God Help Me...Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Right (But For All The Wrong Reasons)

I feel so fucking filthy for agreeing with the queen of white trash.

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Yeah…best mark this date on the calendar because it’s not going to happen again anytime soon. Marjorie Taylor Greene said something I agreed with. Sort of. Kind of. Indirectly. God, I want to claw my eyes out of my head.

Please don’t hate me forever and let me explain.

Ok, first, here’s the thing the witless fuckstick said and let me front load it by pointing out that she’s a fucking moron saying it for the worst possible fucking reasons.

This tweet was in response to the deadly flash floods that have killed over 120 people in Texas so far, with at least another 50 missing. Among the dead are dozens of children, and while even a fully functioning alert system would not have saved everyone, the loss of life would have been far less.

But we no longer have a fully functioning alert system. Or a fully functioning weather service. Or a fully functioning fucking ANYTHING courtesy of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her replusive Republican death cult. They fired the people in charge of issuing alerts. They fired the people in charge of tracking the weather. They defunded the agencies responsible for tracking dangerous storms.

Kristi Noem took the weekend off so FEMA couldn’t respond for Three. Fucking. Days. People were dying, and the federal government sat by and did nothing because Kristi Noem was sleeping in and didn’t feel like working on her day off.

Populism, baby!! For the people!

Now, Marjorie Taylor Greene knows this all looks terrible for her shitty party and blaming Democrats for a disaster in Texas is a non-starter. Thus, time to roll out the conspiracy handbook for morons. THAT’S what her tweet was about.

Greene was far from alone in pushing this bullshit:

“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,” posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. “WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?”

Far FAR from alone:

“Anyone able to answer this?” wrote retired general Mike Flynn, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration and who helped legitimize QAnon after pledging allegiance to the movement in 2020, reposting Chambers.

Conspiracists and grifters on other platforms joined in. One YouTuber with hundreds of thousands of subscribers posted breathless coverage of what he called “The TRUTH of WEATHER MANIPULATION” in a segment which earned him close to 200,000 views alone.

You see…maybe JUST MAYBE, the floods were caused by weather control and geoengineering. MAYBE it was caused by “THEM” and that means the responsibility for all those dead kids lies with “THEM” and not with the GOP and the delayed response and their incompetence. Who is “THEM?” Who knows?! The deep state? The government? The Jews?!!?!? We may never know but as long as there’s some doubt, we can’t point fingers, so let’s just move on, yes?

It’s gross. It’s vile. Fuck every last one of these soulless monsters with a 2x4 covered in spliters until they beg for the sweet release of death.

So, why in the name of all that’s holy am I agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene?

Well, it’s certainly not because I think someone manipulated the weather for nefarious reasons. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a lying ratfuck but she accidentally stumbled onto a bigger truth. You know the saying: A broken clock and all that.

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The funny thing is, a decade or so from now, I’ll bet good money she’ll be 100% in favor of geoengineering because the fossil fuel industry will be paying her to be in favor of it and that’s a very very bad idea.

OK, so if you’ve been reading me for a while, you should know that one of the things I try to do is look down the road to where we are heading and try to figure out where that leads. This is one of those times and like with the neo-Nazis and pedophiles and drones, I really REALLY want to be wrong but I’m pretty sure I’m not.

Geoengineering is unbelievably dangerous. It sounds good on paper but it can go wrong in so many ways it’s hard to wrap your head around it.

Geoengineering, specifically as a solution for climate change, is us, humans, doing something on a global scale to regulate the temperature. Some of these are not terrible ideas: Large-scale carbon capture will be necessary eventually anyway to repair the damage we’ve already done (I’ll circle back to the problems with this). But others are to mitigate the damage now and have a host of potential consequences we cannot anticipate.

Here are a few:

Solar Radiation Modification Or Manipulation (SRM)

SRM techniques attempt to reflect sunlight back into space to cool Earth. Methods include releasing large amounts of tiny reflective particles (e.g., sulfur dioxide) into the stratosphere, deploying mirrors in space, or modifying clouds, ice, and plants to make them more reflective.

The mirrors aren’t the worst idea. If there’s a problem, we can always move them or push them off into space. We can even blow them up if we really really have to. But the rest? Injecting enough reflective particles into the atmosphere to make a difference means if something goes wrong, we would have no way to clean it up. What if we go too far and lower the temperature too much? What if there’s an unanticipated reaction and we poison the air or erase the Ozone Layer? There’s no way to fix it. We simply are not smart enough to reliably manipulate the atmosphere on this scale and guarantee nothing will go wrong. And there is no Plan B if something does.

And that’s just the nerdy science problems. Here are just two of the more practical issues associated with geoengineering (there are more):

• Who gets to control the “thermostat?” - I hadn’t considered this previously and was incredibly annoyed once I came across it because it was so goddamn obvious.
  
  Industrialized western nations might want to go back to the norms of 75 years ago but warmer weather won’t be all that terrible for colder northern countries. Sure, OK, now how about all of the southern countries that could benefit from lower temperatures? Even a degree or two from pre-industrial norms would make the equatorial regions more hospitable, wouldn’t it? So who gets to decide?
  
  Have fun hashing that out in the UN.

• The crisis doesn’t actually go away - Mitigation isn’t a solution. Taking painkillers so you’re not in agony as the cancer consumes you isn’t really a long-term solution, is it?
  
  This is why I firmly believe that a decade or so from now, as the effects of the climate crisis become so pronounced that even the dimmest dimbulb MAGA imbecile is complaining about it, the fossil fuel industry will invest a lot of money in selling geoengineering as a “solution.” Not that they’ll actually want to DO the geoengineering, but convince people that it will save us from the greenhouse gas pollution. That means Republicans will turn on a dime from being deeply suspicious of cloud seeding and weather manipulation to HUGE fans of it. Because they’re whores who will do whatever they’re paid to do.
  
  This is why carbon-capture, while inevitably necessary, will not be a solution. It’s akin to continuing to smoke during chemo. You’re not addressing the root cause of your disease, stupid.

That’s just a light overview of why geoengineering is not the way to go and why I agree (blech barf gag) with MTG. If you want to get deeper into this, read up on the problem here, and for the really geeky stuff, here.

But when Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s been “researching,” I promise you, this ain’t what that knuckledragging dirtbag is talking about. She’s yapping about “chemtrails” and fucking “Jewish space lasers.” PEW PEW!!! ZAP ZAP, you schmuck!

Let a shit-flinging monkey smash her abnormally thick forehead against a keyboard long enough, though, and she’ll accidentally bang out a coherent sentence or two. And that’s exactly what’s happened here. Give the monkey a banana and then go back to ignoring her.

In the meantime, as tempting as a tech solution may seem, this is not the road to go down. I love science as much as any nerd out there and I believe the geeks in lab coats will be the salvation of the human race but this one is on us. We’re going to have to save ourselves from both the fossil fuel industry and their pet fascists.

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