Ok. *cracks knuckles* 😂

First of all: I think that the future is clearly electric vehicles. One of the best things about EVs that people seem to ignore is that they're totally fuel agnostic. This is going to be important as resources are harder to get and afford.

https://twitter.com/MsLingonberry/status/1804847052695781560

You can charge an EV directly off solar or wind or hydro, or you can generate electricity from combustion in a billion different ways, depending upon what's available. Batteries are getting smaller and charge faster; this seems to be on a path to continue no matter what.

Sure. I think it's going to be one of the big hot button cultural issues of the century - people who can afford to just up stakes and move trying to predict where to go so they get there before the peasants and can enjoy their own prescience behind fences.

It won't work. 😂

https://twitter.com/DellaLuna/status/1804686651496562878

A few years ago, a buddy paid me a small sum to "climate consult" on a property in Minnesota or Wisconsin or some such place he was thinking of buying. He sent me maps and photos and I looked up relevant information in public records, tried to get a feel for the area.

That job interview thing has got me thinking now about all the blind spots I must have as a 6'3" burly cishet white dude with resting murder face - the things I'm totally oblivious to. I mean, at least I know I have em, which is maybe more than a lot of cishet white dudes. I remember my ex telling me that if she sat at the bus stop, dudes would pull up and ask her how much and shit like that, and I was astounded, because I'd never once seen that happen. Or rather, I'd probably never noticed it. It was genuinely shocking to me.

You'll often hear pundits these days say the public have "lost their faith" in politics, as though it's a character deficit on our part.

But the truth is that the public has lost our faith in politicians for the same reason Catholic altar boys have lost their faith in priests. The majority of Americans of any party support universal healthcare. Most Brits think power, water and public transport should be given back to public ownership and that Britain should rejoin the EU.

And yet these things are largely off the table for politicians.

So let's talk about where people should and shouldn't live, because it's something people have said to me a lot for years: "Nobody should live in Phoenix/Las Vegas in the first place."

It's an extremely silly thing to say, of course, even if it's true. When the Paiute discovered the tiny oasis that gives Vegas its name (The Meadows), I'm pretty sure they didn't think "One day white men will come from across the ocean and millions of them will move here because it's cheaper than California, which also doesn't exist yet."

If you're in a place facing heat waves right now and you're not sure what to do about it, here's what's kept me alive in over twenty years running around in the Mojave, in equatorial Africa, and even on the London Tube in summer. 😂 The danger creeps up on you. It's not like being in the cold. You'll think you're fine, then you'll just feel a little weird and light-headed and then you'll pass out or stroke out. Do not assume you can just power through it. Baby, you absolutely can't. You need...

I'm not one to belabor a clever metaphor, but I just keep thinking about my riff on how money is the magic that changes No to Yes, and I keep thinking about collapse and chaos and who will really be harmed the most by it... because I don't think it's as obvious as it seems. Whenever I'm in one of my depressive nihilistic moods, I'm fond of saying things like: fuck it, let it all fall down, the economy, the political systems, all of it. Let it crumble and let's sack the ruins and salvage a better future from it.

This always results in a scolding.

I wanna expand on something I told Martin Shkreli last night. He asked me if I thought rich people couldn't understand life from anyone else's perspective, and I said: after a certain point, yes. I quoted @Richard_Kadrey at him: "Money is the magic anyone can do." Money is a magic that turns No into Yes. That's really it. The richer you are, the more No turns to Yes for you, until eventually your entire existence is pretty much entirely made of Yes. And after a while, you think Yes is what the whole world is made of.

You forget No.

The funniest part about that post you're all so mad about is that I randomly picked pharma as an industry. It could have been widgets. Life-saving widgets. Doesn't matter. Most of you seem to have missed the point entirely. Capitalism has no duty to anyone but capitalists. And just because you wanna suck off a capitalist in hopes of being one, if your income is derived from a salary instead of your capital gains, you're labor. You're a laborer, same as me, same as my dad the retired carpenter, same as your plumber.

So let's imagine a scenario of how capitalism actually works, kids. You ready?

I'm a pharma guy and my company creates a drug that can save the lives of people who are going to die if they don't get it. It costs $5/dose to make.

My guys say we should sell it for $15K/dose. I can sell it for whatever price I want to, because anything else is communist devilry. So I put it out on the market.

But here's a strange problem. The disease it cures mainly seems to afflict poor and uninsured people.

So what do I do?

A few years ago, I had a cool idea: what if I used Amazon wishlists to get homeless people in Vegas what they needed? I could create lists of things they needed and my followers on social media could buy it and it'd get shipped to my house so I could hand it out. It worked, for a while, until I couldn't keep doing it for practical and emotional reasons. (It was incredibly depressing.)

