The wildfires continue in California, and the word that keeps springing to mind is ‘freakish.’ From the tone of voice I’m hearing in print (you know what I mean) from my Facebook friends in the affected area, this fire is extreme, fast spreading and out of control. It seems like it is to fires what Maria was to hurricanes, what Harvey was to hurricanes before Maria, what Sandy was to hurricanes before Harvey, and what Katrina was to hurricanes before Sandy.
Speaking of Maria, people have begun to die from disease in Puerto Rico. Disease caused by lack of clean drinking water, deaths that can be attributed directly to the criminally negligent emergency response.
The fires, and the hurricanes, are both results of global warming, and it will get worse. Not because it has to get worse. Because people are making money by making it worse, and politicians take money from those people, and keep us from implementing the programs needed to reverse it.
We need solar power, and wind power, and all sorts of clean power. We’ve got the technology. We’ve got the room. We need high speed electric (or magnetic) trains, we need electric, driverless cars. We need a water distribution and desalination and purification system that can move the water away from the floods and bring it to the forest fires, and drought stricken areas. We need trees, billions, maybe trillions of trees. We have places to put them, that’s seriously not the problem. We need all of these things, and we need them right now.
But instead we’ve got fires, hurricanes, and entirely preventable diseases.
