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Moving away from cars

As difficult, and complicated, as contemplating the move away from cars might be, it can be strangely contextualized by reckoning with the move away from Florida:

The Sunshine State rode a post-pandemic growth wave to surpass New York as the country’s third-most populous state, and has four of the country’s five fastest-growing metro areas‍—including Cape Coral–Fort Myers, which Hurricane Ian slammed in 2022, producing the third-most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history. Will Florida’s lifestyle migrants decide they would rather live on higher ground? “The Great Florida Migration Is Coming Undone,” warns the Wall Street Journal.

Fat chance. To the extent that these storms will push anyone from Florida, it will not be people with the means to go, but people without the means to stay. This phenomenon—sometimes called “climate gentrification”—cuts against one popular idea of climate migration, in which wealthier households move to more secure locations and leave the poor to face extreme weather.

Locals are already conscious of this outcome. “The price of repairs may mean we lose our character,” Sam Henderson, the mayor of Gulfport, told the Tampa Bay Times after Helene. “There will be a different kind of people who can afford to live here, moving forward.”

So, a series of counterintuitive developments – much like many of these communities themselves – where, rather than becoming cheaper and less habitable, Florida becomes more expensive and more appealing.

If history is any guide, this devastating hurricane season will increase the state’s rents and home prices, rather than drive them down, and Florida’s growth will continue apace.

Then again, as hundred-year-storm chasers know, history may not be much help in the era of unprecedented weather events fueled by a changing climate. The hazards of long-term sea-level rise are distinct from those associated with disaster recovery, which comes with rebuilt, functioning infrastructure and a sense of returning to normal. Future climate change risks are not included in FEMA flood maps, insurance policies, or Florida land-use planning—and seem not to impact the way people consider the risks of coastal property.

Oh, yes. People prefer less complication.

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Jimmy Carter, man of a century

Happy 100th Birthday to Jimmy Carter, an amazing milestone for one of the most inspiring Americans with whom we could ever share the planet. As we do this day – what remarkable longevity for a cherished soul with a conscience that can move mountains. There’s probably a lesson in their somewhere. I’ll share another one I heard from him firsthand:

On a weekend visit to my in-laws in South Georgia, we rounded out the family time with something we had always heard about but never done: attending a Sunday School class taught by an ex-president.

It was a beautiful morning, and we made the eight-mile drive from my in-laws’ farm to Plains and the Maranatha Baptist Church, where Jimmy Carter holds forth about one Sunday morning a month. An excellent Squeeze song came on just as we entered town and the speed limit dipped to 35. A couple of blocks past the main drag, Maranatha sits in a pecan orchard just off Highway 45. On a Sunday morning when Carter is in town, there are far more cars than the small country church would normally boast. You can’t miss it.

No one seems too put out by the local deputies parked near the road nor the Secret Service folks at the church entrance—very civilized, only one metal-detector wand. Firm, but fair. We think we’re early, but as we walk up to and enter the back doors, the former president is already talking, asking the crowd of maybe 175 to tell him where they are from—and what religious denominations they profess. We dodge a videographer in back and take up an empty pew a couple of rows further up. The church is nearly full, but there is room.

He’s at the front but not in the pulpit, conversing with the crowd like it’s his natural state. And it must be. The former president is in his 80s and, from the back of the room, both looks it and doesn’t. In his jacket and bolo tie he is at ease and in command. He asks how many of the assembled have traveled to Cuba: one. Then, how many would like to: hands go up all over the room. He tells us that he and Rosalyn have just returned from there and what a mistake it was for the U.S. to have isolated Cuba via embargo all these years. While there, he met with prisoners, wives and mothers of Cubans held in the U.S., as well as members of the thriving Cuban-Jewish community in Havana—which, he reported, is in need of a rabbi. He also met with Raul and with Fidel, who, he reports, is recovering from his intestinal problems quite well. Candid, humble and witty, Carter shares these details not like they are in confidence or evidence of his importance, but simply as one might news of people one had visited while away.

With a word, but little more, of his upcoming trip to North Korea, he seems to have fulfilled the requirement of answering for himself and what he’s been up to, and moves toward the lectern down front and his lesson.

Read the rest…

Image: Nelson Mandela, left, and former President Jimmy Carter, right, hold HIV-positive babies at the Zola Clinic in Soweto in March 2002. ILLUSTRATION: Associated Press

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Oil Sports

Like Soap Operas, only when you’re watching this week’s marquee match up® brought to you by our friends at BPExxonMobilShellConocoPhillipsChevron where “what’s a little feel good fossil fuel propaganda between friends?”

