The Climate Fad

                                                                                  written 14 December, 2025

                                                                              published 21 December, 2025

 

            In the last few months, articles from pundits, nationally known to local, have announced the end of the climate crisis, declaring it was just a bankrupt liberal fad that fell out of fashion.  

            However, scientific consensus is the climate crisis results from combustion of fossil fuels, which changed atmospheric chemistry, inexorably heating the planet to levels never before experienced by humans, let alone human technological civilizations.  Effectively addressing this problem requires radically reducing further combustion, and aggressively removing what has already been added to the atmosphere, returning to atmospheric conditions we know can support humanity.  This threatens fossil fuel industry profits.  

            The president states the climate crisis is fake news (along with the affordability crisis, the Epstein files, and the rule of law).  Despite his declining mental capacity, he is still a bully with immense power.  Any governmental agency related to climate has been closed, gutted, or staffed with climate deniers.  Responding to economic and legal pressures, businesses have backed away from effective climate mitigation, and corporate media reporting on climate matters has diminished.  Climate concern wasn't a fad that faded, but was deliberately destroyed by oppressive political policy.

            Because we are in late-stage capitalism, where concentration has distorted the economy, making profit more important than product, or even life, the fossil fuel industry responded with well-funded denial.  Inspired by the lethal tobacco companies, this involves attacking individual climate scientists, climate research, and science in general.  Massive disinformation, death threats, lawsuits, pressure on the university employers, and defunding further research, are all on the rise.  The result is less information by design, combined with such chaos from our distractor-in-chief, that attention has been diverted.  If you can't even afford food, electricity, housing, or health care today, who cares if the entire life support structure of the plant is slowly dying.  Future concerns are swept away by immediate problems.  This is not an accident, but by design.

            The deniers say there is no evidence of a climate crisis.  It still gets cold in the winter.  There is still winter ice at the poles.  What is the problem?  But anyone who looks deeper is concerned, because the evidence is there to be seen.

            A recent UDJ article about a coastal abalone poacher, mentioning the season had been closed for the last 8 years, due to a lack of abalone.  The abalone died because 95 percent of the kelp it feeds on has died, eaten by an explosion of purple urchins, the result of a massive die off of the sea stars which eat urchins, due to a pandemic of sea star wasting disease, the consequence of unusually warm ocean waters, that resulted from the global heating of the atmosphere due to the changed chemistry.  

            Greenland has been in the news this year, as the president wants to either buy, or steal it, for America.  One of two non-demented reasons is access to rare minerals as the warming planet thins the Greenland ice sheet.  The second reason is control of the increasing Russian and Chinese shipping through the Arctic Ocean.  What was once totally impassable is now open to container ships for a growing part of the year, because the ocean is warming.

            Record breaking oceanic warming fuels stronger hurricanes, which intensify rapidly, going from tropical storms to category 5 hurricanes in a single day, leaving residents little time to prepare, increasing damages and insurance rates.

            Climate denial makes money for a few, but we all pay the price.  Our present energy policy pours hundreds of billions into nuclear (the most expensive) and natural gas (the most climate damaging), while killing the renewable industry which is the cheapest power to install and addresses the climate concerns.  While it takes a decade or more to build a gigawatt scale nuclear reactor, the rest of the world installs a gigawatt of cheap solar every day, because not everyone in the world is beholding to the fossil fuel industry, 

            The future of a sustainable technological civilization is renewables.  China is already a leader in production of solar panels, battery storage, and EV vehicles.  But US leadership is retarded on this, working for the benefit of the billionaire class.

            So, the next time you read, or hear, the climate crisis is an obsolete fad, recognize they are either short sighted and ignorant, spouting something they were told, or they are lying to you, because they are making money off the existing system.