But the smartest thing I did was the first thing I did: I went to the homeless camps and *asked* them what they needed that charities weren't providing.

Listen: it sounds like my wet bulb post scared the shit out of a whole lot of people. I'm sorry to have done that to you, but you need to be scared, honestly. Scary things are coming and nobody is going to step in at the last minute and solve everything for us.

But there's hope. I am not a "climate doomer" despite what people seem to think. I don't think the human race is doomed yet. I don't know for sure, but neither does anyone else. The truth is, I simply don't care. I'm not going down without a fight.

But the Western way of life? Oh yeah. Doomed af.

Sure! The shortest version is: humans are endothermic, meaning we make our own body heat. We have to stay in a Goldilocks zone between too hot and too cold. If we're too hot, we sweat, our swear evaporates and it cools us off.

With me so far?

https://twitter.com/abbie415_abbie/status/1797558927304863940

But evaporation slows down the more ambient moisture is suspended in the air, which is what we call "humidity". The more humid the air, the slower liquids evaporate in that air; if it's too humid, they won't evaporate really at all from a practical standpoint.

Part of why I'm having a hard time framing this book on how to survive climate collapse is because I think my personal assumptions and worldview are pretty far outside the Overton window of what most people assume and see and believe. It's hard to know where to start. Like, 25 years ago, I read No Logo and watched Fight Club and they were like the grit my adult psyche formed around - the fundamentally anti-consumer anti-capitalist stuff. I don't even know how to talk to people who think consumer capitalism is a good thing.

The thing about climate collapse is, you can see how it works at every step of the way. It's all basic physics a high school kid can understand. So if you can't, or won't, understand it, you have to accept the possibility that you might just be kind of a dumbass. Burning fossil fuels releases gases; gases float in atmosphere; gases absorb heat from the sun; atmosphere gets hotter; hotter means more turbulent; turbulence breaks patterns; climate stability collapses. It's incredibly simple to understand how it works.

One of the reasons I really loved the Fallout TV show is because it is ultimately about something I've been thinking a lot about recently: complacency, and what we're willing to do to achieve it - the price we're willing to pay for it... or make others pay.

(spoilers ahead) The Vault dwellers live an idealized version of the American Dream. They want for very little and have no idea that anything else is even possible. Their society is peaceful, tolerant, kind, idealistic, well-managed and if not luxurious, comfortable.

Surface life is different.

The telling thing about westerners trying to frame climate collapse as a social justice issue is that they think they're not going to be affected and have the luxury to be outraged on behalf of marginalized people.

Guess what, honey? Ain't no privilege when the well runs dry. In point of fact, poor and already marginalized people will probably weather these storms better than privileged westerners, who are entirely reliant not only on systems, but profitable systems, for their survival. If it ain't profitable, it won't exist very long.

I am a fan of giving people the benefit of the doubt, but this is the most narcissistic, self-obsessed, tone-deaf, embarrassing thing I've seen in a very long time. I cannot imagine why this woman thought this was a good thing to put in the world.

npr.org/2024/03/11/123… I mean, aside from expecting people to feel sorry for you because you can't "throw big parties" or "travel on a whim" anymore - you poor lamb - whining that your husband's perfectly reasonable fear of dying is really cutting into your live, laugh, love schedule is just galling.

Listen, I'm really not sure how to communicate to y'all that it's not possible to spend or build our way out of climate collapse disaster. Every objection to my arguments people are throwing at me seems based in magical thinking. I don't know how to respond to them. Have you ever tried to get your city council to fix a pothole? Ever sat through an urban planning public meeting? Ever seen how long it takes to fix a square mile of freeway? Seen someone complain about a fence getting built behind their house at a public forum?

Almost 25 years ago, I moved to Las Vegas. The next year, I got a job briefly as a web designer for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. (I was not a good fit. 😂) I took tours of the water system from Lake Mead to take pictures for the website.

I was confused. So *all* the water for Vegas came from the Colorado River? It had come from underground aquifers for a few decades too, but those were long emptied by 2000 - it actually caused a neighborhood in north Vegas to sink into the ground. So yes: all the water came from the river.

Here's something funny: long before farming is impossible in many parts of the world, the food will cease to be delivered to your door. Why? Because it won't be profitable enough to grow and ship it long before it's technically unfeasible.

Isn't that hilarious? Come on, it is. I mean, agriculture is already subsidized by governments more than any other activity except for killing people, but at some point even the capitalists who rake those subsidies in won't want the reduction in profits required to keep buying water or shifting crops around in heat.