Book Report...

 I read the book by Kim Stanley Robinson "New York 2140." I checked it out from the Kurth Memorial Library. It's a climate change novel. There's dangerous stuff down there in the library of our little town. There's ideas, science and things that people think and write about that they think might come to pass given the directions things seem to be headed. 

If you don't know the author Kim Standley Robinson he's a sci-fi writer and has been named "the gold standard of realistic and highly literary science fiction writing." He came to my attention through this article recently in the New Yorker Magazine. His main themes are nature and culture, economic and social justice, ecological sustainability, scientists as heroes, and climate change and global warming.

In the book I read, New York 2140 there has been a 50' rise in sea levels. All kinds of things are hinted at happening in the decades leading up to the present time of the book and the seeds of those things can be seen happening now. New York, though flooded is still an important place and people have managed to adapt to living there but one thing that is noted about climate change is that the ultra rich have enough money that they are not much effected by climate change. The world is still run by the financial institutions that run it today including the cycle of boom, bubble and bust which is always bailed out by the governments piling up more debt and making the rich richer. The people effected the most by climate and boom and bust are and you may have guessed it by now are the poor people. I'll leave it to you to figure out which you are.

In the book, the climate problem does not get solved but it is hinted that in the early years when the situation is finally accepted effective carbon reducing technologies are rolled out at an amazing pace even though things are past the point of no return. The economic and social justice problems get solved and guess what? The world is a better place if people are happy and taken care of with their needs met. I'll stop with the spoilers here. 

As I write this book report the temperature is about 10 degrees higher than normal. The government of Texas has asked that you keep your thermostats on 78 degrees. A little over a year ago we had some record lows and 246 people in Texas died from the cold. In 2016 I wrote this song about climate change (yeah I was getting around to selling my own stuff) and though there are a couple of versions floating around out there and I have changed and tightened up the words a bit this version recorded on a battery powered amp on a record low day during a grid failure will give you a hint at my ideas. I have performed the song in public but everyone thought it was by Paul and John.

For your info the record low when this video was recorded and the 10 degrees warmer today are related events. Come on, you scientists as heroes, YouTube researchers, poor people cause I know no rich people are reading this or they would have called me over to their houses by now figure it out!