DL Open Thread: Thursday, January 9, 2025

The Horrific SoCal Fires.  Trump blame Dems for disaster:

“Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!”

Presumably just as he’s blamed Rethugs for all those hurricanes hitting Florida.  Biden had better get as much aid as possible to Cali before Trump shuts it all off.

Climate Change Is The Real Culprit:

The short answer is that the greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California.

As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly.

Melting Arctic ice creates changes in the jetstream’s behavior that make wind-driven large wildfires in California more likely. Recent studies have found that Santa Ana wind events could get less frequent but perhaps more intense in the winter months due to the climate crisis.

The more complicated answer is that these fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. That idea formed a guiding theme of the Biden administration’s 2023 national climate assessment.

A ‘No-Buy’ 2025?  I’m all for it:

“There is something more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity,” French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his 1970 book, “The Consumer Society.” Since Baudrillard published those words, online shopping has removed the brakes from spending so that you move at crushing speed toward a purchase: Websites remember your credit card information, delivery is free, a convenient button urges one click to buy. The entire universe of shopping malls sits tidily in our pockets, thanks to our phones — only the scent of Cinnabon is missing. Since launching a shopping function last year, TikTok, once a thrilling mishmash of the fun and absurd, has homogenized, taking on a strange, sickly feeling of a 24/7 home shopping network with an endless parade of hosts holding up wares to the camera and speaking in the fluent patter of salespeople. Online shopping sales soared during the pandemic — on a line graph, the jump looks like the spike of a high heel you ordered online during a prolonged daydream — and they are now at an all-time high.

The result, no-buyers point out, is carbon emissions, clutter and credit card debt. The answer, they say, is to stop buying more stuff. In a 2020 article in Nature, researchers from the University of New South Wales agreed. “Long-term and concurrent human and planetary wellbeing will not be achieved in the Anthropocene if affluent overconsumption continues,” they argued. The researchers considered solutions as seismic as eco-anarchism, and changes as small as not buying so much stuff.

Fucking Merrick Garland: AG ‘Half-A-Loaf’ At Best:

Attorney General Merrick Garland submitted a court filing Wednesday announcing his intention to release part of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on his investigation into Donald Trump relating to the 2020 election.

“The Attorney General intends to release Volume One to Congress and the public consistent with 28 C.F.R. § 600.9(c) and in furtherance of the public interest in informing a co-equal branch and the public regarding this significant matter,” the filing reads.

However, the filing includes the caveat that a second installment of the report—which includes Smith’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents—will not be available to the public as long as Trump’s co-defendants, Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, remain in criminal proceedings.

Is this mic on?  The Justice Department will drop those proceedings as soon as Trump takes office.  The Trump Justice Department will not release the report.  So, either release the report now so that the public can know the truth, or drop the charges that are about to be released anyway and then release the report.

Is this stuff so hard, or are you this soft?

‘Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Las Vegas?’  Not a new Lana Del Rey song, but a real tunnel built by, you guessed it, Elon Musk:

Elon Musk’s Boring Company spent years pitching cities on a novel solution to traffic, an underground transportation system to whisk passengers through tunnels in electric vehicles. Proposals in Illinois and California fizzled after officials and the public began scrutinizing details of the plans and seeking environmental reviews.

The powerful Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority greenlit the idea and funded an 0.8-mile route at its convention center. As that small “people mover” opened in 2021, the authority was already urging the county and city to approve plans for 104 stations across 68 miles of tunnels.

The project is also realizing Musk’s notion of how government officials should deal with entrepreneurs: avoid lengthy reviews before building and instead impose fines later if anything goes awry. Musk’s views on regulatory power have taken on new significance in light of his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump and his role in a new effort to slash rules in the name of improving efficiency. The Las Vegas project, now well under way, is a case study of the regulatory climate Musk favors.

The head of the convention authority has called the project the only viable way to ease traffic on the Las Vegas Strip and in the surrounding area — a claim that was never publicly debated as the Clark County Commission and Las Vegas City Council granted Boring permission to build and operate the system beneath city streets. The approvals allow the company to build and operate close to homes and businesses without the checks and balances that typically apply to major public transit projects.

Meanwhile, Boring has skirted building, environmental and labor regulations, according to records obtained by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas under public records laws.

It twice installed tunnels without permits to work on county property. State and local environmental regulators documented it dumping untreated water into storm drains and the sewer system. And, as local politicians were approving an extension of the system, Boring workers were filing complaints with the state Occupational Safety and Health Administration about “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and severe chemical burns. After an investigation, Nevada OSHA in 2023 fined the company more than $112,000. Boring disputed the regulators’ allegations and contested the violations.

When you hear the term ‘cutting bureaucratic red tape’, this is what developers really mean.

What do you want to talk about?