungs during the months to come from the fine particulates carried in the wildfire smoke that’s been engulfing this city in recent years.
I was in Reno last September, so I missed the morning when San Franciscans awoke to apocalyptic orange skies, the air freighted with smoke from burning forests elsewhere in the state. The air then was bad enough even in the high mountain valley of Reno. At that point, we’d already experienced “very unhealthy” purple-zone air quality for days. Still, it was nothing like the photos that could have been from Mars then emerging from the Bay Area. I have a bad feeling that I may get my chance to experience the same phenomenon in 2021 — and, as the fires across California have started so much earlier, probably sooner than September.
The situation is pretty dire: this state — along with our neighbors to the north and southeast — is now living through an epic drought. After a dry winter and spring, the fuel-moisture content in our forests (the amount of water in vegetation, living and dead) is way below average. This April, the month when it is usually at its highest, San Jose State University scientists recorded levels a staggering 40% below average in the Santa Cruz Mountains, well below the lowest level ever before observed. In other words, we have never been this dry.
Under the Heat Dome
When it’s hot in most of California, its often cold and foggy in San Francisco. Today is no exception. Despite the raging news about heat records, it’s not likely to reach 65 degrees here. So it’s a little surreal to consider what friends and family are going through in the Pacific Northwest under the once-in-thousands-of-years heat dome that’s settled over the region. A heat dome is an area of high pressure surrounded by upper-atmosphere winds that essentially pin it in place. If you remember your high-school physics, you’ll recall that when a gas (for example, the air over the Pacific Northwest) is contained, the ratio between pressure and temperature remains constant. If the temperature goes up, the pressure goes up.
The converse is also true; as the pressure rises, so does the temperature. And that’s what’s been happening over Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia in normally chilly Canada. Mix in the fact that climate change has driven average temperatures in those areas up by three to four degrees since the industrial revolution, and you have a recipe for the disaster that struck the region recently.
And it has indeed been a disaster. The temperature in the tiny town of Lytton, British Columbia, for instance, hit 121 degrees on June 29th, breaking the Canadian heat record for the third time in as many days. (The previous record had stood since 1937.) That was Tuesday. On Wednesday night, the whole town was engulfed in the flames of multiple fires. The fires, in turn, generated huge pyrocumulus clouds that penetrated as high as the stratosphere (a rare event in itself), producing lightning strikes that ignited new fires in a vicious cycle that, in the end, simply destroyed the kilometer-long town.
Heat records have been broken all over the Pacific Northwest. Portland topped records for three days running, culminating with a 116-degree day on June 28th; Seattle hit a high of 108, which the Washington Post reported “was 34 degrees above the normal high of 74 and higher than the all-time heat record in Washington, D.C., among many other cities much farther to its south.”
With the heat comes a rise in “sudden and unexpected” deaths. Hundreds have died in Oregon and Washington and, according to the British Columbia coroner, at least 300 in her state — almost double the average number for that time period.
Class, Race, and Hot Air
It’s hardly a new observation that the people who have benefited least from the causes of climate change — the residents of less industrialized countries and poor people of all nations — are already suffering most from its results. Island nations like the Republic of Palau in the western Pacific are a prime example. Palau faces a number of climate-change challenges, according to the United Nations Development Program, including rising sea levels that threaten to inundate some of its lowest-lying islands, which are just 10 meters above sea level. In addition, encroaching seawater is salinating some of its agricultural land, creating seaside strips that can now grow only salt-tolerant root crops. Meanwhile, despite substantial annual rainfall, saltwater inundation threatens the drinking water supply. And worse yet, Palau is vulnerable to ocean storms that, on our heating planet, are growing ever more frequent and severe.
There are also subtle ways the rising temperatures that go with climate change have differential effects, even on people living in the same city. Take air conditioning. One of the reasons people in the Pacific Northwest suffered so horrendously under the heat dome is that few homes in that region are air conditioned. Until recently, people there had been able to weather the minimal number of very hot days each year without installing expensive cooling machinery.