 

 

 

Capitalism and Democratic Socialism

                                                                                    written 7 December, 2025

                                                                              published 14 December, 2025

            On November 19th and 20th, 2025, Daily Kos (dailykos.com) posted essays under the name Trenz Pruca, excerpted here, clarifying the conversation about capitalism and socialism.  Specific definition of these words is important, as confusion comes from people using different definitions for the same words, talking past each other in circular debates, when trying to communicate.

            A conventional business school definition of capitalism is: private ownership and free markets.  But Adam Smith's theories were an idealized form, assuming such things as equal access to funds and information, which don't exist in the real world.  So, capitalism can't be considered as just mindless commerce, independent of social impact.  It needs human feedback if humans are to survive. 

            History shows that unrestrained capitalistic systems change over time.  They begin with competitive growth, consolidating with maturity, become dominated by financialization with age, and eventually decay into oligarchy, with eventual collapse.  This is a logical progression, not a defect.

            In the early stages, capitalism is typified by small business, entrepreneurship, competition, risk and reward, and a rising standard of living.  In the later stages capitalism is dominated by monopolies, financialization, rent extraction, political capture, and wealth concentration.  Both can be called capitalism, but their impact on society is very different.  

            In a similar way, some people believe socialism means: governmental ownership of everything, a command economy, with bureaucratic central planning.  This is properly called state socialism, and the failed former Soviet Union is an example.

            Recognizing the natural life cycle of capitalism, and desiring to prevent oppressive oligarchy, societies can take actions to keep capitalism from digesting itself.  This takes the form of taxing capital, regulating corporations, investing in public services and unions, and instituting strong anti-trust and anti-corruption laws.  Such regulated capitalism is what the rest of the world calls democratic socialism.  Examples include the Scandinavian countries, and certain eras in New Zealand, Canada, and even the US.

            In the US, we have been taught to associate all socialism with authoritarianism, a result of Cold War polarization and business school indoctrination, a simplicity that benefits the wealthy.  But democratic socialism is capitalism with guardrails.

            The US is clearly in a late stage of unrestrained capitalism.  Almost every sector of the economy has concentrated into monopoly control by a few large conglomerates.  More than half of all rental housing is owned by a few corporations.  The financialization of the economy is overwhelming, shifting from producing quality products to maximizing shareholder value.  Wealth inequity is at a historic high, and labor unions are relatively weak.  Regulatory agencies have been captured, and money influences politics to the level of corruption.  This is not Adam Smith's capitalism, but a system near the end of its life cycle.

            In contrast, Scandinavian countries are working examples of democratic socialism, with vibrant markets.  Individual firms are privately owned, working in competition, encouraging entrepreneurship.  However, essential services are publicly or cooperatively owned and universally available.  Government regulates capital, limiting the concentration of wealth, protecting political equity from corruption by extreme wealth.  Unions are strong, and nobody confuses human rights with "handouts".  Capitalism powers the system, but democracy determines the direction.

            Where we have monopolies and mega corporations, they have a mix of private, public, and cooperative businesses.  Our profits are diverted into speculation and corporate buybacks, while their profits reinvest in social systems like healthcare, transit, and housing.  While our firms regulate politics, their politics regulate markets.  We see concentrated ownership of everything and they have broad based ownership.  Our economy protects capital with public bailouts, they allow poor business to fail without destroying the society.  America falls lower on measures of happiness than Scandinavia.

            The issue is not about markets, but about power.  Who controls the surplus, sets the rules, or avoids the risks?  Who writes the laws, funds the politicians, or decides who fails?  In late-stage capitalism, the answers are: capital, but in democratic socialism the answers are: citizens.

            "Capitalism is like fire, brilliant, dangerous, and transformative, so societies have three choices: let it burn out unchecked (oligarchic collapse), extinguish it (authoritarianism), or manage it (democratic socialism).  The United States choses the first, and Scandinavia choses the third.  The societies that flourish will be the ones that treat economics not as theology, but as gardening: tending the healthy growth, pruning the dangerous overgrowth, and remembering that unchecked systems, like unchecked fires, consume everything."

