I would like to dedicate this entry to the late David Koch, capitalist royalty from my wife's hometown of Wichita, the Libertarian Party's 1980 nominee for vice president, and funder of multiple conservative-to-libertarian think tanks that churn out reams of climate-denier propaganda. The news of his death—from natural causes, not by guillotine—certainly doesn't sadden me, but I'm not exactly celebrating. His dying will not bring an end to the international neoliberal nightmare in which he and brother Charles have played a starring role.

A glance at Koch's wiki entry reminds us that, odious as he may have been on far too many issues, he continued to hold some libertarian positions that even Greens could appreciate.

Will the circumstances of the disbursement of his billions will be announced? Stay tuned.

*****

Last night I was one of dozens of Angry Tweeters after seeing the news about the Democratic National Committee's resolution to conduct a presidential debate dedicated to climate disruption. Here is my bit from last week concerning this matter. The Resolutions Committee voted 17-8 against the measure. I am less angry this morning, as the full picture emerges, but still ready & rarin' to rag on the chicken-shit Democratic leadership.

The Sunrise Movement reports that the resolution may still face a vote of the entire DNC, where it has a chance of passing. Sunrise remains cautiously optimistic, given that the Resolutions Committee did pass an amendment to the resolution which would allow two or more candidates to appear together in events that the DNC does not directly sanction—e.g., outside of the televised debates. The amendment was then voted down along with the resolution itself, so nothing has changed on that front.

As Sunrise's statement implies, the optimism stems from seeing people-power in action, from Sunrisers themselves exerting real and sustained pressure on policy-makers. You and I may believe that the Sunrisers are barking up a hearing-impaired tree, but I love that these teens and 20-somethings are learning first hand where the ropes are and how to pull them. So I remain optimistic about their dedication to this issue and, by extension, to every issue connected to it.

These young people get it. They understand that climate is not the same as weather (unlike two different climate-denier debate coaches they mentioned). They know who Greta Thunberg is and understand the importance of Climate Strike, a version of which they plan to  conduct on Friday 20 September. They can give examples of intersectionality as it relates to the climate crisis. They also get that not everyone in their schools will have the depth and breadth of knowledge that they do, but they have the will and the patience to explain this multi-faceted issue.

Back in 2016, former Vice President Al Gore came to Houston to deliver the two-day Climate Reality Project speaker training, and Kayleen signed up for it. She got to spend some time with one of her heroes: She had shown excerpts from An Inconvenient Truth to her World Geography students back in her teaching days.

Gore, a Democrat to his very marrow, became less of a hero in her eyes when he came out in favor of his old friend Hillary Clinton in her quest for the presidency. The whole movement lost its luster as Kayleen discovered that the overwhelming majority of those present for the training placed their faith in the Democratic Party and its candidates to solve the impending climate crisis. Cuz we know that President Barack Obama dedicated his entire eight years in the White House to reversing climate change, starting at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009--NOT!

So Kayleen, dejected, never did any Climate Reality speaking gigs. As consolation she did meet a new friend who came to the training from Zimbabwe, and who is now studying climate science in Paris. So we may have someone to visit if we ever make it to France.

None of the text below, which mentions several Democrats by name, is meant to imply that I'm turning into a Democrat. Generally, I vote for Democrats in local races in which there is no Green running. I will promote candidates and elected office-holders whose views I find genuinely progressive—regardless of how the Democratic Party establishment may treat them, regardless of occasional votes that seem at odds with the progressive agenda. I will defend them from baseless smears propagated by any party or media outlet. (Your findings of progressivity may vary, and that's OK: even Greens don't agree on everything.)

Color this old Greenie impressed. The City of Houston appears to get it, and the City's chief sustainability officer obviously does.

Last night at the Metropolitan Multi-Service Center, Lara Cottingham gave what I perceived as a stellar presentation regarding Houston's governmental efforts to stay in compliance with the targets of the Paris Climate Accord. The principal target, to which more than 400 US municipalities of various sizes have committed, is net carbon neutrality by 2050. Here is the PDF of the PowerPoint that she has used at a series of community meetings.

You may know that our alleged president unilaterally withdrew the United States from the 2015 agreement. The Republican-controlled 114th Congress never acceded to President Obama's wish that the Accord be given the force of a treaty, so His Orangitude and his oil-soaked cronies decided in 2017 to ditch it. However, cities and states have gone out of their way to affirm their commitment to the agreement and actually do something about it—including our own Petro Metro, under the leadership of Mayor Sylvester Turner.

In the ensuing months, the City came up with a plan and gave it the no-nonsense name "City of Houston Climate Action Plan." Cottingham announced last night, as she has at other community meetings, that implementation of the CAP is scheduled to begin in late 2020.

