It Could Happen Here - The Great Chinese Heatwave

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

The gang talks about the brutal heatwave sweeping China and our blisteringly hot future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It Happened Could Here. I'm Evans, Robert. Podcast. Song. Hello. Hello. Who else is on the call? I'm Evans, Robert, podcast, song. Hello. Who else is on the call? What are we doing? Where are we?

It's me. It's Christopher Wong. I'm going to talk a lot this episode. There's also other people here. You are. Now, before we get into that, I should that we we're all just looking at the latest episode of podcast magazine which of course we all read regularly that's i do a list i do like that they describe you as uh as uh they they describe you in a few funny ways actually yes they do it's a list of the most powerful people in podcasting um it's of course got me obviously trevor noah joe rogan all the greats on on page 47 we have robert

evans who and they do say that he has also undertaken an ambitious daily series called it could happen here that takes on some of the weightiest issues and problems facing policy makers around the world i i will say this if you are a policymaker and you have ever taken a policy suggestion from us you have a legal obligation to like light your own office on fire with a molotov i do like that robert evans no no no don't listen to chris do it policymakers i do like that robert ev Evans is right above the serial creators. So that's good. That is nice.

I'm above Trevor Noah. I mean, I literally don't think it's listed because there is no way in the list Ben Shapiro is above Joe Rogan. And that's just not accurate to the way the industry functions. But it's a very silly list anyway. It's been fun reading through our latest issue of our favorite podcast magazine. Podcast magazine, of course. Made by Podcast

News Daily, where you can get all your news about podcasts. A thing that I totally knew about. I've known about this clearly for longer than 15 minutes. Actually, that's not true. I've known about it for longer than 8 minutes. Actually, that's not true. I've known about it for longer than 8 minutes, maybe 12. Yeah.

Yeah, it's an amazing photo of Robert. I was happy to get in some fine reading today. So anyway, what's our episode actually about? That's a great question. It's a podcast power rating episode. Yeah, yeah. I don't even have anywhere to go with that. No, the thing the episode is actually about is heat waves.

Very specifically, a heat wave in China that has been going on for... As we're recording, this is day 72, I think. By the time this goes out, it will probably be like day 74 um yeah and this is an an incomparable heat wave uh i'm just gonna read this from axios the extreme heat and drought that has been roasting a vast swath of southern china for at least 70 days straight has no parallel in modern record keeping in China or anywhere else around the world for that matter. Now, OK, so that sounds bad, right? But it's actually worse than that because, OK, so if you were to read that, you might believe that this heat wave is just affecting southern China. And that's like not true. It's also affecting southern China, and that's not true.

It's also affecting northern China. It is affecting most of China. It's affecting almost most people alive. It is affecting 900 million people. Now, Chris, quick question. Is that a lot? a lot so okay so if you rank all the countries in the world right the people affected by this heat wave would be the third largest country in the world only behind china and india okay okay so that's it that's several peoples it's it's fun is it more people than the british people

who have been logging on to post about it being like 85 degrees and them dying like i do love one of the things that's keeping me alive during this ugly summer is like all of the photos of british people just getting as red as possible because they think that tanning means burning 80 of the surface of your body you don't it's hard for me to explain how difficult it was for me to comprehend that in california they won't serve you if you have your shirt off because it is a national tradition in Britain to take off your shirt and get as much sunburn as possible

or if you're getting into a fist fight as well I have witnessed a number of folks pull their shirts off in fights in London yep it's part of our natural heritage it's a beautiful country, but please continue, Chris.

Yeah, okay. So, you know, to get a sense of, like, the stakes of this, right? So, okay, and, like, just the sheer scale of this, because 900 million people is an amount of people that, like, is incomprehensible. Yeah, you can't tell us. That's a number that's too large. So, okay, Sichuan province, right? This is one province that is being affected by this. This province has 83 million people in it.

