This year I am going to write something short, mostly daily, about what is going on – “2 cents on the Arrived Ecological Debacle” (2cotAED). I have to write it; you don’t have to read it. If you DO read it, feel free to tell me how wrong I am (and hopefully why). Re: the debacle aspect: in 2004 the English writer Sara Maitland wrote about the “pending ecological debacle.” The expression stuck with me; it’s a debacle because it was foreseen, warned about and was avoidable. Well, it’s no longer really “pending” is it?
So, the Trump regime is back and has started in on the wishlist; an executive order pulling out of the World Health Organisation (because, you know, international cooperation is definitely not needed for global pandemics). And pulling out of the Paris Agreement (with membership of the UNFCCC presumably as a follow-up?) [FT coverage, BBC coverage, Grauniad coverage.]
Everyone knew this was coming, as soon as it was obvious that Trump had won those swing states. There’s been a couple of months of – what – pretending the future wasn’t coming?
More interesting is that Treasurer Rachel Reeves is getting so desperate that she’s going to give a “greenlight” (sic) to airport expansions.
Reeves is poised to make a swathe of announcements intended to increase economic growth in a speech later this month, including giving the green light to airport expansions.
The long-mooted plan to build a third runway at Heathrow, which is Britain’s busiest airport, is expected to be approved by Reeves, along with bringing a second strip at Gatwick into full-time use and increasing the capacity of Luton, according to Bloomberg.
This all takes me back to a disaster novel I read in the 1980s. Written by Thomas Block and Nelson DeMille, Mayday deals with a supersonic jet liner that is hit by a missile (no warhead) and depressurises. Over the Pacific, a handful of survivors deal with weather, zombified passengers and the US plane that shot them hovering. It’s great stuff. The pilot of that US plane, scared and low on fuel does something that seemed to make no sense to me at the time. Rather than eke out his fuel, he climbs to 30,000 feet. Block describes the sense of power, of comfort. (Spoilers – the pilot dies).
That’s what is going on here – like the T1000 in the vat of molten steel at the end of Terminator 2, we’re reaching for previous disguises/positions that used to make us feel good, that used to make us feel powerful.
With less cod-Freudianism, you could ALSO point to the enormous political and cultural power of the fossil fuel lobbies, obvs. Not everything is about “psychology”.
We’re so so fubarred.
marchudson.net 
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