Through a somewhat fortuitous set of circumstances, I find myself at work an hour earlier than usual. Suffice to say that the cable is out at home, I woke up at 1 am, I was unable to get back to sleep, and after reading the first chapter of Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution I had the urge to blog. So instead of seeking out an early-morning coffee hut with dodgy wi-fi, I headed to the office.

Apologies if this entry is a sprawling mess, but it's not easy to keep big-picture observations short and tidy.

This past week-plus, instead of posting individual entries on individual news items, I waited until all the items congealed into a gestalt before commenting on them here. The gestalt in question has one of the items at its focal point: all the saber-rattling and other hubbub over Venezuela.

Since yesterday, I've seen some grumbling on Green Party Facebook pages about this recent development. Greens are not complaining so much about A. Ocasio Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and the Sunrise Movement staging a protest rally in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's office at the Capitol. What rankles them is that progressive Democrats are misappropriating the "Green New Deal" language that Jill Stein made the centerpiece of her presidential campaigns.

Also seen: Democrats wringing their hands about AOC and Tlaib upsetting the party establishment, virtually assuring that they won't get any committee assignments, let alone the ones they might want. If Pelosi et al. are that invested in bipartisanship and that petty about Progressives trying to shake things up a bit, that will reveal them as the Republicans in Democrat clothing they really are. Are the establishment Democrats smart enough to recognize that, though?

Sure, I would love to see these Democrats give full credit where it's due, tipping their hats to Stein and the Green Movement. If Green New Deal policies actually get implemented in full, without acknowledgment of their architects, I for one won't complain. We need to move forward on averting climate catastrophe with all due haste. Even if the Democratic Caucus adopts it but cannot get it past the Senate, I'll salute them for trying.

However, if the Democrats in Congress propose a watered-down version of the Green New Deal, fuck 'em. If they even try to include Cap & Trade language, fuck 'em harder.

Starting with a compromise, rather than battling toward one, is exactly why Democrats lose, both on Capitol Hill and in our polling places. On the issue of anthropomorphic climate disruption, science tells us that we have no space or time for compromise.

Saturday Activism
Despite what you've heard, not everything is big in Texas. We have a fiercely persistent progressive activist community in this state, including in its largest city. But for all its vim and vigor, it's tiny. That's why it's such a gas to see people other than the usual crew showing up at protest events.

San Francisco had about 30,000 people from literally all over the world show up for the Peoples Climate Movement's Rise for Climate, Jobs, and Justice rally Saturday.

Houston had about 60, from all over Metro Houston, but few or none from Third Ward where the rally took place.
​
We came together by the stage in the back of the Emancipation Park Community Center. I got some props from the organizers for riding my bike there; fortunately the weather was suitable for cycling, if a bit hot. We took turns making speeches and didn't march anywhere. Climate change or something has apparently made it too hot to march, even after Labor Day.

Harvey has drifted off to the northeast, still moving slowly, dumping a zillion gallons per hour on the Piney Woods of Texas and Louisiana. We have clear to partly cloudy conditions here in South-Central Houston today; yesterday, in light to moderate rainfall, I was helping a friend and his family move lots of stuff out of their flood-damaged home and surveying where Brays Bayou had lapped over some of its bridges inside Loop 610.

The university where I work remains closed, with classes canceled, but I will likely make a trip into the office to take care of some overdue business. Before that, however, I wanted to post this as an add-on to Monday's entry.

There has certainly been no shortage of articles, from various web publications, about the exact topic of Monday's entry. I wanted to link to just a few of those here.

Here's a pretty good piece from Ana Campoy and David Yanofsky on Quartz.

Naturally, Dahr Jamail weighs in on the climate angle, his specialty, for Truthout.

And at least one contributor thought it appropriate to mention the twin scourges of climate disruption and suburban development in the Wikipedia entry for Hurricane Harvey.

All for now.

Friday night, as Hurricane Harvey was pulling ashore near Matagorda Bay, we got a little rain here in Greater H-Town. It wasn't enough to scare my visiting brother into packing up his three sons and his new ladyfriend and all their stuff to leave town ahead of their scheduled Saturday morning departure. The Friday night meet & greet proceeded as planned; they rolled out of our sister's driveway early Saturday and arrived safely in Pennsylvania last night. The boys presumably made it to the first day of school this morning.

Meanwhile, here in Southeast Texas, we are not having school this week. Thanks to Tropical Marathon Summer Shower Harvey, in many places, the water is too high even for a school bus to get safely through. Area districts will resume (or in some cases start classes) the Tuesday after Labor Day. My own employer, a small private university, just now announced that it is closed for the entire week. (My director just texted to say that we'd soon have more news on extended closure soon.)