This is the entire combined population of California, Texas, Indiana, and New York City. Here's some France 24 about what's happening here. Since July this year, the province has faced the most extreme high temperatures, the lowest rainfall in the most extreme high temperatures the lowest rainfall in the corresponding period in history and the highest power load in history local authorities said so it is hotter than it has ever been it is uh drier than it has ever been except and and this is the fun part uh this is the similar similar what's been happening in texas and i think yeah well i'm texas probably the best example of this.

Okay, so it's really, really, really unbelievably dry, except for when there's giant flash floods and they've killed like 22 people already, have died from the flash floods in different provinces. But yeah, it is unbelievably bleak. One of the big things that's happening is that the Yangtze River is like the lowest anyone has ever seen it who's like anyone alive has ever seen it it's the lowest we have recorded measurements of because like and this is everything that's happening here like there is no record of it ever being this bad and this is a real problem because particularly in Sichuan, because 80% of this province's power is drawn from hydroelectric. And, you know,

it turns out I it's, it's really bad. If the rivers that you are relying on for your hydroelectric power are basically drying up. And like, like there's, there's pictures of like, like you can go find pictures of this.

Like there are pictures of the Yangtze that like, it looks like a riverbed on Mars. Like it is just just just completely dry. Like it's like dry, cragged stuff. It's really. Again, this is just to kind of bring out how worldwide this problem is. We're seeing pieces of this everywhere else, right? is we're seeing pieces of this everywhere else right like texas which is also in a horrible drought has been having flash floods that have been disastrous recently because when it's been

super dry for a while and you have these these heavy rains it's it's a huge fucking problem and you've got riverbeds drying up all across the southwest and things like lake mead getting low enough that hydroelectric power isn't going to be reliable in a huge chunk of like the again because it's important not to distract from like what's happening in china but because it's important like this is this is everybody this is everybody yes having india right now yes in india all over yeah yeah and and you know okay so the the the sea wave in china like there's been very very little english coverage of it and the thing that everyone focuses on is the fact that the reduced

ability to generate power and the fact that everyone has to turn on their air conditions to not literally die is wreaking havoc on China's productive capacity. So Sichuan has an enormous industrial base there that produces stuff from everything

from Tesla to Apple. And this is what the Anglophone media cares about right like everything almost everything written about the heat wave is about its effect on like supply chain disruption disruption to like semiconductor production and like batteries for electronics and so on and so forth and i do not give a shit about this um and the reason i don't give a shit about this is because the actual human impact of this is just sort of unfathomable and the media outlets were talking about it like don't seem to be paying attention to it at all um so while i was originally okay so uh when i was originally writing part of this episode i went and like looked back at weather

data for shanghai and so okay when I was running this on August 23rd. That day was 103 in Shanghai. Two weeks before that, it was 111. And I found out that from July 30th to August 20th, the daily high temperature did not go below 100. On the 21st, it finally rained, and that dropped the temperature to merely 94. I think either tomorrow,

today or tomorrow, I think, it will go below 90. This is at night as well? No, this is the temperature of the day. But the temperatures during the night aren't going below 70 either. A lot of times, they're in the 80s or 90s. And, you know, like. The temperature at night does, just for people who are not aware of, like, heat,

one of the things that's most important for, like, the survivability of a heat wave is whether or not it gets cool at night. Because you can survive pretty hot temperatures during the day if you're able to cool your body down at night. It's one of the saving graces, the Pacific Northwest had during its heat waves, but yeah. And,

and this is, this is a real like, so trunking, which is an enormous city. It has 9 million people like regularly in the city. It's trunking. It's the city is also the municipal like government. There's a,

there's a whole sort of complicated thing there, but like the municipality of trunking is 32 million people in it. They had a night. I, a couple couple i think a couple of weeks ago that was 94.8 degrees and which is again like that is a night that is significantly hotter than the average summer day and you know i mean like i want to go back to shanghai for just like a second because like shanghai i i i looked Shanghai, I look this up. Shanghai has not had a day where the high has been below 89 degrees for two consecutive days since mid-June. It has been over 90 degrees every single day, like without two days back to back.

