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Word games

As puzzling as it seems [to me], maybe this is what the Times is ultimately after – a smash up of word games and news where terms are need to be replaced to convey meaning?

Example 1.  “While we recognize the US’ significant economic and financial strengths, we believe these no longer fully counterbalance the decline in fiscal metrics,” Moody’s Ratings in a statement as it downgraded the US thanks to government debt that’s approaching  $37 trillion. Hmm. Fiscal responsibility, but whose? A different kind of non-puzzle, but Points to Ponder. Keep playing to access the new clarity level.

You can’t win if you don’t play.

Example 2. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will scale back on the number of recreational sites at Lake Lanier that will be temporarily closed due to the USACE’s current staffing levels.

Who are these so-called engineers, and to whom do they answer? Current staffing levels has to be a clue. Who does what and for why bleeds into a little bit of everything and it might take some blurred vision to see the outlines of causes and effects of such downgrades and closures. So it’s a good thing you can’t afford those new glasses, see?

And isn’t this fun already?

 

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Prosperity Gospel Vamp

As mentioned many times, including public fora, sustainability is a vanishingly low bar. Just transfer the concept to say, friendship, and try to be whelmed at all.

Accordingly, this discussion about ‘everything-bagel-liberalism’ as a stymie to de-carbonization and other incursions into societal progress looks a bit pekid when corporate interests and provincial politicians are allowed the posture of disinterested bystanders:

Green-energy developers will tell you that among the biggest obstacles to new solar or wind projects online are 1) intransigence by gas-dominated utilities that make it practically impossible for renewable developments — which are less profitable for utilities than fossil-fuel infrastructure — to interconnect with the grid, and 2) campaigns by oil-and-gas front groups that work to gin up opposition to clean energy with deceptive claims like “wind turbines kill whales” and “solar panels cause cancer.”

We could pass all the federal permitting reforms Klein and Thompson could dream of, but if powerful fossil-fuel interests continue to call the political shots, we’ll never achieve the clean energy build-out we desperately need.

Similarly, when it comes to the scarcity of affordable housing, Abundance primarily blames zoning laws for constraining supply and driving up prices.

So much of the discourse on sustainable solutions reaches for just-in-time incrementalism that never can be, and only serve to preserve the status quo when radical change is required. Just like prosperity preachers, Abundance liberals need all of the attention for which they clamor. The best of among of them, like those cited here, even move us to consider why their arguments achieve such lift-off velocity in major media. Kudos – it’s a gift. Look askance and ponder.

 

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Phosphorus edition

The Devil’s Element is a tale of folly, waste, greed, and excess, which Egan unspools with a light touch and a brisk pace. He opens the book with a police foot chase; the unfortunate suspect is eventually fished out of an algae-choked canal and hospitalized in Cape Coral, Florida. In its final pages he describes a pilot project to capture phosphorus from the pee of residents of Brattleboro, Vermont, and its use of an educational video featuring a talking drop of urine named Uri Nation. Along the way we meet Hennig Brand, an alchemist who first succeeded in isolating pure phosphorus from urine in 1669 while searching for the philosopher’s stone, the mythical substance that could turn lead to gold. Others quickly discovered that while the waxy, glowing stuff did not produce gold, it was poisonous, extremely unstable as a solid at room temperature, and prone to exploding. These properties earned it the moniker “the Devil’s element,” which in turn presaged its other modern application as an ingredient in some of the most horrendous weapons that humans use on one another. (Egan writes about a German beachcomber whose leg began to melt and char after a small orange rock he had collected exploded in his pants—a pebble-size legacy of the Allied firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 washed up on a Baltic shore.)

