Fox News reported on some new presidential rankings, which purportedly show Barack Obama as the #6 president in U.S. history and Donald Trump dead last, and MAGA was not happy.
Fox News on Sunday posted an article about the new rankings by the Presidential Greatness Project, which Fox describes as “a group of self-styled experts.” It states that Abraham “Lincoln topped the list of presidents in the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project expert survey for the third time, following his top spot in the rankings in the 2015 and 2018 versions of the survey.”
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“Rounding out the top five in the rankings were Franklin Delano Roosevelt at number two, George Washington at three, Theodore Roosevelt at four, and Thomas Jefferson at five,” according to the report. “Trump was ranked in last place in the survey, being ranked worse than James Buchanan at 44, Andrew Johnson at 43, Franklin Pierce at 42, and William Henry Harrison at 41.”
The report states that Obama and Joe Biden “ranked an average of 6th and 13th, respectively, among Democrat respondents, and 15th and 30th by Republicans.”
Advanced plumbing doesn’t help you when you no longer have ground water, and there’s no snow melt to feed your reservoirs. Agricultural surpluses dry up when the topsoil is exhausted, there’s no water for the crops, and the growing zones have shifted so that the land that used to be perfect for corn and soybeans can’t grow them at all anymore. Peaceful co-existence stops the minute famine hits. Those safe arteries for travel? That’s in large part what’s causing this. We keep pumping out carbon dioxide at ever increasing rates with out global production, and blithely assume that there will always be a new technology to prevent the whole house of cards from tumbling down.
And literacy? That’s not the same as being able to do a thing. I’m talking about skills, thing that need to be learned and practiced from a young age.
The great thing about the enormous storms powered by climate change that have been deluging the Midwest and the California coast is how quickly they’re replenishing snowpack in the mountains and groundwater in the plains.
Hence the need for advanced (specifically nitrogen fertilizer) agriculture techniques.
The majority of climate fumes arise from coal powered electric generation, split between industrial and retail consumption. Car transport makes up the plurality of the remaining quarter for transportation, but that’s easily mitigated with public transport (a thing we’re headed for anyway as the economy shrinks overall and demand for new vehicles contracts).
Knowing how to do a thing is central to doing it.
That’s temporary, as you would know if you had paid attention.
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That whooshing sound was the point going right over your head.
We’re past the point of fixing the soil. The advanced farming we’ve been doing is what has been depleting topsoil. When your growing regions change around you, it’s not going to matter how much you try to compost.
And concrete production, which is a cornerstone (pun not intended) of our civilization. At this point, there is no viable electric alternative for commercial transport (Nikola is bankrupt, and the owner if going to jail for fraud), and there’s no viable way to make public transport work in about 99% of the country. You would need to entirely re-build the infrastructure of the US in order for public transit to be practical for the majority of people, and we’re already out of time. Let’s say you could do that in a mere ten years (which is hopelessly, impossibly optimistic); you’d still have ten years of increasing carbon emissions that have already started to create a cascading, self-perpetuating chain reaction. We’re already seeing a 1.5C rise in seawater temperatures, and that’s over a decade earlier than was worried about. We’re fucked. We’re bleeding out from a severed artery, EMS hasn’t even gotten in the bus, and you’re saying, nah, it’s just a little cut. It’s fucking delusional. If we’d been doing this shit 40 years ago, when I was a kid and we were talking about stopping acid rain and holes in the ozone, maybe we wouldn’t be fucked. But it’s all too little, too late.
That’s cyclical. More heat generating larger stormfronts is the norm. A destabilized jetstream that triggers more polar drift is the norm. The fundamental hazard of the next century isn’t simply going to be higher-than-average temperatures but enormous hurricanes plowing through urban areas, unleashing megatons of wind force and teraliters of water, onto real estate wholly unprepared for the damage.
But the notion that we’re simply not going to have rain anymore because of rising heat is… incorrect on a few very basic levels.
We’ve made more progress reclaiming desert territory in the last twenty years than humans have achieved in the last millennia. The question isn’t whether we can but whether we choose to dedicate the human labor and industrial capital to actually do the thing.
The great thing about a shrinking global population is a decreased demand for new concrete.
Denying that trains even exist.
Denying that buses actually exist
You would not. If anything, we’ve overbuilt infrastructure and would do well to tear down a bunch of the surplus and consolidate in denser urban centers. But we can get by just fine on what we’ve already built, assuming we’re willing to maintain it and shift to bus/train transit over everyone driving their own cars.
Industrial scale changes are going to take place whether we want them to or not. The current pace and direction of development isn’t sustainable.
But huge drop-offs in human activity - the Mississippi cultural collapse being a classic example as is the Chernobyl zone - can and does result in quick reversals and reclamation of territory by wildlife.