Damage from Hurricane Helene is severe. Weather extremes are all around us. It's undeniable.

[Dennis Donovan]

P G Antioch
23m
#DemVoice1
#wtpEARTH
#wtpBLUE
The evidence for human caused climate change is in our faces, plain as day. Yet R's, Big Oil, tRUmp, Vance, Abbott & DuhSantis continue to claim it's a hoax. They refuse to do anything to address it
Check your registration & vote blue.

P G Antioch
#ClimateEmergency
#ClimateActionNow
Damage from Hurricane Helene is severe. Weather extremes are all around us. It's undeniable.
Check your registration & vote blue, up & down ballot.

11:01 AM · Oct 5, 2024

CBS News - Hurricane Helene satellite images show major devastation in North Carolina as death toll continues to rise

By Kerry Breen

Updated on: October 4, 2024 / 9:51 PM EDT / CBS News

Hurricane Helene satellite images show major devastation in North Carolina as death toll continues to rise
By Kerry Breen

Updated on: October 4, 2024 / 9:51 PM EDT / CBS News


A week after Hurricane Helene tore through the U.S. Southeast and devastated western North Carolina with heavy rains and severe flooding, satellite images are showing the extent of the damage.

Officials have previously said hundreds of roads in western North Carolina have been inaccessible because of the storm's effects, hindering rescue efforts. Residents reported seeing water as high as the roofs of some homes.

At least 225 people have been confirmed dead, and officials say they expect the death toll to continue to rise as recovery efforts continue.

A spokesperson for the police department in Asheville, North Carolina, told CBS News in an email late Friday that it is "actively working 75 cases of missing persons." The spokesperson disclosed that there had been a total of 350 persons reported missing since Helene struck, but 270 of those have been located.

Satellite images show washed-out streets and buildings. One image shows mud and debris near Old Fort Elementary School in Old Fort, North Carolina.

/snip

https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

Link to tweet

[Think. Again.]

1. Yep, humanity has made the informed choice to....

...let the planet go through abrupt and catastrophic changes very quickly, rather than just switch to different energy sources.

[orthoclad]

4. I disagree. "Humanity" didn't make the choice; the global plutocracy made a decision

to amplify their profits and power, thinking they can buy the way out of disaster while "humanity" drowns.

"Humanity" was told that the economy and military and national power relied on the fossil economy. "Humanity" in the US tried to change direction, around the time of Earth Day in 1970. The oil monarchs then turned off their pumps to teach us a lesson. But we took the "wrong" lesson - Carter put solar panels on the White House and pushed conservation. So they had to get Reagan elected.

My point is this: many people say that "the species" or "the race" has destroyed its nest. But the species coexisted well with the rest of the biosphere until industrial capitalism and the coal-fired steam engine. I find it incredibly telling that the steam engine, fired by coal, was created in order to pump the water out of coal mines.

Fossil energy had some uses like central heating, but the bulk of fossil energy got used to power the enormous profits of capitalism.

Sorry if I'm nit-picking, but it's an important distinction. There's a difference of scale, of punching down, between individual choices and the profit-seeking lust of the ruling class.

[Think. Again.]

5. Nah, humanity as a whole blew it.

We could debate forever which particular group, living in which area of the planet, or holding which fortunes, or having which jobs, etc, were responsible for laughing off the scientific predictions, but it comes down to all of us having been willing to accept pumping out CO2 emissions instead of not pumping out CO2 emissions, which is what we did (and still do everyday).

[orthoclad]

6. No. The peoples of the South, the indigenous all over the world

did not participate in creating this disaster. The ruling class burned fossils to fuel their profits.

The Bengali fisherman who burns a little fuel to run the boat which allows him to compete with corporate trawlers is caught between rising seas, melting glaciers, and typhoons. Compare him to Bezos' city-sized megayacht.

Study after study has documented that the ruling class burns a vastly disprorportionate amount of carbon. On top of that, they have purposely designed a society that requires creating emissions in order to survive. I did without a car for 35 years, but eventually found it impossible to work without one, e.g. Another example is how the megacorps did away with the wide and well-operating mass rail of Los Angeles to build the freeways and create a car-dependent society.

This is an interesting thread the other day, humorously shining light on megacorps' hungry love affair with AI:
https://democraticunderground.com/100219513581

By turning off your lights all day every day for a month, you conserved about 1 percent of the energy needed for AI to generate a picture of a duck wearing sunglasses. Isn’t he cute? Aside from the fact that he has the feet of a human man, of course.

For decades, the megacorps have been pushing the "individual" narrative. Like using consumer recycling to enable them to pump out plastic. "Pollution is the individual's responsibility" is the get out of jail free card for the megacorps.

[Think. Again.]

7. Yep, you, me, and lots of other first world, American mainstreamers...

...have known all along that it's our consumer dollars that are making this devastation happen, that a lot of other humans have nothing to do with causing it, but will suffer just as much if not worse than us, and still we let it happen.

We know exactly what's causing it, exactly what industries must be stopped, and exactly what industries must be built out, and we've known all that for the ladt 50 years, and yet the world is still increasing our CO2 output every day.

As I said, we could go around in circles all day blaming individuals or groups, or whatever, we can call people who spill soup on picture frames terrorists and jail them, or we can give fossil fuel executives and shareholders huge excessive profits, but the actual problem is not being addressed.

Just stop oil.

[orthoclad]

8. We can't stop oil while the oiligarchs run the country.

I do my part. I'm on my 4th solar project now, and I'm on the waiting list for a solar car. I walked and took buses for decades. But a million people doing this don't hold a candle to one Bezos or Koch.

Know the enemy.

[Think. Again.]

9. The oiligarchs are only oiligarths because we let them be oligarths.

It's past time for humanity to take responsibility for our planet instead of leaving it up to a greedy few.

[orthoclad]

10. We need to remove the guilty few from power.

This is a class issue, not a consumer issue.

[Think. Again.]

11. This is whatever the issue has to be to stop burning fossil fuels.

[Elessar Zappa]

2. The world should be

building nuclear plants as fast as they can. It won’t solve our problems but it would put a big dent in them.

[cachukis]

3. There is no escape. We are in predicament.

All we can do is manage the unpreventable.
My wife and I travel away from Florida in the summer in a Vintage Airstream.
We left Tampa just before Helene for the International Rally in Missouri.
Temps in 90's.
Checked out NOAA and a new depression is forming in the Bay of Campeche with a cone of silence headed to Anna Maria Island as a Hurricane.
My SIL, who lives on the water in Tampa Bay in a beautiful well apportioned home, suffered 3 feet of water in some recently remodelled rooms. The contractors were available and have already removed the first course of drywall. The front yard has the damaged furnishings waiting for pickup.
Treasure Island has plowed sand banks reminiscent of plowed streets in my youth.
My daughter spent the torrents of North Carolina in Banner Elk. She and her husband took 10 hours to get to Jacksonville over crowded back roads.
We sold our large home nearly 3 years ago anticipating the havoc to come.
Florida is not the same any more.
We are lucky to be away for what appears to be at least a serious deluge.
We are in predicament and can only manage what is coming.