Well, the UCLA Emmet Institute on Climate Change & the Environment conducted a survey:

Many major league sports teams in the U.S. have sponsorship deals with some of the companies most responsible for the polluting products fueling climate change. But how many exactly?

This survey of 2024 sponsorships across six major league sports leagues in the U.S. reveals more than 60 recent deals with high-polluting companies. This includes sponsorship deals with oil and gas companies—most of them Big Oil’s household names. It also includes deals with lesser-known utility companies that generate electricity from fossil fuel-burning power plants and sell fossil gas directly to consumers. Not every team plays this way. This survey also highlights some that have chosen a different path.

LAT follows up with an easy-to-understand analogy:

If you’re wondering why this matters, I could tell you about research suggesting that fossil fuel companies, much like tobacco profiteers back in the day, pay off the owners of beloved institutions, including our favorite teams, to cleanse their dirty images — and lull us into forgetting that their noxious products are causing hotter heat waves,more intense wildfires and growing water scarcity (not to mention regular old deadly air pollution).

I could tell you about the research. Or I could ask you to imagine going to watch the Sacramento Kings — or the Giants, or the 49ers, or LAFC — and seeing a cigarette advertisement above the scoreboard. Or a gun ad.

Unimaginable, right? So why is Big Oil propaganda considered acceptable?

At some point, the shift in consciousness about banning fossil fuel ads will break through into legislation. It really has to. Though big statements are waiting to be redeemed for PR gold, public outcry won’t be enough. Because we may wince at the violence on the field/ice with the same grimace that we wince at these ads, allowing for both. As we consume that media – that’s what we’re doing – designed to make us think about some things rather than others, the next thing happens in our brains. Acceptance or rejection. Allowing the infringement of advertising does not allow for ambivalence. Marketers have thought of that, too. Ask me how I know.

Or better yet, start to notice the ads. In a different way.

Image via

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What does C L R James mean?

The West Indian Intellectual C L R James (born in 1901, Trinidad) provided an insightful assessment of democracy in the U.S., ‘Notes on American Civilization’ (1950). ‘I trace as carefully as I can the forces making for totalitarianism in modern American life,’ he explained.

Carefully or not, the explanation has apparently been grossly, and repeatedly mischaracterized and misunderstood ever since, as unpacked in this essay:

At the climactic centre of this ominous analysis was the contemporary entertainment industry, which, James argued, set the stage for a totalitarian turn through its projections of fictional heroic gangsters as well as its production of celebrities as real-life heroes. A manufactured Hollywood heroism, he warned, had the potential to cross over from popular culture to political rule. ‘By carefully observing the trends in modern popular art, and the responses of the people, we can see the tendencies which explode into the monstrous caricatures of human existence which appear under totalitarianism.’ Completed in early 1950, James’s proposal remained underground for decades until it found publication under the abbreviated title American Civilization in 1993. Four years earlier, the author had passed on into history as one of the finest minds of the 20th century.

At the base of this ignorance is a 30-year-old tale of radical misreading. Beginning in the 1990s, commentaries on American Civilization have erased its concern with the dark cultural politics of totalitarianism, dismissing the manuscript as quixotic and optimistic, even embarrassingly romantic. James, according to reviewers, fell for the US with the naive zeal of what Trinidadians would call a never-see-come-see. This radical was so dazzled by the North American republic that his radicalism disappeared once he sat down to write about its history and culture. In American Civilization, James was ‘enthusing with the greatest passion about the democratic capacity of the civilization with which he had fallen in love,’ the UK-based historian Bill Schwarz wrote. In a review for The New Yorker, Paul Berman concurred, describing the work as proof that ‘James basically loved the United States’. Yet, far from love and happiness, the manuscript was inspired, we will see, by a concern with the despair and hopelessness of US citizens and by a worry about the political portent of these mass feelings.

James’s basic contention in American Civilization was that a critical mass of the population had become so desperately distressed by the failure of the promises of liberal democracy that they were prepared to give up on it and elect, instead, to live vicariously through violently amoral political heroes. ‘The great masses of the American people no longer fear power,’ wrote James near the end of the manuscript. ‘They are ready to allocate today power to anyone who seems ready to do their bidding.’ This popular disenchantment with liberalism and the accompanying vulnerability to totalitarian leadership manifested in the entertainment industry, according to James. In films, novels, magazines and comics, he identified a contemporary archive of the cultural politics of totalitarianism – not a source of special affection for the modern republic (James actually trashed much of US popular culture as ‘ephemeral vulgarity on a colossal scale’). For him, moreover, the dire US situation was not exceptional but simply a richer symptomatic case of a modern derangement. The conceit that James was seduced by the achievements of ‘American civilisation’ is one of those strange North Atlantic fictions; one that reveals more about those who study James than about James himself.

