Milton's Visible Fist

PRESENTED BY ROGER REVELLATIONS

We’re less than a month out from Election Day. What should I start with? Heck, let’s go with Donald Trump going on a disjointed climate denial ramble in response to the devastation of the fossil-fueled Hurricane Helene. He reprised Mitt Romney’s pre-Superstorm Sandy mockery of sea level rise, then made the bizarre lie that the planet is getting cooler. He concludes, “I believe I’m really an environmentalist.” Okay, grandpa.

Neoliberal ideologue Milton Friedman pretended that society should be organized entirely by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market without central control or government oversight. It’s utter nonsense, but justified the fossil-fuel-powered free-trade takeover of the world and its ensuing obliteration of the safe operating space for humanity.

The aptly-named Hurricane Milton is the latest visible fist of the invisible hand, now beginning the work of pummeling the breadth of Florida into smithereens. The fossil-fueled monster, with its winds and rains, is sucking up and churning out far more energy every day than that released by all of the nuclear testing ever done on the planet.¹ A vanguard of tornadoes is the leading artillery barrage, to be followed by furious gales and torrential rains. Billions of gallons of the superheated Gulf of Mexico are being pushed onto the western coast of the storm.

"I want to emphasize the consequential damage Milton can do,” President Joe Biden noted at a televised briefing this afternoon with Vice President Kamala Harris and federal disaster officials whose jobs Project 2025 would eliminate. “It’s going to enter Florida in the west as a hurricane, and leave Florida as a hurricane.”

Fret not, fossil-fuel Friedmanites: “Most energy infrastructure on the U.S. Gulf Coast, including oil and gas production facilities, liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants and refineries, is expected to be out of the storm path.” At press time, Eric Schmidt was reported to be breathing a sigh of relief that fracking-powered AI is safe from this storm, as he spun up another game of Universal Paperclips.

It’s harder to guarantee the safety of the 477 residents of Fort Myers who are trapped in a mandatory evacuation zone by Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno, who decided not to evacuate the Lee County Jail which is only 1500 feet from the water’s edge. But “inmates will be evacuated to top floors in case of flooding,” a Lee County spokeswoman comforted me.

Oops, that got a little grim. That must mean it’s time for a . . .

BIRD BREAK!

‘CARBON DIOXIDE MAY CONTRIBUTE TO HURRICANES’: How much warning did Floridians have that fossil-fueled hurricanes would threaten their shores? Oh, about 70 years warning.

“Fuel-burning man is adding ‘tremendous quantities of carbon dioxide in the air,’” the United Press reported in 1956 that climatologist Roger Revelle testified before Congress, “and ‘this may cause a remarkable change in climate’ by raising atmospheric temperatures.”² In his testimony, Revelle noted that changing the earth’s temperature would influence the formation of hurricanes.

It only took a decade for polluter lobbyists like the cement industry’s Bruce Kester to begin the disinformation campaign against climate science. In testimony on the the President’s Air Quality Act of 1967, he mockingly argued that “the cement plant which burns large quantities of fossil fuel and emits dust to the atmosphere is the ideal device to maintain our ecological balance.”

Sixty years later, the threat Congress was warned about has come to pass. Climate scientist Michael Mann tells Arielle Samuelson that storms like Milton expose “the profound irresponsibility and culpability of a fossil fuel industry that knowingly hid evidence of the tremendous danger of their product.”

Princeton University is honoring the decades of fossil-fuel industry corruption that has fueled the catastrophes of Helene and Milton by announcing it is keeping the dirty money from the fossil-fuel industry for influential climate policy academics like Jesse Jenkins, whose programs are financed by BP and ExxonMobil. Based on data contributed by the oil giants, the climate scenarios promoted by Jenkins rely on substantial capture and storage of fossil-fuel pollution, a technological phantasm.

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1  Nuclear testing yield is about 500 megatonnes or 2 exajoules; a hurricane (of average 20th-century scale) releases about 50 exajoules per day.

2  The nation’s top journalists have replaced the phrase “fuel-burning man” with “human-caused forces that have been bringing abnormal heat.” Congratulations on the obfuscations, New York Times scribes Raymond Zhong and Mira Rojanasakul.