A reader who calls himself a “displaced Canadian” responded to my last dispatch in this fashion:
“I was also struck by the failure of the press to connect the east coast blackout to the ongoing travails of ordinary Baghdadis and Iraqis, without electricity, basic medical supplies etc. for months. When I lived in Montreal much of the province of Quebec lost electricity for a week after an ice storm. The media was apoplectic, the population traumatized, the collective sense of moral community shattered by looting and vandalism (especially the stealing of electric generators). And this after just a week.
“This simply deepens my feeling that we North Americans are so privileged that we cannot even begin to empathize with the suffering that the recent American aggression has caused. Hopefully the price tag is so high, this administration will be dissuaded from committing further cruelties.”
Well, speaking of our ability to empathize, here’s a remarkable example of the same. On August 14th, the very day, coincidentally, the very day of the great Northeastern blackout, the Washington Post wrote an editorial to remember, though it was only three paragraphs long. I unfortunately can’t quote it in full here, but go read it yourself. Headlined Can’t Stand the Heat (as in “then get out of the kitchen”), it began:
“To listen to the fuss Europeans are making about their weather, anyone would think that it was actually hot over there Okay, so maybe it’s a bit warmer than usual. Temperatures across the continent have once or twice have topped 100 degrees. But is this really hot ?… Temperatures in Houston and Dallas in the past couple of days have topped 100 Yet somehow, no one’s talking about extraordinary measures being taken by Texans or Washingtonians. On the contrary, President Bush is currently mocking the press corps by pretending to enjoy jogging in the Texas heat. Not all Europeans may want to go this far — but maybe they will now at least stop turning up their noses at those American summer inventions they’ve long loved to mock: The office window that doesn’t open, the air conditioner that produces sub-arctic temperatures and the tall glass of water, served in a restaurant, filled to the brim with ice.”
I say, atta way to stand up to them bums! It must be the damn French again, with a few other “old” European wimps thrown in for the bargain. And it’s now been proven that, at least in the Washington Post editorial offices, there are still a few tough hombres ready to take the heat (so to speak), the sort of people who would consider Iraq, where a major pipeline just went up along with a major water main in Baghdad (both evidently due to sabotage), a jaunt in the sun. The only problem is this: However good the advice, we happen to be in a “kitchen” that’s not going to be easy to get out of as the heat rises — all the harder with attitudes like those at the Post editorial offices gripping Americans by the throat.
As it happens, I found a letter written by a reader to the Post‘s ombundsman, by in fact, someone as wimpish as I am, that summed up my feelings (To read in full click here and scroll down):
“This simply deepens my feeling that we North Americans are so privileged that we cannot even begin to empathize with the suffering that the recent American aggression has caused. Hopefully the price tag is so high, this administration will be dissuaded from committing further cruelties.”
Well, speaking of our ability to empathize, here’s a remarkable example of the same. On August 14th, the very day, coincidentally, the very day of the great Northeastern blackout, the Washington Post wrote an editorial to remember, though it was only three paragraphs long. I unfortunately can’t quote it in full here, but go read it yourself. Headlined Can’t Stand the Heat (as in “then get out of the kitchen”), it began:
“To listen to the fuss Europeans are making about their weather, anyone would think that it was actually hot over there Okay, so maybe it’s a bit warmer than usual. Temperatures across the continent have once or twice have topped 100 degrees. But is this really hot ?… Temperatures in Houston and Dallas in the past couple of days have topped 100 Yet somehow, no one’s talking about extraordinary measures being taken by Texans or Washingtonians. On the contrary, President Bush is currently mocking the press corps by pretending to enjoy jogging in the Texas heat. Not all Europeans may want to go this far — but maybe they will now at least stop turning up their noses at those American summer inventions they’ve long loved to mock: The office window that doesn’t open, the air conditioner that produces sub-arctic temperatures and the tall glass of water, served in a restaurant, filled to the brim with ice.”
