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?
More podcasts and substacks. If I can’t have thoughts of my own, I can at least point you to other people’s that are worth your time. The latest Letter from an American (February 7) by Heather Cox Richardson is another banger. A lot of it is given over to her reading out portions of a speech by the junior Senator from Maine, where he pointed out what is happening to the Constitution, and what oath the Republicans took. It went about as well as you’d expect.
Meanwhile, on yesterday’s canal walk I listened to an October 2024 interview with Timothy Snyder (the historian) where he had lots of useful things to say about political impotence as a pose (JD Vance) but also the ways Americans conceive of “Freedom”. He tells a good anecdote of being on a panel with a bunch of national security types at some event in New York in February 2022 and all of them – bar him – saying Zelensky would flee if/when the Russians invaded. Snyder doesn’t use the word projection, perhaps because he doesn’t do Freud, or thinks it wouldn’t be helpful, but, well, Zelensky didn’t flee. If he had, the war would have been over in another day or two, I suspect.
See also Bill McKibben
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/pushing-back-short-term-and-long
So in about six weeks we’re going to formally announce plans for a big global day of action—we’re calling it Sun Day. It will happen on the weekend of the autumnal equinox, September 20 and 21. It will be a celebration of the fact that we can now run this world without fossil fuels: imagine EV and e-bike parades, green lights in the window of every solar-powered home, big concerts and rallies, joyful ceremonies as new solar farms and wind turbines go on line. It’s going to happen around the world. It’s going to demand justice—above all, that we figure out how to finance this revolution around the world, so the people who need it most can take full part. And it’s going to be beautiful.
This may not look, at first glance, like ‘resistance’ or ‘opposition.’ But in fact this is precisely what the fossil fuel industry fears most: the truth that their product isn’t needed. That it’s dirty, that it’s expensive, and that there’s a better way—Big Oil’s executives know that at the cellular level, which is precisely why they spent so much money electing Trump. Solar panels are to the fossil fuel industry what water was to the Wicked Witch.
Looking at the UK situation – it’s not clear to me the Conservative Party will survive. I think there is likely gonna be a huge surge for Reform in the Welsh and local elections. Badenoch doesn’t have any way of fending off Farage (and Labour are busy doing what a bunch of right-wing technocrats can be expected to do).
This (the Enlightenment project, for want of a better slogan) is going to end in ignominy, tears and quite staggering amounts of violence. Not that violence didn’t keep the show on the road all along, obvs. I did not breed because I was 99.99% sure it would come to this. I just thought I wouldn’t go tits up in my 50s. I was kinda hoping to make it to 70 before the shit properly hit the fan. Oh well. Bet it sucks to be young, or a breeder.
marchudson.net 
I find it strange that all the actions being taken to curb our need/reliance on fossil fuels, requires our use of fossil fuels!