Mark Twain is widely credited with having said: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” In fact, the credit ought to go to Twain’s friend and co-author of The Gilded Age, Charles Dudley Warner – but so what? It is a timely quip. And if we substitute “infrastructure” for “weather,” we have a spot on description of the state of play in what is likely to be one of the major “issues” heading into the 2018 midterm elections.
Were Twain alive today (he would now be 183 years old), he or Warner could still say the same about the weather; we are no closer now to doing anything about it on a day-by-day or weekly basis than we were when they were around.
One thing has changed, though: nowadays we – that is, everyone less ignorant and deluded than Republican lawmakers, Donald Trump, and other assorted climate-change deniers — knows that anthropogenic global warming, a bi-product of profit driven-industrial development, sometimes makes weather conditions dangerously, even catastrophically, more turbulent than in Twain’s and Warner’s day.
The entire capitalist class, the politicians who serve them, and wide swathes of the general public are complicit – not because they too are climate change deniers or because they don’t care about the end of life on earth “as we know it,” but because they see no advantage to themselves and others they care about in calling for far-reaching changes.
The situation is…