Tom Clyde mug
Summer seems to be here. When I went outside last week to move irrigation water, I felt good wearing a fairly heavy coat, and when there was any chance of getting wet, I put on waist-high waders.
Suddenly I’m under a boom, clearing a clogged sprinkler and getting soaked. I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come. It’s going to be a scorching hot summer.
Texas, Arizona and California are already experiencing extreme heat, tornadoes are bigger, earlier and more destructive than usual across the central US, and hurricane forecasters are predicting a very busy hurricane season.
Last winter was also strange: there was a lot of snow at higher elevations, perfect for skiing, more snow than normal melting (and it’s been melting really fast this week!), yet it was warm and rainy in town and around my house at an elevation of 7,000 feet, and much of the snow at lower elevations melted early.
Plowing this winter was no work, hardly a nuisance.
The past 12 months have been the hottest in global recorded history, and the next 12 are expected to be even hotter. After a while, you start to think that climate change hoaxers are amazingly good, or maybe they’re right.
Even if you don’t believe in climate change, there’s a good chance your insurance company does: Home insurance is becoming increasingly difficult to get in areas where fires regularly break out, are destroyed by tornadoes, or flooded by hurricanes.
In large parts of Florida and California, insurance is prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable. I have never thought of the insurance industry as a bastion of daisy-scented environmentalists. They have looked at the actual numbers and the actual claims paid and have decided that climate change is an uninsurable risk in some places.
We gave up growing barley on the farm many years ago, partly because there was no feed market for it after the local dairy industry collapsed, but a big reason was that we could always count on a heavy snowfall in late August or early September that would kill most of the barley. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Now the problem is mainly a lack of harvesters and finding a market where the transportation costs won’t be a huge deal.
During a very enjoyable bike ride around Camas Canyon, I was thinking about climate change. Though it’s getting harder to find a path that doesn’t require dodging excavators and concrete pumps, there are still some pristine back roads where you’re more likely to be interrupted by a family of sandhill cranes than a construction site.
In case you haven’t heard, there’s an election coming up. In a normal world, the Democrats could have convinced Biden to step down while he was still pretty much on top. But he’s offering up his old age. That’s great for the old-timey bunch of guys who run the Senate. But this is not normal, and he’s not going to step down.
Not to be outdone, the Republicans nominated for president a man who had just been convicted of 34 felonies. Though the charges were minor, a random jury of citizens found him guilty on all counts. Think Richard Nixon.
But in our dysfunctional system, that’s now the choice: old and infirm, or out on bail. The country faces real problems, and climate change is high on the list. (As an aside, one can only imagine where we’d be if Jimmy Carter’s energy policies hadn’t been promptly reversed by Reagan.)
But that is not discussed. Nor is the unsustainable national debt, which recently doubled in interest rates. The immigration and border issues are something to blame on the other party, ignoring the real humanitarian issues and economic impacts. It is politically advantageous to blame the other party rather than solving problems that could reasonably be solved.
Instead, the campaign so far has been about Trump seeking “retribution” for wrongs he cannot put into words, such as not getting enough votes to win the last election.
The same goes for congressional primaries, which have degenerated into 14-year-olds blaming each other for being stupid with “your mother” in school parking lots. John Curtis is one of the few Republicans who believes in climate change and wants to do something about it, and because of that he’s being treated like a leper.
I’m not going to talk about the real policy issues, because those are hard issues and our politicians can’t do anything about them.
I keep looking for a place on the ballot to vote for “none of the above” and “put the entire Congress out on the street.” It’s not there.
Locally, we have the other extreme: there is a wealth of really talented people who want to be on the county council, and we can’t lose on that front.
Tom Clyde is a longtime attorney in Park City. He lives on a ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.
