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Regression to the mean

Advertising can be rude, as well as prophetic. All the clean coal and fossil fuel wishcasting propaganda (Beyond Petroleum?) leads to complacency, inefficiency, more SUVs – at least in one country – and hence greater vulnerability, whereas crisis framing of responding to climate change leads to hard-won improvements. To wit:

[In June 2026] for the first time in the U.S., solar generated more electricity than coal, a reflection of both the rapid adoption of renewable power and the declining fortunes of America’s aging fleet of coal power plants.

Solar output reached an all-time high last month, supplying 12.8 percent of U.S. electricity, with coal supplying 12.2 percent, according to an analysis from energy think tank Ember. As a share of the power supply, solar typically reaches a high in May, when longer days spur greater generation, but mild weather keeps demand in check.

Coal output continued to slump last month, reaching a new record low, according to Ember. Its decline comes despite a push by the Trump administration to extend the lives of aging coal plants. Just this week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency order to keep a coal power plant in Orlando, Florida, online. The plant had been scheduled to be retired last year under a plan by the local public utility to shift to renewable energy.

Carbon emissions from power plants and vehicles , as well as methane emissions, will always and only produce more atmospheric warming. Active denial about the results of these activities belongs alongside every other institutional lie.

Do you need praise to make you do better? Or does a focus on shortcomings, mistakes, and wrong thinking begin to help turn things around?

A country named this one is stuck in a war it started, cannot end it, may escalate further for no reason or avail, has sundered its diplomatic mechanisms in favor of sycophancy, depleted its military and destroyed its credibility, all because we won’t call out an idiot’s historic strategic blunder.

The energy that has gone into denial has put off reckoning with the consequences for exactly as long as it will take to direct that energy elsewhere.

 

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Birth of a New Nation

In his April 7,  1957 sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr., laid out his anti-imperialist vision. Fresh off a trip to Ghana where he and Mrs. King had witnessed the transfer of sovereignty from the British to Ghana’s long imprisoned leader, Kwame Nkrumah, King provides an excellent history lesson based, at least in part, in what he had seen with his own eyes – a people long treated like chattel coming in from the wilderness.

I want to preach this morning from the subject: “The Birth of a New Nation.” And I would like to use as a basis for our thinking together a story that has long since been stenciled on the mental sheets of succeeding generations. It is the story of the Exodus, the story of the flight of the Hebrew people from the bondage of Egypt, through the wilderness, and finally to the Promised Land. It’s a beautiful story. I had the privilege the other night of seeing the story in movie terms in New York City, entitled “The Ten Commandments,” and I came to see it in all of its beauty—the struggle of Moses, the struggle of his devoted followers as they sought to get out of Egypt. And they finally moved on to the wilderness and toward the Promised Land. This is something of the story of every people struggling for freedom. It is the first story of man’s explicit quest for freedom. And it demonstrates the stages that seem to inevitably follow the quest for freedom.

Prior to March the sixth, 1957, there existed a country known as the Gold Coast. This country was a colony of the British Empire. This country was situated in that vast continent known as Africa. I’m sure you know a great deal about Africa, that continent with some two hundred million people and it extends and covers a great deal of territory. There are many familiar names associated with Africa that you would probably remember, and there are some countries in Africa that many people never realize. For instance, Egypt is in Africa. And there is that vast area of North Africa with Egypt and Ethiopia, with Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco and Libya. Then you might move to South Africa and you think of that extensive territory known as the Union of South Africa. There is that capital city Johannesburg that you read so much about these days. Then there is central Africa with places like Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo. And then there is East Africa with places like Kenya and Tanganyika, and places like Uganda and other very powerful countries right there. And then you move over to West Africa, where you find the French West Africa and Nigeria, and Liberia and Sierra Leone and places like that. And it is in this spot, in this section of Africa, that we find the Gold Coast, there in West Africa.

You also know that for years and for centuries, Africa has been one of the most exploited continents in the history of the world. It’s been the “Dark Continent.” It’s been the continent that has suffered all of the pain and the affliction that could be mustered up by other nations. And it is that continent which has experienced slavery, which has experienced all of the lowest standards that we can think about, and its been brought into being by the exploitation inflicted upon it by other nations.

And this country, the Gold Coast, was a part of this extensive continent known as Africa. It’s a little country there in West Africa about ninety-one thousand miles in area, with a population of about five million people, a little more than four and a half million. And it stands there with its capital city, Accra. For years the Gold Coast was exploited and dominated and trampled over. The first European settlers came in there about 1444, the Portuguese, and they started legitimate trade with the people in the Gold Coast. They started dealing with them with their gold, and in turn they gave them guns and ammunition and gunpowder and that type of thing. Well, pretty soon America was discovered a few years later in the fourteen hundreds, and then the British West Indies. And all of these growing discoveries brought about the slave trade. You remember it started in America in 1619.

And there was a big scramble for power in Africa. With the growth of the slave trade, there came into Africa, into the Gold Coast in particular, not only the Portuguese but also the Swedes and the Danes and the Dutch and the British. And all of these nations competed with each other to win the power of the Gold Coast so that they could exploit these people for commercial reasons and sell them into slavery.