08-01-2022, 01:13 PM
(08-01-2022, 11:52 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:(07-31-2022, 01:52 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(07-31-2022, 02:58 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: We talk a lot of smack about boomers around these parts (including me sometimes), but my boomer mentors taught me one very important lesson growing up: the coming years will be hard on everyone, and will call for self-sacrifice and austerity**, but never forget what those sacrifices are for. At the end of the day, the only world worth fighting for is a world where people have the freedom to express themselves and pursue what inspires them. Regardless of what side of politics you fall on, I hope we can all agree on at least that much.
**both right wing calls for balanced budgets and left wing calls to combat global warming require austerity, and honestly...both have a point.
The Hard Right cares not a whit for balanced budgets when they can instead have crony capitalism which is the best thing possible for plutocratic profit -- with of course the privatization of everything possible to rapacious monopolists and the degradation of workers' rights and the denial of any responsibility of the economic elites for peace (wars for profit can be extremely attractive to reckless and rapacious elites) environmental or social viability of the economic order. Such implies huge sacrifices of the masses for questionable ends, but those are sacrifices. The call for great sacrifices can have a very dark side, and you can predict how badly they will work.
The suppression of global warming (as well as other injustices such as human trafficking, only the worst of those injustices; as I see it there is nothing wrong with human trafficking that well-performed hangings can't solve) will require some sacrifices, but those sacrifices will be necessary if we are not to have a Crisis Era that makes the last one look like a holiday festival for Humanity. Today we see something like Stalin's collectivization of Soviet agriculture and the Nazi Holocaust as not only immoral but even worse, absurd.
Global warming will inundate huge areas of alluvial farmland and desertify much of the world's wheat-fields* that now produces a huge part of the world's food supply. Agriculture and peasant farmers may not be glamorous to over-educated bureaucrats and college professors, but they are the ones who feed the non-farmers in much of the world. The peasant farmers of Bengal may barely feed themselves, so they are particularly vulnerable. Does anyone want to relocate huge numbers of peasant farmers?
Agriculture is the foundation of all economic activity, and when it fails, then so does everything else. Many problems have techno-fixes, but hunger does not. Famines will lead to the failures of political systems and the rise of extremist ideologies that could be even more murderous and warlike than Nazism. The line between people generally being well fed and enduring horrific famines is quite narrow.
To protect ourselves from the worst consequences of global warming we will need to reduce dependency upon gas-guzzling motor vehicles and eschew conspicuous consumption. In view of the technology we do not need to own as much stuff as we used to. You can read a classic book out of a Kindle that you have put into something that simulates a book. You may not need a large library of video and music. Indeed you may even be able to live in an inside apartment with a fake window that offers art work or a fake view far better than anything in the area. You could have virtual reality that simulates a road trip. Such is the opposite of conspicuous consumption.
*Wheat is the crop grown in the driest farmlands suitable to intense agriculture in such countries as Spain, Morocco, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine that are most vulnerable to desertification if rising temperatures do not come with rising rainfall.
When it comes to gas guzzling cars, we can switch to electric but that will takes lots of time. Shouldn't we take steps to reduce auto dependency as well, because the congestion will still be there? While we're at it, do you feel that high speed rail, the darling of the transportation world in much of Europe and Asia, will ever take off here in the US and also Canada?
What is "a long time"? It took little time for compact discs to replace vinyl discs for recorded music, DVD's to replace VHS tapes in the marketplace, or for flat-screen TV's to supplant CRT-based TV's. If there is enough prosperity, good times kill obsolete technologies. DVD and Blue-Ray coexist in part because many poor people have yet to upgrade to DVD and because much recorded video isat as high a level of definition as is possible (most black-and-white movies and video made for TV broadcasts) that Blue-Ray is no improvement. It would be difficult for me to consider replacing a complete set of The Honeymooners, a 1950's comedy series, with Blue-Ray... or even Taxi.
General Motors has stated that beginning with the 2035 it will make no gas-powered vehicles The typical gas buggy being sold today has an expected life of about twelve years. Twelve years seems like a long time (he model year begins in September of the previous year) so on the average a gas buggy now sold new will be scrapped by then.
It's up to customers to decide whether to buy an electric vehicle of a gas buggy between now and then. I expect the economy to have a deep downturn between now and then, and Obama's Cash for Clunkers could work to get gas-powered cars off the road and into the scrapyard. By 2035 if one did not replace one's car in the usual attrition of aging vehicles one will find high taxes and reduced availability as incentives to abandon gas-powered vehicles. (This will likely also apply to golf carts and lawn mowers).
Will Boomers lead the way in this change? Hardly. They are now old enough that they will range from 73 to 92 when GM (and likely nobody else) manufactures "gas buggies" any more. The last generation of Americans to have clear memories of people who lived in the horse-and-buggy days will often be in a nursing home or a grave when the "gas buggy" is retired as an object of manufacture. i am one of those Boomers. If I should buy a new car or a used car less than five years old, then that is likely the last vehicle that I will buy. I turn 67 in December. A hint on that: there was a point at which I would never ride in the car if my mother was driving. She was a moderate speeder, and usually adjusted her speed for conditions of the road. She failed to adapt to her slowing reflexes. I insisted that she cut back her speed by ten miles per hour on the open road if she wanted me as a passenger.
I am now a marginal driver. I have unusually slow reflexes and sleep apnea. Ideally I would move to some place with good public transportation (like Chicago) except that I would be priced into the dangerous South Side. I can't imagine my driving getting any better, and I am taking frequent road trips to make sure that I see things that I want to see while I have a chance. The police have stopped me twice for suspected DUI... and I was not drinking or using drugs. If I am starting to fall asleep while driving I usually get about a two minute warning and I pull over. The local police know me well for this.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
