Winter Arrives; Wildfires Come East; Nuclear Renaissance Threatens Us All; UFOs Over the Northeast
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The winter solstice has passed, the days begin to lengthen. In the Northeast the cold season arrived several weeks ago and minus a couple interruptions we’ve had a nice Arctic blast going for a while. This has marked quite the swing from the warmer-than-normal and very brief autumn. The rest of winter is an open question. Here’s NOAA’s current two-week outlook:
What did pass for autumn in the Northeast was marked by the most memorable fire season in living memory, the significance of which remains to be determined. Is this a harbinger?
It’s unclear to me whether the residents of this dense region, on the whole, grasped the unsettling uniqueness of this fall. Probably in parts of New Jersey and New York; maybe if you live near certain parts of Prospect Park. Maybe not. I keep thinking back to this article in which a Massachusetts fire chief complains that people just won’t stop outdoor burning and flicking matches or doing whatever even with all the fire warnings. The New Yorker and New York Times both ran big think piece–type stories on this but as with other markers of a radically altered climate it’s difficult to know whether it seeps in until you experience it firsthand (and even then). Real, regular wildfires would be a new phenomenon here. Culturally we’re so used to seeing them as a Western phenomenon. And of course, we’re just as likely to have catastrophic flooding across the Northeast. Who knows. But if the drought continues and the Northern Appalachians receive limited snow this winter that will certainly favor a resurgence of the fires come spring.
I’m going to break out of the regional theme a bit; nuclear power is back on the menu as this civilization desperately avoids confronting its ecological limitations. I was struck by a segment on it at the evidently largely useless COP29 several weeks ago.1 Diné activist Leona Morgan gets at it pretty well here:
There is, increasingly, a debate on the merits of nuclear power among those who claim to care about the environment. Many of us, of course, see the supposed debate as a dangerous distraction. As Morgan says, nuclear development is definitely not carbon neutral, nor is it safe (the hazards of the plants themselves still very much exist, despite industry claims of enhanced safety, and in fact are arguably worse than ever given rampant global destabilization, climate and otherwise). The toxicity of the waste produced is as alarming as ever, with nowhere to go; the extractive requirements at the beginning of the process, which frequently take place on Indigenous land, are also extremely toxic.
If you squint and try to imagine “nature” as numbers on a spreadsheet, you can get a little closer to seeing how a certain type of “environmentalist” sees nuclear as sustainable. But it ought to be fundamentally understood as a strategy for development—even there a risky, expensive, and unreliable one—not for long-term sustainability; as a “solution,” it’s one only a civilization as myopic, desperate, and addicted to unrealistically cheap energy as ours could reach for.
Adding insult to injury, the new nuclear craze seems inextricably wound up with AI, an industry whose continued development is treated as a matter of messianic necessity2 by its believers. Its a biblically arrogant approach by a tech sector that seems to believe it can produce God via supercomputing, all the more ominous given we’ll be dealing with the impacts of these choices for millions of years.
Do you know your local nuclear plants? There remain two operating in New England, Seabrook Station in New Hampshire and Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Connecticut, and several others in the greater Northeast.
Nukes, are, unfortunately, not the only ongoing attempt to engineer us out of a dire situation we’ve created. The New York Times reports on in-progress carbon dioxide–removal projects:
This summer, Bill Gates huddled in London with representatives of some of the world’s wealthiest people, including the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, the SoftBank founder, Masayoshi Son, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.
They were evaluating their joint investments in companies that could help the world combat climate change. Among the businesses in their portfolio, four stood out as having a particularly audacious goal: They were working to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, for a profit.
Bill Gates (probably the largest private farmland owner in America) and Saudi Arabia jointly combatting climate change!? And turning a profit!? Sounds promising.
While huge sums of money are being dedicated to the nascent field, these projects will not have a meaningful effect on global temperatures anytime soon.
There are a few dozen facilities operational today, including ones in Iceland and California. But the biggest of these capture only a sliver of the greenhouse gases humans produce in one day. Even if hundreds more such plants were built, they would not come close to counteracting even 1 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions.