I say, atta way to stand up to them bums! It must be the damn French again, with a few other “old” European wimps thrown in for the bargain. And it’s now been proven that, at least in the Washington Post editorial offices, there are still a few tough hombres ready to take the heat (so to speak), the sort of people who would consider Iraq, where a major pipeline just went up along with a major water main in Baghdad (both evidently due to sabotage), a jaunt in the sun. The only problem is this: However good the advice, we happen to be in a “kitchen” that’s not going to be easy to get out of as the heat rises — all the harder with attitudes like those at the Post editorial offices gripping Americans by the throat.
As it happens, I found a letter written by a reader to the Post‘s ombundsman, by in fact, someone as wimpish as I am, that summed up my feelings (To read in full click here and scroll down):
“In regards to the recent ‘editorial’ on the European heat wave I can only conclude that a) your office drinking water contains more than the legal amount of mercury, b) you’ve turned over your editorial page to residents of “Our Lady of Cashews Home for the Cerebrally Unhinged,” c) you’ve all been adopted by Rupert Murdoch – I used to work for the N.Y. Post so I’m wary of editorials where alleged wit masks pre-pubescent jingoism or, d) half of the editorial staff is seriously hooked on the potent Nyquil/airplane glue combo. might I point out that the heat wave in Europe is anything but funny. 3,000 dead in France, alone? That deserves a rim shot?… THE ALPS ARE MELTING!
“Last time I looked, Texas had no glaciers, so we really can’t compare the heat waves in the highly intellectual ‘my thermometer is bigger than yours’ motif.”
Here then are some passages from a piece in the British Observer on how this summer’s heat hit one spot in Europe. The piece highlights a problem facing any restaurateur in the area wishing to serve those tall glasses of ice water — the ice is, in fact disappearing. (David Rose, Record heatwave closes Mont Blanc to tourists, Dramatic proof of global warming as peaks begin to crumble in high temperatures and snowline retreats):
“This year, for the first time since its conquest in 1786, the heatwave has made western Europe’s highest peak too dangerous to climb. Mont Blanc is closed.
“The conditions have been so extreme, say glaciologists and climate experts, and the retreat of the Alps’ eternal snows and glaciers so pronounced, that the range – and its multi-billion-pound tourist industry – may never fully recover. The freak weather, with no substantial snowfall since February, means pylons holding up ski-lifts and cable cars may be too dangerous to use next winter, while the transformation of shining mountains into heaps of grey scree and rubble is unlikely to persuade tourists there this summer to return.
“Dr Jonathan Bamber [expert in glaciology] said, ‘People don’t seem prepared to take real notice of [global warming] and start to press for something to be done until it affects their own backyard and livelihood. What’s happened to the Alps this year is almost an allegory for the kind of events that may take place elsewhere.'”
(And by the way, if you read the whole piece, there’s quite a striking global list of extreme weather events at the end.)
As it turns out though, the Post‘s suggestion may come in handy for the British in the future, for “global warming” is a kind of scientific misnomer — if, at least, it leads you to think that every part of the earth will simply to experience ever hotter temperatures. As the British Independent reports (Severin Carrell, Britain ‘may face sudden Ice Age):
“Britain may be basking in one of the hottest summers on record, but scientists now fear that the UK could face an abrupt switch to freezing winters and Icelandic summers. Leading global warming experts suspect that climate change, instead of being a gradual and largely predictable process, could mean that Europe’s weather patterns will worsen severely with very little warning.
“At any time after 2010, their research suggests, Britain’s average temperature could drop by up to 5C within as little as three or four years – with catastrophic results for farming, transport, northern towns and tourism.
“‘It would wreck agriculture the way we know it now,’ [Professor Jochem Marotze, one of Europe’s leading oceanographers] said. Many scientists now believe that rapidly increasing CO2 emissions will exacerbate the natural cycle of hot and cold weather that led to the mini Ice Age of the 17th century by severely affecting natural ocean currents.”
