Yeah, yeah, I know, it's not global warming anymore, it's climate change.
And I do believe the Earth is getting hotter, I am not denying that. Is it getting warmer because of humans? Probably. Is it part of the natural ebb and flow of Earth's climatological cycles? Probably not.
But I'm going to say to you the same thing that I say to people I meet in real life. Even if the United States became carbon neutral, it's irrelevant. We aren't the largest polluter in the world, it's China, and by a mile. And for those who say we shouldn't eat meat because of all of the cows farting? That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard. We just invented cows?
Blocking out the sun? The second most absurd thing I've ever heard.
What we need is a Manhattan Project-level program to attack climate change and to cool the Earth in short cycles, so we don't mess up some other ecosystem by accident in the process. [Good luck figuring out who's paying for THAT.]
The Industrial Revolution started over 250 years ago, why didn't climate change kick in a century earlier? I'm 50-ish, I remember smog warnings over nearly every major metropolitan area in this country. I remember cars that resembled chimneys driving down the street. But, in theory, we tackled those problems. If you ask me, today, what the biggest problem in AMERICA is relating to climate change, it would be air conditioning.
Are cities growing at an exponential rate in the American North? No. The dessert Southwest and the South are where the growth occurs. As the population shifts, business shifts. Even though air conditioning has existed on a mass scale since just after World War II, if you lived in the North, how many months a year are you using that air conditioning? Three, maybe four, tops. How about if you live in Phoenix? Maybe 10 months a year?
Did someone say Phoenix? That's our secret word. In 1920, Cleveland Ohio was the 5th largest state in the Union. Today? It's Phoenix. In a hundred years, Cleveland shrank from 5th to the 54th largest city in America. In 1920, the population of Phoenix was 30,000.
Why the infatuation Phoenix? Because in today's headlines:
If you ask me what's symbolic of the absurdity of Phoenix's extreme growth? The fact that Arizona has a hockey team. A crappy one at that. The Arizona Coyotes have been the second worst team, record wise, over the past decade, and have been in the bottom 5 in attendance for 10+ years running.
Gary Bettman wants his legacy to be that he made hockey work in America's warm weather metropolises. Instead he should be embarrassed that he helped normalize America's migration into inhospitable habitats. In the 1950's, there were 75,000 air conditioning units in the United States. Global Heating, or whatever you want to call it, really kicked in with the rise of the air conditioner. In 2020, 90% of households in America had air conditioning, and there were around 130 million households, meaning that there's a, bare minimum, of 100,000,000 air conditioning units in the United States alone. I haven't even mentioned new, rapidly growing cities in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or Malaysia that rely on air conditioning for growth.
Back in 2017, we talked about the NHL's Las Vegas expansion in this way: "It seems lost on the general public that on the same day Las Vegas had record setting heat, highs of 113 degrees, heat warnings galore, and 120+ degrees in the nearby desert, that here was an expansion draft being held for the new expansion hockey team that starts playing this fall in the NHL, the Las Vegas Golden Knights."
It has only gotten hotter ever since.
You are saying that this is the stupidest article ever written?
Oh come on now, you've read worse.
If a normal "good" Beacon of Speech article gets 20-1,000 hits, but an "idiotic" Corporate News article gets 100,000 hits, does it even matter what I write?