Obviously, people with more discretionary income will have an easier time investing in air conditioning now that temperatures are rising. What’s less obvious, perhaps, is that its widespread use makes a city hotter — a burden that falls disproportionately on people who can’t afford to install it in the first place. Air conditioning works on a simple principle; it shifts heat from air inside an enclosed space to the outside world, which, in turn, makes that outside air hotter.
A 2014 study of this effect in Phoenix, Arizona, showed that air conditioning raised ambient temperatures by one to two degrees at night — an important finding, because one of the most dangerous aspects of the present heat waves is their lack of night-time cooling. As a result, each day’s heat builds on a higher base, while presenting a greater direct-health threat, since the bodies of those not in air conditioning can’t recover from the exhaustion of the day’s heat at night. In effect, air conditioning not only heats the atmosphere further but shifts the burden of unhealthy heat from those who can afford it to those who can’t.
Just as the coronavirus has disproportionately ravaged black and brown communities (as well as poor nations around the world), climate-change-driven heat waves, according to a recent University of North Carolina study reported by the BBC, mean that “black people living in most U.S. cities are subject to double the level of heat stress as their white counterparts.” This is the result not just of poverty, but of residential segregation, which leaves urban BIPOC (black, indigenous, and other people of color) communities in a city’s worst “heat islands” — the areas containing the most concrete, the most asphalt, and the least vegetation — and which therefore attract and retain the most heat.
“Using satellite temperature data combined with demographic information from the U.S. Census,” the researchers “found that the average person of color lives in an area with far higher summer daytime temperatures than non-Hispanic white people.” They also discovered that, in all but six of the 175 urban areas they studied in the continental U.S., “people of color endure much greater heat impacts in summer.” Furthermore, “for black people this was particularly stark. The researchers say they are exposed to an extra 3.12C [5.6F] of heating, on average, in urban neighborhoods, compared to an extra 1.47C [2.6F] for white people.”
That’s a big difference.
Food, Drink, and Fires — the View from California
Now, let me return to my own home state, California, where conditions remain all too dry and, apart from the coast right now, all too hot. Northern California gets most of its drinking water from the snowpack that builds each year in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In spring, those snows gradually melt, filling the rivers that fill our reservoirs. In May 2021, however, the Sierra snowpack was a devastating six percent of normal!
Stop a moment and take that in, while you try to imagine the future of much of the state — and the crucial crops it grows.
For my own hometown, San Francisco, things aren’t quite that dire. Water levels in Hetch Hetchy, our main reservoir, located in Yosemite National Park, are down from previous years, but not disastrously so. With voluntary water-use reduction, we’re likely to have enough to drink this year at least. Things are a lot less promising, however, in rural California where towns tend to rely on groundwater for domestic use.
Shrinking water supplies don’t just affect individual consumers here in this state, they affect everyone in the United States who eats, because 13.5% of all our agricultural products, including meat and dairy, as well as fruits and vegetables, come from California. Growing food requires prodigious amounts of water. In fact, farmland irrigation accounts for roughly 80% of all water used by businesses and homes in the state.
So how are California’s agricultural water supplies doing this year? The answer, sadly, is not very well. State regulators have already cut distribution to about a quarter of California’s irrigated acreage (about two million acres) by a drastic 95%. That’s right. A full quarter of the state’s farmlands have access to just 5% of what they would ordinarily receive from rivers and aqueducts. As a result, some farmers are turning to groundwater, a more easily exhausted source, which also replenishes itself far more slowly than rivers and streams. Some are even choosing to sell their water to other farmers, rather than use it to grow crops at all, because that makes more economic sense for them. As smaller farms are likely to be the first to fold, the water crisis will only enhance the dominance of major corporations in food production.
Meanwhile, we’ll probably be breaking out our N95 masks soon. Wildfire season has already begun — earlier than ever. On July 1st, the then-still-uncontained Salt fire briefly closed a section of Interstate 5 near Redding in northern California. (I-5 is the main north-south interstate along the West coast.) And that’s only one of the more than 4,500 fire incidents already recorded in the state this year.
