Republicans Celebrate Heat Wave, Because the Cruelty Is the Point
People in California and the western U.S. generally have been living through an extraordinary heat wave over the past week. Ever increasing and lengthening hot spells already kill more people than any other type of severe weather in the country.
What we have been living through is a major natural disaster, and climate change is making these events more frequent and unpredictable. Roughly 42 million Americans have been under excessive heat warnings, including those in parts of Nevada and Arizona, with red-flag fire conditions covering the Pacific Northwest, Montana and Idaho.
People are suffering, from the homeless dying in ever-increasing numbers on San Diego’s streets to farmworkers, construction workers and others who toil outdoors, not to mention elderly people, children and those with already existing conditions such as heart, respiratory or kidney disease.
The fact that the heat wave covers most of the western US makes stress on the state’s electrical grid more acute because California is less able to import electricity from other states that need it for their own increased demand.
Bad things happening to people are cause for celebration in some quarters these days, particularly among Republicans of the MAGA persuasion. President Biden got it right last week when he pointed to the anti-American nihilism at the heart of Trumpism.
…MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.
Thus we have politicians like County Supervisor Jim Desmond engaging in performative ignorance and amplification of obvious falsehoods as a means of pandering to the anti-science, anti-consensus-reality base of his party.
I’m sure that acolytes of the MAGA persuasion nationwide are firm in their belief that the lights went out in California this week, just as they believe that major American cities were burned to the ground in 2020. Bad news is good news for them, especially when it’s embellished in a disparaging manner.
This week’s targets for ridicule and snark are the imaginary Green New Deal being forced upon the populace by globalists and California’s plans to phase out internal combustion powered transportation over the next decade.
Har, har, har. Let’s see what was going on over at KUSI “News”:
The headline in Wednesday’s Union-Tribune was POWER GRID HOLDS UP AMID RECORD DEMAND. We were all just asked to be conscious about power use to ease stress on the grid and when that message came through, people actually cut use.
I‘m glad to see the populace unite in the face of adversity and assist in alleviating the suffering of those impacted by calamity and that there is general agreement this was a good idea. It’s too bad the MAGA crowd sees these situations as an opportunity to spread cynicism and distrust.
As you can see by the chart below, Californians did in fact step up to the plate.
A hurricane making its way up the west coast of Mexico threatens to make matters even worse this weekend for San Diegans, as the flow around the storm will bring easterly winds to the area, which could bring extreme heat all the way down to the beaches. Parts of the East County may see torrential downpours and flash flooding. Local fire departments are already offering free sandbags to residents.
Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles was interviewed by the New York Times:
“The number of heat events that would have been impossible to fathom in the 20th century that have happened in the last three months is astonishing,” Mr. Swain said. “Wildfires burning rowhouses in London. The heat wave for weeks on end in China. Now this. The extraordinary has become ordinary when it comes to extreme heat.”
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