Read the entire essay, which is really terrific and uncomfortably on the nose concerning how ‘we’ might conveniently misunderstand polemical, and any, language:

Finally, and maybe most originally, James identified resources for totalitarianism not only in the industry’s projections of fictional protagonists but also in its production of ‘stars’ in reality. Since the Great Depression, he noted, a vital development in popular culture involved the professional packaging of celebrities (Hollywood actors, especially) into ‘synthetic characters’, produced by a ‘vast army of journalists, magazine writers, publicity men, etc’. The rise of these stars concerned James because he believed that through them the masses ‘live vicariously, see in them examples of that free individuality which is the dominant need of the vast mass today.’ Celebrities, he wrote, ‘fill a psychological need of the vast masses of people who live limited lives.’ In this regard, James saw an intrinsic connection between the industrial fabrication of these real-life heroes to be consumed by the admiring masses and the conditioning of the public for totalitarian rule: ‘We have seen how, deprived of individuality, millions of modern citizens live vicariously, through identification with brilliant notably effective, famous or glamorous individuals. The totalitarian state, having crushed all freedom, carries this substitution to its last ultimate.’ The entertainment industry’s heavy investment in the production of stars readied the republic for an antidemocratic regime.

Image: CLR James on New Year’s Eve in 1975 © Val Wilmer

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If it has sentience

it’s being used to protect us? Now that is thoughtful:

Imagine a medical-advice chatbot that lists fewer diseases that match your symptoms, because it was trained on a narrower spectrum of medical knowledge generated by previous chatbots. Or an A.I. history tutor that ingests A.I.-generated propaganda and can no longer separate fact from fiction.

Just as a copy of a copy can drift away from the original, when generative A.I. is trained on its own content, its output can also drift away from reality, growing further apart from the original data that it was intended to imitate.

In a paper published last month in the journal Nature, a group of researchers in Britain and Canada showed how this process results in a narrower range of A.I. output over time — an early stage of what they called “model collapse.”

Apparently, visual artists have been attempting to poison the models for a while now, to the point where they can’t tell the difference between a cat and a cow. Turns out even in Plato’s Cave you need people who know things.

But using itself to replicate itself is, shall we say, projecting deformity.

Hapsburg AI, indeed.

Image: Based on research by Ilia Shumailov and others.

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A target on your front

Georgia misses out on billions to cut climate pollution (sic?), the headline blared. Metro Atlanta failed to secure federal dollars to slash its emissions:

Last year, with the help of a $3 million federal grant, the state of Georgia began developing its first-ever plan to cut emissions of planet-warming gases. With funding from the same Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program, metro Atlanta drafted a climate road map of its own, too.

The plans were submitted to the federal agency this spring. The hope was to snag a slice of the $4.3 billion the EPA was offering, part of one of the federal government’s largest-ever grant opportunities for curbing heat-trapping pollution.

Let’s peek inside that first-ever plan, shall we? I wonder why the feds didn’t reward for these forward-thinker-lookers:

Peach State Voluntary Emission Reduction Plan

Oh.

Maybe that’s just the title and the plan is really much more aggressive inside, given the stakes not to mention the detestable traffic in that photo:

Strategy 1: Electrify Transportation Sector and Adapt to Mode Shift                                                                                                            Strategy 2: Improve Energy Efficiency and Promote Electrification
Strategy 3: Increase Availability and Use of Renewable Energy
Strategy 4: Improve Waste Diversion and Landfill Management
Strategy 5: Promote Use of Alternative Fuels
Strategy 6: Refrigerant Management
Strategy 7: Advance Conservation and Sustainable Land Use

The media report, and no doubt public officials, characterizes the rejection of federal funds to support this laughably obtuse plan as a ‘snub.’ I mean, where to start? This would have been decent plan had it been pursued in 1982, visionary perhaps. But now? Promote the use of alternative fuels? The absence of the words ‘mass transit’ is a damning indictment by the plan’s second chart, Figure 2, which indicates that the largest percentage of Georgia’s GHG emissions (38%) come from transportation.

Games played by non-serious people. Meanwhile, those voluntarily miserable drivers keep enjoying the scenery.

Les miz, indeed.