At the outset of the Industrial Revolution many nation-states figured out that they couldn’t feed their fast-growing populations without finding a lot more phosphorus than was available from manure and crop residues and naturally occurring in soils. Egan gives a grim global tour of the various predatory lengths to which imperial powers and modern multinational firms have gone to secure phosphorus. Soon after the Battle of Waterloo the British dug up their own fallen soldiers’ phosphorus-rich bones, shipped them home, then heated and ground them up as fertilizer to grow food for the living. In the middle of the nineteenth century, European and American farmers became reliant on imports of guano (bird poop) strip-mined from Peruvian islands by indentured Chinese laborers. When those reserves were exhausted in the 1890s, they turned elsewhere. Thus began the century-long ordeal of the Banaba Islanders, displaced from their Pacific homeland by the voracious English-owned, Australia-based Pacific Phosphate Company. After a company agent discovered vast reserves of phosphorus-laden rock on Banaba one day in 1900, the firm’s miners carved up the island chunk by chunk. The rocks were carried by conveyor belt to ships that ferried them onward to fertilize fields around the world. Banaba’s destruction helped Australia and New Zealand boost the productivity of their soils and become wealthy agricultural exporters. After the late 1970s Banaba’s phosphate reserves were largely depleted—by that point, mining firms had stripped 90 percent of the island’s land surface and removed 22 million tons of material. In the process, they also ruined many of the sacred caves where the islanders had collected water to survive periods of drought.

From Planet Ooze by Jonathan Mingle in the April 10, 2025 issue of the New York Review of Books

As always, support and invest in physical media. Subscribe to print journalism, buy books and records, experience the thrill.

Image: Decades of phosphate mining has left the surface of Banaba Island a moonscape of coral pinnacles. Photo by Janice Cantieri. National Geographic

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Consequent antecedent

What if a climate report falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it read it write it?

The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.

The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.

Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.

On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.

No presto-magic-o, no problem-o. Luckily for us, those pesky climate issues are no match for a brain genius who just does not want to hear about them. Solved.

Fantasy Winning.

Video: frères d’armes

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The Solar Glut

Drafting on last week’s post, what if the news the way news is presented was reversed?

Europe’s solar energy season is getting longer and more intense, threatening to disrupt markets and overwhelm grids with a glut of cheap power.

Solar energy production surges in April as longer days combine with sunnier weather, while the warmer conditions also curb household heating demand. Swaths of new solar capacity are generating a flood of electricity that can drive power prices below zero, eating into the profits of renewable-energy producers and scaring off some investors.

Not artificially reversed, only mindful that this happening, too.  Of course Bloomberg (only the messenger) frames this in a grave ‘We Must Do Something About This Immediately’ context, as though strong solar production paired with milder temperatures is a disruptive problem.
Which it could be, but not for the planet. And there are all manner of gluts – sun, solar power, solar panels themselves. One man’s glut is another man’s boom.
Image: raise your hand if you remember this band
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On fiery rivers

What we talk about when we talk about the great outdoors, environmental protection division. The ‘environment’ is certainly an abstraction, much like all notions of considering any idea removed from its reality before during or after the attempt to frame it on its own terms. Deliberate word choice; all paintings are abstractions, to use a convenient example.

So, we take a thing out of context to do something with it – appreciate it, contemplate it, take in your arms and hold it up the light… where were we? Oh, yes protect it. That’s one reason behind the necessity of such words, a word like ‘environment.’ it’s a general idea but at the same time much more than that.

While we might be capable of protecting individuals trees or even an adored 100-acre wood, it’s necessary to widen our grasp reach, because to really protect those trees it’s necessary to safeguard all of them. Unless the goal is protecting none of them:

WASHINGTON – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency will undertake 31 historic actions in the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history, to advance President Trump’s Day One executive orders and Power the Great American Comeback. Combined, these announcements represent the most momentous day in the history of the EPA. While accomplishing EPA’s core mission of protecting the environment, the agency is committed to fulfilling President Trump’s promise to unleash American energy, lower cost of living for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, restore the rule of law, and give power back to states to make their own decisions.

“Today is the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen. We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” said EPA Administrator Zeldin.

And however one may want to rationalize it, this de-regulatory whirlwind is also much more than it seems. Great progress has been made on public health. It will be jarring as it is abandoned.

Image: Pierre Bonnard, Nude in Bathtub, c. 1940s.  Per the above, it’s probably Marthe, but also much more than just her.

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The take away to the give again

If As nations decide to abandon disaster planning in favor of necessary shodding for war and its maths, a kind inverse calculus comes readable. As previously stipulated, climate change will not stop and governments preparing for war will be even less inclined to worry about floods, droughts, rising seas and disappearing shellfish. It should also be noted that military planners have long-prioritized strategies to ameliorate the effects of climate change on their ability to fight wars – actually not that different from other, widely more useful abilities.