Most businesses are closed; social media outlets are useful for informing us which are actually open. Metro service is suspended, although yesterday I saw an Out of Service bus on Scott Street, presumably taking people to a storm shelter. Some surrounding communities are under mandatory evacuation. There are far fewer cars and trucks on our streets than usual, but yesterday on a reconnaissance walk I witnessed people parking their vehicles on Scott where it crosses Brays Bayou, getting out, and taking video of the high and rushing water.

Stormy Thoughts and Tweets

Hey Lee & Jill, I love you guys, but it's not certain whether we can pin the blame for Harvey on Anthropogenic Climate Disruption. While my neighbors and I endure this unprecedented amount of moisture, I have been careful not to kvetch on my social networks about climate change and those who enable it.

Presumably, according to the scientific consensus, ACD is to blame for our planet having more frequent, more intense, and wetter tropical cyclones. The amount of precipitation from Harvey breaks all records locally, but a lot of folks around Alvin still talk about 1979, Victoria about 1998, even if they don't remember that storms by name (Claudette and—well, Victoria's storm didn't even have a name).

​However, just as Katrina was a man-made disaster in 2005, I see Harvey as a continuation of a man-made disaster that has spanned multiple years. With Katrina, the lack of evacuation infrastructure and the inadequate structural integrity of the levees killed more people and caused more misery in Greater New Orleans than the storm itself. You could also throw in the loss of wetlands and mangrove patches in coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, wetlands that would have absorbed a lot of the rain.

In the ever-expanding Houston metropolitan area, we've lost some wetlands too. More importantly, we've been losing prairies. To the northwest, west, southwest, and south of the city, developers have been turning those prairies (as well as the old rice farms) into subdivisions. There is far less permeable ground in the watersheds of the bayous that flow from those prairies. The subdivisions discharge their treated sewage back into the bayous. Downstream, older neighborhoods that formerly flooded never or very seldom have had devastating floods four times in the last three years.

Meanwhile, inside the Loop and just beyond it, older single-family homes and duplexes with yards (aka, affordable housing) have been razed and replaced with omnipresent, butt-ugly, multi-story townhomes on big concrete slabs with token vegetation deployed here and there (aka, profitable housing).

Bigger, Faster, Stupider
The connection between development (which is not exactly new) and the recent flooding is officially controversial, as this article notes. Even stupid development is not new: Just ask the folks who bought in Cy-Fair–area subdivisions like Norchester and Ravensway, both situated right along Cypress Creek.

But there are reasons, other than the Attwater's Prairie Chicken, for concerned citizens having fought against development of the Katy Prairie and the construction of the Grand Parkway for so many years. Even Republican candidates for elective office havepublicly and vociferously opposed the Grand Parkway, which has kicked the sprawl machine into top gear. Just as the oil & gas companies are now resorting to high-risk strategies like tar sands, deepwater drilling, and hydrofracking, the housing mafia has begun gobbling up the most vulnerable lands that might protect the area from Harvey-esque catastrophic flooding.

The painful part for me is that I have friends who live and work in that sprawl—e.g., teaching the children of the Sprawlites. One of them posted photos yesterday of Seven Lakes High School, which over the weekend has turned into One Lake.

Inside the city, the builders may be building for density, but they're doing it stupidly and maliciously. Townhomes and luxury mid-rises are pushing out students, working folk, and families who have lived in their neighborhoods for generations but can no longer afford the property taxes on their over-valued bungalows. The ultimate insult is the new Grey House and River Oaks District, which I've blogged about previously: a new-urbanism-style luxury apartment village with luxury boutiques on the ground floor, where rents start at if-you-have-to-ask-you-can't-afford-it. (OK, it's actually about $1,700 for a 1-1.)

Rather than continue wallowing here, I may have some real wallowing to do today. I'll post a follow-up tomorrow or the next day.

I wanted to write something long and tortured about Our Alleged President's announcement that the US would be "leaving Paris"—i.e., withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. But I just couldn't. Apoplexy. Yes, it's a non-binding agreement, and the US would have totally fudged on attainment because we have a long history of flouting treaties and international agreements. But given all the work that went into Paris after President Obama's limp appearance at Copenhagen in 2009, given the European nations' commitment to the goals of the accord, given that members of the Cabinet and White House staff lobbied against pulling out, this decision is galling at best.

As with Brexit, there are too many aspects to this story even to form a coherent picture even in above-average minds. Several of the articles I have read have omitted several of those aspects. I'm not even going to try covering the implications of the Paris Pullout, much as I would like to.

So instead, I did a little upkeep on this website. In particular, I updated the Web Links page, adding links to the YouTube channels to which I subscribe. Because when modern life overwhelms you, there's always TV (or its Internet equivalents). Please enjoy these links responsibly.