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My way, part two

The post below was kind of a set up, because there are so many things like that, and so many things like that are related climate change.

For example, why so many people continue [broken record alert] to buy expensive cars and live so far from work despite the misery eventually produced by both, not just at present, for a very long time now. And yes, these two things are prime exacerbating factors driving climate change and making it worse, inducing despair in those who cannot fathom giving up large vehicles or exurban living and rage against suggestions they consider it. See also, over-crowded ‘lakefront’ developments, especially in the American south, with accompanying overpopulation of large boats and jet skis. If the taste for these things is no longer based on pleasure or necessity, we must unpack. Bourdieu is very helpful here.

Another one – how climate patterns influence where people live and work:

Among the mass migrations in U.S. history: after the Second World War, people left cold Snow Belt states in the Northeast and Midwest for the warmth of the southern half of the country. Americans are still moving south in large numbers, but new research documents some growing appreciation of colder parts of the country due to climate change.

Marketplace’s senior economics contributor Chris Farrell has been looking into this. He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: All right, just remind us, 1950s and ’60s in particular — it was from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt.

Chris Farrell: That’s right, there were a combination of factors. Millions of retirees, they were just fed up with the cold. They went for the warmth and recreational activities of the Sun Belt. Defense companies rose alongside military bases in the region. Established northern industries looking for cheap, nonunion labor shifted operations south. Agricultural businesses boomed, thanks to new farming techniques. So if you take a step back, David, newcomers were attracted by the region’s low cost of housing, the growth in job opportunities, low taxes and warm weather. And the widespread adoption of new technologies like air conditioning made the hot climate bearable.

So…. to bring it all together, that was broadcast on a radio program. What if you were listening to that report on your commute in your large automobile? Does it spark… anything? Bueller?

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Comme d’habitude

Pierre Bourdieu on taste, as luxury vs. necessity:

The true basis of the differences found in the area of consumption, and far beyond it, is the opposition between the tastes of luxury (or freedom) and the tastes of necessity. The former are the tastes of individuals who are the product of material conditions of existence defined by distance from necessity, by the freedoms or facilities stemming from possession of capital; the latter express, precisely in their adjustment, the necessities of which they are the product. Thus it is possible to deduce popular tastes for the foods that are simultaneously most ‘filling’ and most economical from the necessity of reproducing labour power at the lowest cost which is forced on the proletariat as its very definition. The idea of taste, typically bourgeois, since it presupposes absolute freedom of choice, is so closely associated with the idea of freedom that many people find it hard to grasp the paradoxes of the taste of necessity. Some simply sweep it aside, making practice a direct product of economic necessity (workers eat beans because they cannot afford anything else), failing to realize that necessity can only be fulfilled, most of the time, because the agents are inclined to fulfill it, because they have a taste for what they are anyway condemned to. Others turn it into a taste of freedom, forgetting the conditionings of which it is the product, and so reduce it to pathological or morbid preference for (basic) essentials, a sort of congenital coarseness, the pretext for a class racism which associates the populace with everything heavy, thick and fat. Taste is amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced choice, produced by conditions of existence which rule out all alternatives as mere daydreams and leave no choice but the taste for the necessary.

Doesn’t quite explain why people eat chickfila who don’t have to – or does it?

Full text

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Remarkable and glaring

Take the frog in boiling water apologue.

The extent to which we notice general goings on and are able to get used to them – acclimate, if we’re looking for a poor word choice – remains a much greater, darker mystery than the fable of the mythical frog. Still, perceiving danger and saving oneself, one’s country and compatriots needs a bit of  a reset.

Slender appetites for suffering but no end of explaining away those who explicitly promise more nightmares. The kind of true that some desire the worst of everything if it will hurt others elicits a shrug, or even shrewdness toward toward their understanding. It’s an opinion you can understand enough to pity, though it must be appreciated enough to fight. Not correct, but confront and conquer. Comprehending simple minds bent on retribution meets an unmovable force in climate change. Misogyny, too, has an endgame.

There is no gradual increase in this temperature. You may wake up today and note that you are in boiling water, but there has been no creeping authoritarianism, slowly appearing right under your nose. All along, individuals chose not to notice – or celebrate its arrival, let’s be honest. The rationalized-away digression of what on some level was accepted as agreeable was approved as such. More please, we were actually demanding.

But the magnitude by which we choose bewilderment instead of joy, fiery passion and benevolence is all on us. Seek no refuge in ‘how could we have known?’ Wonder instead why we did not and begin to paddle toward others, recognize salvation.