Summer appears to have arrived. Earlier in the week when I went out to move irrigation water, it felt good to have a pretty heavy coat on, and if there was even the slightest possibility of getting wet, the hip waders came out.
Suddenly now, I’m diving under the boom to clean out clogged sprinklers and letting it soak me. I hope this isn’t an indication of things to come — a sizzling hot summer.
Texas, Arizona and California are already experiencing extreme heat. The mid-section of the country is having tornados that seem bigger, earlier, and more damaging than normal. The people who predict hurricanes are forecasting a very busy hurricane season.
This past winter was also strange. There was a lot of snow up high, with great skiing, and a greater than normal snowpack to melt off (and boy howdy is it melting off this week!), and yet in town and around my house, that 7,000 foot level, it was warm enough that we got rain, and a lot of the lower snow melted back early.
Plowing this winter was not a job. It was barely a nuisance.
Each of the past 12 months have been the hottest in recorded history on a global basis. The predictions are that the next 12 months will be even hotter. After a while, you begin to think the people running the climate change hoax are incredibly good at it, or perhaps they are right.
If you don’t believe in climate change, the odds are pretty good your insurance company does. It’s increasingly difficult to get homeowners insurance in places that seem to regularly burst in the flames, get flattened by tornados, or swamped by hurricanes.
Large parts of Florida and California are either prohibitively expensive, or insurance just isn’t available. I’ve never thought of the insurance industry as a bastion of daisy-sniffing tree-huggers. They are looking at real numbers and real claims paid, and deciding that climate change is an uninsurable risk in some places.
We abandoned raising barley on the ranch years ago. In part, that was because there wasn’t a local feed market to sell it to once the dairy industry collapsed locally. But a big part of it was that you could always bank on a snowstorm in late August or early September that would destroy most of the crop. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore. Now the issue is mostly the lack of harvesting equipment, and that issue of finding a market where the freight doesn’t break the bank.
I was thinking about climate change while on a very pleasant bike ride around Kamas Valley. It’s increasingly difficult to find a ride that doesn’t involve dodging excavators and concrete pumps, but there are still some unspoiled backroads where the ride is more likely to be interrupted by a family of sandhill cranes than construction.
If you haven’t heard, there is an election coming up. In a normal world, the Democrats would have been able to convince Biden to step out of the way while he was more or less on top. Instead, he is offering up his declining years. That has served us so well for the brigade of senile old men running the Senate. But this isn’t normal, and he’s not stepping aside.
Not to be outdone, the Republicans are nominating a guy who was just convicted of 34 felonies. The charges were kind of penny-ante stuff, but a jury of randomly picked citizens convicted him on all counts. It makes you long for Richard Nixon.
But in our dysfunctional system, that is now the choice — old and frail vs. out on bail. There are real problems facing the country, climate change being near the top of the list. (As an aside, you wonder where we might be if Jimmy Carter’s policies on energy hadn’t been summarily undone by Reagan.)
But there is no discussion about that. There is no discussion about an unsustainable national debt with an interest rate that doubled recently. Immigration and border issues are something to blame the other party for — while ignoring real humanitarian issues and economic ramifications. It’s more politically advantageous to blame the other party than to fix something that seems reasonably fixable.
Instead, the campaign so far is about Trump seeking “retribution” for wrongs he can’t articulate, like not getting enough votes to win the last election.
The congressional primaries are no better. It’s all sort of sunk to the level of a bunch of 14 year olds in the school parking lot trading stupid “yo mamma” insults. John Curtis is a rare Republican who believes in climate change and wants to do something about it. He’s treated as a leper because of it.
We’re not about to talk about real policy issues. Those can be hard, and our politicians are incapable of doing anything, let alone hard stuff.
I keep looking for the place on the ballot to vote for “none of the above” and “throw the entire Congress out in the streets.” It’s not there.
Locally, we have the other extreme — a surfeit of really qualified people wanting to be on the County Council. On that one, it’s impossible for us to lose.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.