We have wasted so much fucking time on this asshole.
A constant theme of my posts since we have been back is how long it is going to take to get back to where we were before this asshole rode down that fucking escalator. People say years; I say decades or generations. We’re still trying to recover from the Reagan era: an era that is still around! We’ve been dealing with this asshole for over a decade now, way too long imho, but we still perhaps have three years left. God help us.
Meanwhile, the world is falling apart and he is absolutely not helping. We could be doing something to mitigate or prevent the absolute collapse of everything, but we’re not. In fact, we are actively pushing it further into perdition.
The greatest existential threat to our society (probably not our species, or the earth, but maybe) is climate change. This is an undisputed fact. Well, you could try to dispute it, but you would be wrong, because it is a fact. Even if you, like probably me, are in too privileged a position to be totally affected, it’s hard to ignore what is going to happen when the places where a majority of the people on earth live become uninhabitable. When food is no longer easy to grow, when water starts drying up (except where it starts to flood), and when major conflicts arise between not just neighbors but between nuclear powers over what resources are scarcely available.
Donald Trump wants to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico not just to keep Mexicans out now, but also for when Latin America becomes uninhabitable, people from south of the border will be locked out forever, destined to perish. It is a planned genocide, out in the open. Oh also this. It’s racism, but it’s also genocide: weird how those tend to go together! But we’re doing so great in the Global South!
We had basically a generation to get this sorted out, and instead we spent a decade dealing with this monster.
That’s not to say that the interregnum wasn’t a step in the right direction. The bills and regulations passed during the Biden era helped claw us back substantially, and in fact, were the biggest steps we have made as a country, even before the first Trump era. But sadly, it seems those successes were short-lived.
Perhaps the biggest success though, was as much a joint effort of the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Biden administration, and China: the absolute explosion in availability and affordability of solar power. And that’s now in a little bit of danger, at least in the United States.
(Bush for the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which gave out tax credits for residential solar production, Obama for massive investment in solar energy tech [Solyndra!], and China for, well, cleaning our clocks on investing in both research and production.)
Earlier this year, the Trump administration killed the biggest solar power project in the country. The project, Esmerelda 7, in sunny Nevada, was set to produce 6.2 gigawatts of electricity. That’s just one move among many in his seeming desire to force us to burn oil for the next 100 years.
Also earlier this year, Republicans in Congress passed the only functional bill the passed all year: the tax act that has a stupid name I don’t feel the need to write down. The law as passed kills the residential solar energy production credits first a part of the Bush energy bill. While it did lead to a pretty bumper industry for 2025 in solar panel building, it will likely lead to stagnation in the years to come. Prices for panels are going down, but not as quickly as prices for everything else (including the inputs for those panels) goes up. Thanks, tariffs and inhumane and illogical immigration policy.
Here’s a good piece today in The Verge if you have a subscription.
And, elsewhere, news that Ford is moving away from its current EV plans. Again, one of the positive trends lately has been the electrification of cars (with a few speed bumps and Tesla fires along the way), and many saw Ford offering their most popular pickup truck with an EV option as a great sign. However, sales weren’t great before, and now Trump has killed the tax credit for electric vehicles (along with also killing Biden administration gas mileage regulations). And now Ford is moving on from EVs and saying hybrids (which in trucks still burn lots of gas) are the future.
Again, this guy wants us burning gasoline until Barron’s grandchildren are dead.
We’re just wasting so much time with this guy, when we should be instead aiming and working to fix the massive pile of problems plaguing the world. AI (as terrible as it is) is starting to suck the electricity grid dry, and we have no plans whatsoever to mitigate that. That’s not just climate change, but wholesale habitat change, as dirty data centers get erected in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods. Not to mention the knock-on effects on humanity, but good news, he wants to forbid us from regulating it. Awesome.
We could be doing good, but instead we’re fiddling while the planet burns. The ultimate opportunity cost.
