(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what's goin' down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin' gets done, and where beauty walks a razor's edge.

To begin our tour, let's see what those clever Chinese Climate Hoaxsters have been up to around the good ol' USA. Ah, here we go. Alaska—and a good chunk of the Arctic generally—is burning down. From CNN:



New satellite images show huge clouds of smoke billowing across uninhabited land in Greenland, Siberia and parts of Alaska. The wildfires come after the planet experienced the hottest June on record and is on track to experience the hottest July on record, as heatwaves sweep across Europe and the United States...Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at a faster rate than the global average, providing the right conditions for wildfires to spread, according to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at CAMS. "The number and intensity of wildfires in the Arctic Circle is unusual and unprecedented," Parrington told CNN. "They are concerning as they are occurring in a very remote part of the world, and in an environment that many people would consider to be pristine," he said.



And now...the punchline.



The fires themselves contribute to the climate crisis by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They emitted an estimated 100 megatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere between 1 June and 21 July, almost the equivalent of Belgium's carbon output in 2017, according to CAMS.



Tricky pack o'bastids, those Chinese Climate Hoaxsters. Meanwhile, there's a town in Colorado where they're running out of water. From NPR:



From mid-February to early March, most of the town's about 1,600 water customers were issued boil notices and eventually saw their water turned off for a combined 13 days. Conversations in the Colorado River Basin about impending wide-ranging water shortages have created an anxiety in pockets of the West. It's akin to a modern folk tale, a story passed from one person to the next, that one day water will be so scarce, whole communities will see their faucets turned off. That hasn't happened on a wide scale, but this winter Paonia got a taste of that possible future. "There are certain things that we take for granted but you use all the time," Herz said. "We had these expectations about the water and then when you don't have it, it's this huge crisis."

Basically, what happened was a combination of problems that have proven to be prime candidates for being ignored. There was a drought—Thanks, climate crisis!—and then the water tank and associated pipes and conduits began to leak. Thanks, infrastructure week!



Kris Stewart, Delta County emergency management coordinator, was one of the first to respond to the call for additional support. He said communities in the West often have plans in place for what to do if wildfires or landslides damage water infrastructure. But a combination of drought and leaky pipes was a blind spot. "This hadn't really been on a lot of people's radar, but it is now," Stewart said. "It was all new to the town, the county, to everybody. We worked through it as a community and partners because there isn't a playbook to open."

The climate crisis causes a collapse in essential infrastructure, which is collapsing on its own anyway. That's how it works. The term of art is "a cascade of problems." We should get used to using it.

A sign marks the site where Emmet Till was pulled from the river. Courtesy of Emmett Till Interpretive Center

We leave small-town Colorado and head down to Mississippi, where some college students just want to have some fun. Is that so damn bad? Actually, yeah, it is. From ProPublica:

One of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in March showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying. The photo, which was obtained by the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica, shows an Ole Miss student named Ben LeClere holding a shotgun while standing in front of the bullet-pocked sign. His Kappa Alpha fraternity brother, John Lowe, stands on the other side with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. A third fraternity member squats below them. The photo appears to have been taken at night, the scene illuminated by lights from a vehicle.

It is not clear whether it was the students themselves who riddled the memorial marker, or whether they were just pretending to have done so on the electric Instagram machine. In either case, it's a further indication that any speculation as to whether this administration* has bent the zeitgeist so badly that a lot of old, foul demons are running free again is purely unwarranted.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Spur Jangler Friedman of the Plains brings us the tale of how that state's public schools are wrestling with the problem of the climate crisis. From StateImpact:



Lau says she has been educating her students about the connection between fossil fuel combustion and climate change for three years, though she isn’t required to. Oklahoma’s K-12 science standards are based in part on the Next Generation Science Standards, national guidelines developed in 2013 that recommend teaching the concept in sixth grade, but Oklahoma left it out. Oklahoma’ s standards do include language on weather patterns, changes in the environment and variations in regional climate conditions, as well as human activity and its effect on the planet. However, teaching about how fossil fuel combustion relates to these broad categories remains optional.



Lau is one of the educators selected to participate in the revision process. She believes adding more explicit language around fossil fuels and climate change would give science teachers something to fall back on if they encounter resistance from parents or administrators. But she worries it would prompt a political backlash. “Legislators may just see the term climate change and be like ‘I am against that. My party is against that. I don’t want to support that, so therefore, I’m not going to pass your science standards,’” Lau speculated. “The struggle is do we write our standards for somebody who is not scientifically literate or do we write them for science teachers?”



As we continue to remind people until they find us insufferable on the subject: the oceans don't give a damn what you do.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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