A Climate Change Denier at the Start of Independence Day

[Voyager]

It is hot in the Bay Area. Record setting hot. And Houston has it much worse. That’s the justification for this little playlet.

Jack runs up to his friend Fred on the streets of Manhattan. People are running back and forth, screaming, there are flames in the background.

Jack: Fred, why are you standing there? The aliens are invading, we have to get out of here!

Fred: You’re crazy. There is nothing going on.

Jack: Didn’t you see the reports on TV and radio?

Fred: Fake news. They are just trying to sell ads.

Jack: But they quote the scientists. They’ve detected the invaders.

Fred: Just think how much grant money they’ll get from this. It is all made up so they can get fat and happy on the back of the American taxpayer.

There is a giant crash in the background.

Jack: The Empire State Building just fell over! The aliens blew it up!

Fred: Just a coincidence. Can you prove the aliens are responsible?

Jack: Prove it? It just happened, and the place is a glowing mass of rubble.

Fred: See. You can’t. Anyhow I read somewhere that people working on SETI passed around joke emails, so they have no credibility.

Jack: I give up. I’m getting out of here.

Fred shrugs, decides he is hungry and decides to go have a bite downtown. He doesn’t get far.

The End.

[Knowed_Out]

@Voyager

Fred: See. You can’t. Anyhow I read somewhere that people working on SETI passed around joke emails, so they have no credibility.

Best line.

[GIGObuster]

Maybe NASA can help!

Trump names climate science denier to run NASA

**Trump names climate science denier to run NASA

Republican Congressman had demanded Obama apologize for funding climate change research**

Ahhhhh, nuts…

[Trancephalic]

This is fine

[Guest-starring_Id]

@Voyager

He doesn’t get far.

Runs into a gaggle of Breitshirts similar to the Marjoe Gortner character in Earthquake and tramples him to death.

ETA: Sorta like what happened to Gustav Landauer, except I’m pretty sure Fred wouldn’t exactly have been steeped in anarchist theory.

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

I read this great article about how Harvey throws failing Republican policies into stark relief. The whole thing is great, but this section in particular:

Hurricane Harvey offers lessons Republicans will probably ignore

Another lesson from Hurricane Harvey is that allowing decades of sprawling growth to pave over the landscape and subvert natural processes will, sooner or later, produce dire consequences. In Texas, folks do not like regulations. They do not like government telling them where to build a housing subdivision or a chemical plant or a highway. Houston has famously grown to be the fourth-largest city in the United States by dispensing with zoning laws as the metropolis expanded across the flat, clay soil plain with little regard for wetlands and bayous. You can see the result of those policies in all the photographs of Houston neighborhoods drowned in a vast lake of brown water. Now all those government-hating Texas libertarians expect the federal government to bail them out.

Under the Obama administration, new rules were imposed that required federally supported rebuilding efforts to take into account the effects of climate change. In other words, hurricane-ravaged buildings and bridges and roads needed to be built to withstand the bigger floods and storms to come. But the Trump administration, operating on the prevailing Republican supposition that climate change can be denied or ignored, has revoked those rules. That means the infrastructure of Houston will be restored to the same old standards. The certain result is that, when the Gulf of Mexico warms even more in the years to come, the temperature rise will multiply the destructive power of future hurricanes and taxpayers will be stuck paying for yet another disaster that could have been mitigated if common sense, prudence and science had been followed.

This kind of governance is idiotic but, sadly, it will take more than a monster storm to blow away the erroneous notions of today’s Republican Party.