So as Europe spends more on defense, the work they have already accomplished on de-carbonizing their economies becomes even more important, perhaps prominent and easier to understand. Not intended as investment advice or a silver lining, just another way to look at a dreadful and unnecessary shift in priorities. What was already required becomes even more so, maybe even venturing into a dual-use sort of armament, in terms we can understand. Again not, ideal.

And on the subject of less-than-ideal dualities, is destroying a country’s economy ALSO a way to file down its worst tendencies toward planetary harm? You didn’t mean it that way, but the results could point the same way – plus you’re doing it anyway. Just trying to give you credit for being so great and all.

The great environment Preznit.

Now, what makes us reluctant about forced reckonings is people will suffer consequences for no fault of their own. And in this case that is a little of all of us, as clearly always has been. Which is why we are committed to certain values and believe they are worth fighting for rather than simply picking winners. If what is going on right now with all the greatness making works out perfectly, the result will be an authoritarian wasteland of Hobbesian misery – poor, starving, wretched.

There is no possible upside to playing nice.

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Incompatible premises

Screenshot

Your house or mine, depending on the whether.

Back to the irresistible force paradox ( ED. We never left – it won’t leave) where the unstoppable force meets an immovable object. In our case, the immovable obtuse object will not listen to available facts, widely available since the 1980s. Our elected representatives, and the companies that keep them, elect to do nothing about climate change. Even though they know better, just like they get vaccines, largely eat healthy foods, and take regular vacations to foreign capitals.

And the climate continues its response to unabated carbon emissions, pollution, sprawl, and their attendant maladies.

Most poignantly, we have, despite the efforts of the best and brightest, figured out what to do. Every little thing but more importantly the big expensive ones. The power of collective action – the real facts we hate – as well as the beauty of slowness and direct personal touch. We also know beyond doubts that ‘big expensive’ will be far more affordable – always with the deadly calculus – than the bigger expensiver denial that creeps closer as we try to maintain that denial rather than a healthy biosphere. The simple human effort required of managing the cognitive dissonance of massive personal vehicles and long commutes, the right to cheap food and expensive entertainment, is plenty enough power to humble us into open minds about a closed system. Yet we cling to the power to resist all we should embrace. Forever batteries, powered by spite.

Meanwhile, more energy hits the Earth every morning than every man, woman and child will use in 27 years, if you’re scoring at home.

Image: screenshot from Bloomberg, but they’re just the messenger.

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Evangelical A.I.

The SV pinheads just haven’t thought of that yet, but just wait. It’s going to be gross.

And while we all luxuriate in behavior modification and finding ways to excuse, forgive, or hide your glee, as the case may be, about all the destruction of systems and open bigotry being given full reign in this glorious moment, just a word: don’t be so quick to be quiet quitting your opposition to autocracy.

It’s great that we’ve gotten socialized to these terms – and to be clear, it’s not great and terms like that are garbage notions as much as anything. Not helpful or conducive to happiness.

Rather, it’s always in your interest to stand up for groups or people or a person under attack. Find a small thing to have courage about and build on it.

video: friends say.

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Stunning-Kruger-incidence

This is perhaps over-determined, but how were we to know? Is it just the mildest coincidence that just when critical thinking skills are at their most needed, a mysterious and mostly useless tool is helping us file-down any remaining sharp points and edges?

A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”

“[A] key irony of automation is that by mechanising routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgement and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise,” the researchers wrote.

I’m convinced that key ironies need to be mandatory elements of all strategic planning documents going forward, numerated AND annotated. Making dumb dumber and lazy lazier is sufficiently opportune that making us softer and doughier, paired nicely with a ’54 magnum of News You Can Trust and a much more recent vintage of doing your own research, births the inevitability of powerlessness. Aside from the button that releases the treats, of course.

The charge is that the hard work of cowing a populace to submit to not notice authoritarianism is far easier than imagined, and especially when people allow themselves to be confused about the difference between important things and trivialities.  When you’re not sure how to watch out for what you don’t know you need to watch out for, please note the lack of passive construct before proceeding.

Image: Discreet nose. Fruity. Smoke. Suave and rounded on the palate, almost sweet.