To me, the notable takeaways in this story are that 1) the technology is unproven, could have God-knows-what side effects, and is unlikely to have any serious impacts on global heating, certainly in the short-term, 2) venture capital and private equity are very excited, which should always make us uneasy, as their primary goal is bluntly stated as a short-term return on investment, and 3) the US government is demonstrating bipartisan support for this scheme, which is not usually promising.
The UN is generally dismissive of the technology, and the NYT devotes this much space to the bluntest critic:
“Carbon capture will increase fossil fuel production, there’s no doubt about it,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. “It does not help climate one bit.”
Completely unrelated, here’s the trailer for Snowpiercer (2014):
Parts of the Northeast have swelled with reports of unidentified “drones,” particularly in New York and New Jersey. I don’t have much to add except to note this isn’t the first mass UFO sighting in the region—another notable one is the Hudson Valley sightings in the 1980s. Despite the particular abundance during that decade, the Hudson Valley itself has a long history as a UFO hotspot. Linda Zimmermann, author of Hudson Valley UFOs—a fun book that chronicles UFO sightings in the region from the late 1800s to the present, copies of which are now selling for over $100 on Amazon, I’m betting because of the current craze—argues that the Hudson Valley may be the number-one UFO hotspot in the country.
I discussed this history with occult historian Mitch Horowitz when I interviewed him two years ago. Mitch’s words:
It’s difficult to understand why the Hudson Valley plays such a prominent role in UFO sightings. In a way, it comports well with the past. When Joseph Smith produced the Book of Mormon in 1830, he was drawing upon certain aspects of lore that had long circulated in the Burned-Over District. One was the existence of an ancient tribe, older than the oldest Indian tribe, that made its home in the Burned-Over District. One could look at Smith’s testament in two ways: either drawing upon the folklore of the region or reflecting it.
I mention this as I thought Mitch made an interesting point when interviewed in a recent story about the New Jersey sightings:
“It's so highly speculative. I think we're using the term drones because it's reassuring to employ a familiar term; it stands to reason that if we put a familiar name on bizarre phenomena, it's reassuring in a certain way,” Horowitz told Decrypt. “I haven't met anybody of any quality of intellect who professes any degree of confidence in what is going on.”
Followers of these sorts of events might recall a similar mass “drone” sighting in late 2019, just before the pandemic began (credit to Ken Layne of Desert Oracle Radio for reminding me of this). From a Denver Post story, published Christmas Eve in 2020:
A band of large drones appears to be flying nighttime search patterns over northeast Colorado — and local authorities say they don’t know who’s behind the mysterious aircraft.
The drones, estimated to have six-foot wingspans, have been flying over Phillips and Yuma counties every night for about the last week, Phillips County Sheriff Thomas Elliott said Monday.
The drones stay about 200 feet to 300 feet in the air and fly steadily in squares of about 25 miles, he said. There are at least 17 drones; they emerge each night around 7 p.m. and disappear around 10 p.m., he said.
“They’ve been doing a grid search, a grid pattern,” he said. “They fly one square and then they fly another square.”
As far as I can tell, the Colorado sightings appear much better corroborated than those happening now, five years later. Then again, the American psyche has deteriorated quite a bit in half a decade, context that may be key to deciphering what’s happening.
Finally,
has rebooted her newsletter and has a lovely short post about the solstice. Go read it here:
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We are in a world of diminishing pledges vis-a-vis the clean energy paradigm. Here in the Green Mountains our own red wave brought into office the biggest Republican legislative bloc in a quarter century. Republican Governor Phil Scott is gleeful about this; already this state is probably walking back from its climate pledges, a local version of countries basically giving up on the Paris Accords.
To be clear this isn’t necessarily something to solely lament; many of these pledges were not only unrealistic but fundamentally impossible in the paradigm within which they were promised, premised on the idea we could keep doing business as usual, more or less—but in some sustainable or fair way. That circle cannot be squared, and dealing with that reality is a starting point.
“We're not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it,” [Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt recently said]. “I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem, than constraining it and having the problem.”