When will millions of people start fleeing uninhabitable climates?

This week the Middle East had record 125 degF temperatures.  This is unbearable.  When does it become uninhabitable? It is ironic that the part of the world that most contributes to climate change by basing its existence on the gathering of fossil fuels to burn around the world may become the first part of the world that becomes uninhabitable.

All around the world cities are built on coastlines, from New York and Miami and New Orleans to Mumbai and Shanghai and Buenos Aires.  Glaciers are melting into the ocean.  If Antarctica, which has the vast majority of ice on the planet lets massive amounts of ice crash into the ocean, the sea rises and cities become uninhabitable.

Blizzards, hurricanes, floods, droughts, fire storms, killing of coral and marine life – all coming from climate change.

And climate change is driven by two massive worldwide corporate industries – fossil fuels and corporate agribusiness. 

Burning, and extracting, fossil fuels throws massive amounts of carbon, and methane, into the atmosphere, which traps heat in the atmosphere which also heats the oceans – climate change. 

And corporate farming clears wild forests, plows vast tracts of land – throwing tons of carbon into the atmosphere – plants mono-culture crops fertilized by chemicals that foul the waters, and creates billions of farm animals requiring the clearing of land and dumping methane into the atmosphere.

Our world is quickly becoming uninhabitable.  One nightmare scenario is massive migrations of refugees fleeing uninhabitable parts of the word, with nowhere to go, which could well cause worldwide conflict and violence.

When do millions, or billions, of people start being forced to become climate change refugees?  What happens then?

We have time to change, but it has to come from the demand of the populace, we can’t count on the industries to voluntarily end their destruction.

The smartest kids at MIT, Cal Tech, Berkeley, England, Germany, China, India and around the world are not dreaming of more efficient cars and fossil fuel power plants. They are dreaming of world changing breakthroughs in energy and food production. 

I dream of their success, and very, very, very soon.

The purpose of the phony ballot audits by Trumpster fanatics

Why are the Trump Cult conducting an obviously phony “audit” of the votes in Arizona after there were already two official audits conducted by professionals?  It’s pretty easy to understand, it is to discredit trust in democracy itself so that the oligarchs and fascists can take power by force.  Trump is the figurehead, but the forces of oligarchical fascist tyranny run long and deep in America, most notably in the Jim Crow South after the Civil War, and they see this as their time to end the use of government to empower people's lives and instead to use government for the purpose they want – fascist oligarchical wealth and power.  Pretty much the definition of oligarchical rule. 

Sadly, so many are fooled into thinking that by giving their personal power to their authoritarian oligarchical bosses they are somehow becoming more free – free from compassionate caring about other people, free from caring about other species, or the environment, or succeeding generations.  Free to buy guns and shoot each other, I suppose.  Free to force their women to have unwanted babies.  Free to put black and brown people “in their place”.  

The oligarchs are happy to give them these tiny satisfactions as long as they themselves get to feed their endless avarice and domination, so long as they can continue to destroy the environment by running their fossil fuel and massive agribusiness industries without having to make changes needed to halt and reverse the catastrophic climate change, biodiversity destruction, endless pollution of our planet that is killing the forests, oceans, species, and humans.  

We live in dangerous times, but so many of us are waking up to the real needs that the planet is forcing upon us.  And indeed, there are a few glimmers that some of the massive industries are at least pretending to care about the planet, so I choose to hope.

We need a second Reconstruction in Trumpistan

After the Civil War, President Ulysses S Grant implemented Reconstruction in the South and put troops into the Confederate states to ensure that the former slaves were allowed to vote, hold office, and protect their full rights as citizens per the 14^th and 15^th amendments.  But the election of 1876 culminated in the infamous Compromise of 1877 where the southern Democrats conceded the election to the Republican Hayes in exchange for removing the troops from the South, thus allowing the reign of Jim Crow terror for nearly a century in the South which was only reversed by the Civil Rights movement and voting rights legislation in the 1960s. 

Now, thanks to the Republican appointed members of the Supreme Court, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was effectively struck down in 2013 by a 5-4 vote allowing racist states to change their election laws without getting federal approval.  And, of course, the south moved immediately to constrict voting of black and brown citizens, because, well, because they could. And because they have every intention of keeping blacks and browns from voting and holding power.

And now, after Trump lost decisively in the 2020 election, and because the deeply corrupt Trump refused to concede and has ridiculously and falsely claimed that he actually won the election – in a landslide, for goodness sake – the Republican Party has seized upon this lie to do their best to reinstate Jim-Crow-like suppression of black and brown votes by closing polling booths, restricting mail in ballots, restricting early voting, ending automatic voter registration, and even makes it a crime to pass out water to those in the long lines in minority communities waiting to vote (!).  They do this on the pretense of ending voter fraud – which has been proven over and over and over again to be insignificant to the point of meaninglessness.  It is racist  voter suppression, and nothing else.

In other words – the racist Republican Party was given full permission by the racist Republican appointed Supreme Court members to implement their racist/white supremacist agenda and do what they can to strip black and brown people of their full rights as citizens of the United States.

So, what we need in the United States is a second Reconstruction – probably not federal troops to guard the polls and drop boxes, etc. during elections (but that may not be a bad idea).  Rather a good place to start is for the Senate to join with the House and pass HR-1, the 2021 Voting Rights Act that would do things like establish voter registration and mail in voting standards, establish fair redistricting reforms (for both parties), mandate exposure of “dark money” donors (for both parties), establish stronger ethics rules, and – oh yes – require candidates to release their tax returns.  All of these hurt the Republican Party strategy of suppressing black and brown votes.

The only way for the Senate to pass this bill, and this bill is needed to preserve democracy in the United States, is to end the anti-constitutional filibuster.  (I guess the filibuster is not UNconstitutional, but it was certainly not in the Constitution and is contrary to the spirit of the Constitution)

Would the Republicans force through an anti-Voting Rights Bill if they take over in the future?  Of course - unless they actually wake up and decide to be politicians rather than oligarchical tyrants dedicated to preserving the power of the white supremacists and plutocrats. 

They could actually try to win votes rather than suppress votes.  What a concept!