If correct, that means ice, if not ice water, for England which is, after all, half the battle. And the British, as I’m sure the Post‘s editorial writers would be quick to point out, aren’t really the sorts of whiners the French are — and don’t they have a tradition of hot toddies to support them through rough patches of cold weather anyway? And what would they have to complain about when Alaskans don’t complain about much colder weather, right? (Oh actually, let me correct that. In our global warming world, Alaska’s just had a bizarre “winter” of warmth, mudslides, melting permafrost, and the like.)
Now admittedly even the scientists are guessing. Nobody can know the future, but let’s consider the fact that scientists are generally a cautious lot. So if they’re worry about catastrophic global weather effects, perhaps we should be freaking out as did the Guardian‘s George Monbiot in a fierce column (see below) last week on the state we should all truly be in right now and the kind of “dream world” we instead find ourselves in. In a piece also included below, Paul Rogers, the very down-to-earth analyst for the openDemocracy website, offers his own cautious assessment of where we are right now on climate change and how it might affect our future in the reasonably near term.
Only when he writes, “One effect of the recent northern hemisphere heatwaves has been to make people think seriously once again about climate change, at a time of further evidence that such a phenomenon is already with us – and on a global scale,” is he obviously wrong — when, at least, it comes to this country. In our increasingly fundamentalist land, where the religious heat seems to be rising, plenty of people are concerned with “end time” and the “last days” — and as far as I can tell most of them would be proud as hell to face them from the driver’s seat of the sort of SUV where, if you tripped while descending, you might well break a leg in the fall. This country seems remarkably sanguine about the actual “end time” that does threaten rather than the Biblically prophesied one. (Why at least aren’t they considered one and the same?)
But really, folks, what ever happened to the American “empathy gene”? I don’t mean to say that Americans aren’t willing to offer help (as we saw copiously in New York and other cities during the blackout), but our inability to imagine the situations of others, or what exactly we’re contributing to the dire situation of our planet, or what our own situation might be like the day after tomorrow, since we are, to the best of my knowledge, actually located on the same planet, is somewhat mind-boggling. And on this, to make a vast generalization, no one seems more sanguine than the American media.
I’ve been thinking a bit about this ever since my website disappeared into the great blackout of 2003 and I was left feeling remarkably helpless. You would think that considering the blackout and its costs, both human and financial after only a couple of days, a great shudder would have gone through the country. It went through me at least. After all, beyond the details about grids and electricity, the event revealed to us a vision of our own future helplessness, of exactly how fragile our seemingly solid world actually is. Maureen Dowd in her column in the New York Times ( Batteries Not Included) started to approach this lightly (“New York took on a retro tone Thursday, gamely going back to batteries, relying on ice blocks to cool food and transistor radios to hear news. Without a blow-dryer, the usually sleek CNN anchor Paula Zahn was relegated to bedhead waves.”), but then veered off.
Sarah Wolfe and Thomas Homer-Dixon writing in the Toronto Globe & Mail (The matrix of our troubles) began to get at it a bit in discussing the “fragility or the ‘brittleness’ of the grid — a combination of its complexity, interconnectedness, and uncertainty — made it increasingly vulnerable to ‘sudden, massive failures with catastrophic consequences.'” They add:
“The blackout on Thursday was a sharp reminder of how electricity has insinuated its way into every corner of our lives. When the power goes down, air conditioners and elevators won’t work — but that’s obvious. On Thursday, we were reminded that traffic signals, portable phones, automatic tellers, debit-card machines, electronic hotel-room doors, electric garage doors, and almost all our clocks won’t work either. And the most disconcerting disruption was the loss of the constant flow of information we’ve become hooked on.
“Television, e-mail, and — worst of all — the Web all failed. We couldn’t tell what was happening. Darkness fell in mid-afternoon. People phoned B.C. or California to find out what was going on in the East — our acquaintances there at least had TV. Other people clustered around cars that boomed out all-news radio.”
