"All over town the stressed hum of windowbox air conditioner fans buzzed like giant mosquitos."
3/n
"Wails of dismay cut the air, coming from the rooftop across the street. Cries of distress, young women leaning over the wall calling down to the street. Someone on that roof was not waking up."
4/n
"Then the sound of the air conditioners cut off. More cries of distress."
5/n
"The air, already bad, would soon be a blanket of exhaust."
6/n
"We need to go get help, the whole district has lost power, we have to tell them in Lucknow. We have to get doctors here."
7/n
"For now, take the old ones and the little ones into rooms with air conditioning. The schools would have A/C, the government house. Go to those places. Follow the sound of generators."
8/n
"For now, get to the school. Get inside, find some A/C somewhere. Get the old ones and the little ones out of this. But there’s nowhere! Then it came to him. 'Go to the lake! Get in the water!'"
9/n
"Frank walked down streets toward the lake...Metal surfaces in the sun burned to the touch, he could see heat waves bouncing over them like air over a barbeque."
10/n
"He went to the curving concrete road that bordered the lake on this side, crouched and stuck his arm in up to the elbow. It was indeed as warm as a bath, or almost. He kept his arm in, trying to decide if the water was cooler or hotter than his body."
11/n
"It was an open question how many of the townspeople could fit in the lake. Not enough. It was said the town’s population was two hundred thousand."
12/n
"He went back to the compound, into the clinic on the ground floor. Up to his room on the next floor, huffing and puffing. It would be easiest to lie there and wait it out."
13/n
"He checked the particulate meter on the wall: 1300 ppm. This for fine particulates, 25 nanometers and smaller."
14/n
"He tried to fill the generator’s gas tank and found it was already full. He put the can of gas back in the closet, took the generator to the corner of the room where the window with the air conditioner was. The windowbox A/C had a short cord."
15/n
"But it...wouldn’t do to run the generator out on the street below the window; it would surely be snatched. People were desperate."
16/n
If you've read this far, you're into the text. Screenshots only follow.
If this is how @SpeakerPelosi and @TheDemocrats are going to message climate change—"framed" or *hidden behind marginal issues like "habitat" or "clean air, clean water" or even "health" or "morals"—we are going to get KILLED once the fight begins.
THREAD
I know these "frames" poll well in focus groups. But in the field they are ineffective, as experience has shown time and time again.
They are ineffective because they are *decontextualized*. They fail to account for political opposition and the effects of disinformation.
2/n
Even selling climate action as a jobs creator, while powerful in political campaigns (which are largely won and lost on promises of increasing prosperity), will fail once the policy fight begins.
Why?
Again, because it fails to account for opposition and disinformation.
3/n
"If this president makes good on his threats to undermine [the] election...many of us will be called to pour into the streets and face the brutality of Trump’s goons. This thought makes me feel ground down and frightened, not brave and defiant."
"In middle age I’ve started to envy those like Lewis who are able to believe in God.
But something I take from reading about the lives of civil rights heroes is that confidence didn’t always precede action. Sometimes it was action’s result."
2/n
"The first time Lewis was arrested, 'a lifetime of absorbed taboos against any kind of trouble with the law quickened into terror.' But on the ride to jail, 'dread gave way to an exhilaration unlike any he had ever known.'"
3/n
Reading @mashagessen's book, Surviving Autocracy, which helps us understand Trumpism historically and theoretically.
Want to note this passage: Hilter began to consolidate power by restricting the press and "expanding the powers of the police" to "detain people w/out charges."
Gessen makes the point that like "no president before him" Trump views "government with contempt" (30). But it strikes me that contempt for govt has been right-wing ideology since the 80's!
Yet as an ideology that hid the real ways right-wingers just used the govt to transfer wealth upward, contempt for govt was less an expression of intellectual principles and more a justiciation for dismantling the welfare state.
This past week Biden gave a major speech about his plan to put fighting #ClimateChange at the center of America's post-Covid recovery.
Foolishly I assumed that the Sunday shows would have discussed this speech today.
How stupid of me. They didn't even mention it.
THREAD
Usually when my research assistant tells me that the broadcast news has failed to cover a climate story, I will do back-channel outreach and then, if that's ignored, @EndClimtSilence will take to Twitter to call out anchors and producers for their climate silence.
2/n
But I'm not going to do that today. I am exhausted. And I am filled with a sense of foreboding, since I've seen this happen before.
When I was first active on Twitter, I wrote a thread about attending a 2015 speech Hillary Clinton gave about climate & manufacturing.👇