Last year, almost 10,000 fires burned more than four million acres here, and everything points to a similar or worse season in 2021. Unlike Donald Trump, who famously blamed California’s fires on a failure to properly rake our forests, President Biden is taking the threat seriously. On June 30th, he convened western state leaders to discuss the problem, acknowledging that “we have to act and act fast. We’re late in the game here.” The president promised a number of measures: guaranteeing sufficient, and sufficiently trained, firefighters; raising their minimum pay to $15 per hour; and making grants to California counties under the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s BRIC (Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities) program.
Such measures will help a little in the short term, but none of it will make a damn bit of difference in the longer run if the Biden administration and a politically divisive Congress don’t begin to truly treat climate change as the immediate and desperately long-term emergency it is.
Justice and Generations
In his famous A Theory of Justice, the great liberal philosopher of the twentieth century John Rawls proposed a procedural method for designing reasonable and fair principles and policies in a given society. His idea: that the people determining such basic policies should act as if they had stepped behind a “veil of ignorance” and had lost specific knowledge of their own place in society. They’d be ignorant of their own class status, ethnicity, or even how lucky they’d been when nature was handing out gifts like intelligence, health, and physical strength.
Once behind such a veil of personal ignorance, Rawls argued, people might make rules that would be as fair as possible, because they wouldn’t know whether they themselves were rich or poor, black or white, old or young — or even which generation they belonged to. This last category was almost an afterthought, included, he wrote, “in part because questions of social justice arise between generations as well as within them.”
His point about justice between generations not only still seems valid to me, but in light of present-day circumstances radically understated. I don’t think Rawls ever envisioned a trans-generational injustice as great as the climate-change one we’re allowing to happen, not to say actively inducing, at this very moment.
Human beings have a hard time recognizing looming but invisible dangers. In 1990, I spent a few months in South Africa providing some technical assistance to an anti-apartheid newspaper. When local health workers found out that I had worked (as a bookkeeper) for an agency in the U.S. trying to prevent the transmission of AIDS, they desperately wanted to talk to me. How, they hoped to learn, could they get people living in their townships to act now to prevent a highly transmissible illness that would only produce symptoms years after infection? How, in the face of the all-too-present emergencies of everyday apartheid life, could they get people to focus on a vague but potentially horrendous danger barreling down from the future? I had few good answers and, almost 30 years later, South Africa has the largest HIV-positive population in the world.
Of course, there are human beings who’ve known about the climate crisis for decades — and not just the scientists who wrote about it as early as the 1950s or the ones who gave an American president an all-too-accurate report on it in 1965. The fossil-fuel companies have, of course, known all along — and have focused their scientific efforts not on finding alternative energy sources, but on creating doubt about the reality of human-caused climate change (just as, once upon a time, tobacco companies sowed doubt about the relationship between smoking and cancer). As early as 1979, the Guardian reports, an internal Exxon study concluded that the use of fossil fuels would certainly “cause dramatic environmental effects” in the decades ahead. “The potential problem is great and urgent,” the study concluded.
A problem that was “great and urgent” in 1979 is now a full-blown existential crisis for human survival.
Some friends and I were recently talking about how ominous the future must look to the younger people we know. “They are really the first generation to confront an end to humanity in their own, or perhaps their children’s lifetimes,” I said.
“But we had The Bomb,” a friend reminded me. “We grew up in the shadow of nuclear war.” And she was right of course. We children of the 1950s and 1960s grew up knowing that someone could “press the button” at any time, but there was a difference. Horrifying as is the present retooling of our nuclear arsenal (going on right now, under President Biden), nuclear war nonetheless remains a question of “if.” Climate change is a matter of “when” and that when, as anyone living in the Northwest of the United States and Canada should know after these last weeks, is all too obviously now.
It’s impossible to overstate the urgency of the moment. And yet, as a species, we’re acting like the children of indulgent parents who provide multiple “last chances” to behave. Now, nature has run out of patience and we’re running out of chances. So much must be done globally, especially to control the giant fossil-fuel companies. We can only hope that real action will emerge from November’s international climate conference. And here in the U.S., unless congressional Democrats succeed in ramming through major action to stop climate change before the 2022 midterms, we’ll have lost one more last, best chance for survival.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.
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