Remember what Al Gore said about Greenland in "An Inconvenient Truth"? It's happening. https://t.co/2p5Dpr2QAE
— David Bruce Collins □☮ (@dbcgreentx) August 2, 2019
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.)
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.)
With all that in mind, here are some scattershots assembled into my only post of this week, which almost form a coherent narrative.
That's all I got. Have a good weekend.
- I didn't watch any of the Democratic presidential debates, although I did catch some slices of it from Progressive analysts on Twitter and Facebook. I absolutely loathe how the mass media have turned the presidential election into a reality-show distraction from actual issues, and expanded it to fill almost two entire years while other western democracies limit the campaigns to a few months. However, as expected, those same mass media outlets are doing what they can to suppress candidates who dare to criticize the US Empire, particularly Sen. Bernard Sanders and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
- The Exxon Olefins plant in Baytown had its second fiery explosion of this calendar year, with 66 injuries reported. A radius of several miles around Baytown and the was under shelter-in-place orders for a while. Harris County went right to work suing ExxonMobil for Clean Air Act violations, as have at least two employees for safety violations. Too-often-overlooked Senatorial candidate Sema Hernández, who lives near Refinery Row, has been keeping up the information flow via Twitter. Recently enacted policy allows the County Attorney's Office (currently headed by Democrat Vince Ryan) to file such suits without authorization from Commissioners Court. One wonders if Ryan would have shown this level of fortitude under Ed Emmett and the Republican-majority Commissioners, given the same latitude, as he has under rookie Judge Lina Hidalgo's new Democratic-majority crew. One also wonders...why isn't ExxonMobil's explosive malfeasance getting bigtime coverage on the cable "news" outlets?
- And speaking of national media ignoring environmental calamities, why isn't the melting of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) receiving wall-to-wall coverage? The melting is nothing new, but the record-breaking heatwave that has set the Arctic on fire is accelerating it. I do wish that there were some consistency in the estimates of how much fresh water this melt will release into the North Atlantic: I have seen estimates ranging from 10 billion to 65 billion US gallons. Whatever the actual total, we're talking mega-fucktons. There's some pretty dramatic video, as seen in the tweet embedded above.
That's all I got. Have a good weekend.
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