            Do we have the wisdom, and will, to change?

AI, Salvation Or Destruction?

                                                                                  written 30 November, 2025

                                                                                 published 7 December, 2025       

 

            Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, and expanding quickly.  Every Google search now has an AI option at the head of the list.  About half of all new entries on the web are now AI generated.  Students have easy access to AI answers for questions, and AI generated essays are now common at all levels of education.  AI bots can do your shopping and routinely handle making reservations, needing only your credit card and login information, allowing you to do other things.  

            AI previews job applications and are increasingly part of online medical advice and psychological counseling.  A significant number of people have AI chat buddies, particularly teens alienated by social media. 

            Computer code is written by AI.  Complex evaluations, such as reading medical images or calculating how a DNA sequence will fold into an active protein, are accomplished more rapidly by AI than by humans.  AI is essential to self-driving cars and trucks, and AI enhanced drones have changed the balance of power in war.  

            Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into AI data centers and their support infrastructure.  Over the last 6 years, this river of money has about doubled the stock market valuation.  The heart of this frenzy is NVIDIA, now the most valuable company on the planet, which produces the complex chips essential to AI progress.  On average, over the last 6 years, NVIDIA stock price doubled each year.

            It is indeed a brave new world.

            However, there are down sides, even as AI works apparent miracles.  Students focus on obtaining an answer, rather than cultivating the process of deriving an answer themselves.  The more a person depends on AI for answers, the more their capacity for creative thinking diminishes, with measurable deterioration in brain structure, reducing IQ, leaving them more stupid.  The displacement of workers, ranging from vehicle drivers to computer programmers, is creating turbulence in the economy.  Mid-level management positions are disappearing.

            Furthermore, AI tends to hallucinate, or fabricate (lie!).  Experts in the field say this is endemic to the structure of AI, not just a bug.  AI generated governmental reports, full of misinformation, have made headlines.  Numerous lawsuits have been filed claiming AI chatbots encouraged suicides.  AI medical assessments are biased against women's health issues.   

            As more socially critical infrastructure systems, such as power, water, and telecommunications, are turned over to AI, humans become less involved in operations, and are therefore less prepared for any problems that emerge.  Hackers, from bored teenagers to malevolent nation states, use AI to enhance computer scams, malware development, and fraud.  There is concern AI itself could turn on humanity as a logical conclusion.

            AI data centers demand massive amounts of power.  The industry is growing rapidly, but constructing power capacity takes time, so AI boosters submit multiple power claims, unsure where an actual site will be developed.  Estimated power increases range from 15-50 percent, stressing power providers who must make long term plans.  With so much money behind it, power prices are irrelevant to AI, but real people living near proposed centers see electricity rates increasing by double digits.  Because AI needs uninterrupted power, other uses may face rolling blackouts.

            It is proposed this power surge will be supplied by natural gas and nuclear power.  But natural gas is becoming more expensive, and large turbine delivery is slowed by supply chain constipation.  Billions are being poured into nuclear: restarting decommissioned reactors, building new conventional pressurized water reactors, and the promise of Small Modular Reactors (SMR).  However, there are only a few nukes to restart, new conventional construction takes a decade, and SMR's are still mostly nonexistent.  Since the AI power demand is immediate, the AI boom is thrown into question.  

            Fear Of Missing Out on the expected trillion dollar economy means many companies are trying to be first, in an industry that has yet to show it produces an economically viable product.  80 percent of AI companies have never made a profit, yet still ask for billions more.  Talks have begun to get government guarantees: socialist support for this capitalist adventure.  

            Each week there are more articles suggesting this economic surge is a bubble, doomed to pop.  Since the basic economy is already struggling, when the AI economic bubble collapses, the economic shock will be widespread.

            If AI succeeds, our people become more stupid and unemployed, and if it fails the economy goes into recession.  It's a 21st century miracle.