Losing Sight on Clean Energy Targets Due to the Trump Phenomenon

My good friend Terry Ribb writes: under the subject line: ACADEMIC RESEARCH: Both conservatives and liberals want a green energy future, but for different reasons

Hi Craig,  This is from a publication that only allows articles from PhDs and professors–academics who are experts in their fields.  They call it explanatory journalism and their goal is to bridge the gap between academic and public knowledge.  Thought you might like this one.

Thanks. This is cool, but not at all unexpected. Liberals want clean energy because it’s good for the environment; conservatives want it because it’s cheap.  For sure.

This, btw, is the reason I haven’t written any books recently; there is nothing to say that I haven’t said already, e.g.,

We’re getting to renewables whether we care about the environment or not. We’re just a few decades away from having removed almost all carbon from our transportation and electricity grid, and that’s because of costs.  If advanced nuclear kicks in, and I certainly hope it does, that will further accelerate the process.

This whole thing is being fought against, tooth and nail, by the fossil fuels industry, and these people essentially own our law-making system.

My attention at this point is on Trump.  Here’s something I just wrote on how our democracy is crashing down around us.  Many people, myself included, have been saying for decades that the U.S. is a democracy in name only, that all the key decisions are made by a handful of people, that congress acts only at the behest of wealthy donors, and that the common American has literally zero power.  An analysis at Princeton shows that the popularity of a measure has exactly zero bearing on its coming through as a law. This is how it’s possible for a concept like universal background checks for prospective gun owners to remain a vague abstraction; it enjoys 91% public support, but it’s a taboo subject in the halls of Congress.

The Trump phenomenon is far worse, IMO.  Here we have one man, in this case a sociopath, exerting as near to complete control over a nation as possible, whose congress is terrified of him.  There is no precedent whatsoever in U.S. history; it’s the precise phenomenon that concerned the Founding Fathers most greatly.  We’re on the precise path that has resulted in every one of the fascist states over the past 100 years around the globe.

Here’s something from The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, a 2007 non-fiction book by author Naomi Wolf. Wolf outlines ten steps that “closing societies” — such as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Stalin’s Russia — have historically followed. These steps, Wolf claims, are being observed in America now.

The steps are:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy.
2. Create secret prisons where torture takes place.
3. Develop a thug caste or paramilitary force not answerable to citizens.
4. Set up an internal surveillance system.
5. Infiltrate and harass citizens’ groups.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release.
7. Target key individuals.
8. Control the press.
9. Cast criticism as espionage and dissent as treason.
10. Subvert the rule of law.^[3]

Trump is making fantastic progress in several of these areas, especially #1, #8, #9, and #10.