But there was little enough writing of this sort and no one I saw made the connection to global warming (just as few connected the event to the catastrophe of Iraq which holds before us a vision, induced by Saddam and the U.S., of what the world might look like after the “grid” of all our lives collapsed). Imagine our “solid” world once the disruptions of global warming truly hit. I’m thinking Soylent Green here (for those few of you who saw that miserable sci fi flick a few decades back, several images from which nonetheless managed to lodge in my brain).
The strangeness of a country in which a sizeable proportion of citizens have their eyes focused on the “last days” but turned away from the “last days” that are likely to actually strike their own children or grandchildren, is less than encouraging. The urge to look away in this country is striking — and it’s no less frightening to contemplate what happens when such a population, as on September 11, 2001, is suddenly forced to look at a vision which seems to impinge on those last days — we did, after all, dub the site of the destroyed towers in New York “ground zero,” previously a term for the spot where a nuclear explosion takes place.
I include below a piece by Harvey Wasserman on why the blackout was utterly predictable, why it will happen again, and what might (but won’t) be done about it. He may be somewhat optimistic about the capacity of largely ignored renewable energy technologies to immediately change the situation, even under the best of circumstances, but he’s certainly right in his approach. What else is there, after all? But most Americans are not looking — and at some level they know they’re not looking. Perhaps the view from the heights of superpowerdom or from behind the wheel of that new pickup/SUV combo, is simply, counterintuitively, too threatening. Tom
With eyes wide shut
By George Monbiot
The Guardian
August 12, 2003We live in a dream world. With a small, rational part of the brain, we recognise that our existence is governed by material realities, and that, as those realities change, so will our lives. But underlying this awareness is the deep semi-consciousness that absorbs the moment in which we live, then generalises it, projecting our future lives as repeated instances of the present. This, not the superficial world of our reason, is our true reality. All that separates us from the indigenous people of Australia is that they recognise this and we do not.
Our dreaming will, as it has begun to do already, destroy the conditions necessary for human life on Earth. Were we governed by reason, we would be on the barricades today, dragging the drivers of Range Rovers and Nissan Patrols out of their seats, occupying and shutting down the coal-burning power stations
To read more Monbiot click here
The challenge of global climate change
By Paul Rogers
Open Democracy
August 13, 2003Western Europe in July and August 2003 has experienced some of the highest temperatures ever recorded. Records have been broken in Germany, France, Britain, and Croatia. Portugal has experienced major forest fires, people have died of heatstroke in Italy, and in France the Beaujolais wine harvest began this week, comfortably beating the 110-year old record for an early harvest.
In North America, especially in Canada, forest fires have also been a major problem. British Columbia has been the worst affected province, losing large tracts of commercial timber in a region already seriously affected by pine beetle infestations. The pine beetle problem is actually much worse than that of the forest fires but the irony is that it is also climate-related – the lack of severe winters in recent years has meant that more beetles have survived through to the following summers.
To read more Rogers click here
The Latest Bogus Fossil-Nuke Blackout: This Grid Should Not Exist
by Harvey Wasserman
Commondreams
August 16, 2003This is the fourth—and worst—completely unnecessary major blackout of the Northeast in forty years, dating back to 1965.
It’s scope—from Detroit to Ottawa to New York and New Jersey—is absolutely awesome, especially since it’s due to total stupidity and corruption.
This does not count the blackouts that raged through California in 2000-2001. Those were “blackmails,” set by Enron and the other Bush gas cronies to rip $60 billion out of the state, leading to, among other things, the impending ouster of Gov. Gray Davis.
When the lights went out, Davis kissed the feet of Southern California Edison’s John Bryson, who engineered a deregulation bill that gouged $30 billion out of the ratepayers for the state’s failed nukes. That opened the gates for the gas pirates to steal yet another $60 billion. Davis got caught in the backdraft.
Harvey Wasserman is author of THE LAST ENERGY WAR and senior editor of www.freepress.org.