It wasn't that hot since mid-June. And, you know, OK like the effect this is having enormous effects uh one of the big ones this is the most noticeable ones is like basically like any excess power usage that a city can have is just getting shut off there's been a lot of uh there's been a lot of stuff where like businesses aren't allowed to open before like 4 p.m because it's literally just too hot and you can't deal with the electricity load and yeah like and you know the other the other problem here again is like it's not cooling off at night and if it's not cooling off at night yeah like this is this is the thing that kills people um and so i

well one of the things i want to talk about this is just like looking at this looking at what this looks like on like a very very granular individual, because this stuff also just sort of gets ignored. There is a really horrible story in six tone, which is like, it's hard to describe them. So six tone is a state media outlet, but they're like, I don't know.

I guess you consider them like they're like the left wing state media outlet, which means that like they have somewhat more like editorial independence than like something like China daily or like a lot of the left-wing state media outlet which means that like they have somewhat more like editorial independence than like something like china daily or like a lot of the other state-run things and they like they criticize the government a lot more than uh most of the sort of state-run outlets and they did this story about a migrant worker who was working at a freight depot about like he's this this depot is about like two and a half hours outside of shanghai and okay so he he's he's working and it is you know it is it is unbelievably hot i think i think the last day that he's working here it's 104 degrees

and that night it only cooled off to 84 here Here's from Six Tone about sort of just the conditions that people are working in here. On the hottest days, the temperature side of the carriages is at least 50 degrees Celsius, which is 122 degrees Fahrenheit, says Yu Yidong, a worker from Jiangxi, another inland province. It feels like you're on fire standing here around noon. His employer, an outsourcing agency, hands out heat stroke prevention drugs, which he takes twice a day. At the freight depot, managers sit in air-conditioned rooms, but workers like him rest under trees. The office is not for us, Yu says. Now, okay, in theory, under Chinese law, if it hits 104 degrees, outdoor work is supposed to immediately stop, and you're supposed to move everyone indoors and give them water and stuff, because

it turns out if you're working a hard manual labor job outside in 104, you might die. But, you know, you're also supposed to get paid heat breaks. And, you know, as anyone who is familiar with, for example, how American farm labor works, you know

what's about to happen next. It turns out that, you know, okay, so you can take a break break but your employers won't pay you for it because like they don't like no who's who's gonna who's gonna actually force them to do it jong who's the the the worker the story is about you know is extremely poor his family is poor he's trying to support a family like back home because again he's a migrant worker and he you know he can't he can't afford to take a break on his shift so he doesn't die and so he literally collapses on the job and then gets back up and finishes his work and he tries to cool down by like laying in his tiny young un-air-conditioned apartments with like an electric fan pointed at his head

tiny, un-air-conditioned apartments with, like, an electric fan pointed at his head. And he died on a bed that was held up by two broken cinder blocks making maybe $4 an hour. Oof. Yeah, and, you know— Worker's paradise. Yeah, and I mean, you know, the thing about this, right, is—so in theory, he's working for a state-owned company, right? he's working for a state-owned company, right? But, you know, as we talked about, like, a little bit in the sort of quote earlier, he's not actually working for the state-owned firm.

What he's working for is one of these, like, labor agencies, which are these, like, sort of contracting things that allow you to actually get a job. But, you know, what happens is that the state-owned firms, like, outsource labor to these contracting firms, and the contracting firms just, like, pick people up and bring them to the site but this means he doesn't have a contract and the problem is if you don't have if you don't have a contract right you can't get any government benefits you can't get uh insurance and it turns out this matters because uh you know china china has like a payout right that they're supposed to pay to families when you know if someone dies in the job but you

know it's almost impossible to collect especially if you don't have a contract it is it is almost impossible to to get this thing um and you know like this is this is how like most of the chinese economy works uh the chinese journal chuang calculated that in thong kwan which is one of like china's big industrial cities if companies actually paid out the insurance benefits they were legally required to pay out uh it would cut corporate profit by 50 and bankrupt like most of the companies working here's you know the entire economy is based on this and zhong's family drives like 350 miles to the city where he died and starts like harassing government officials and bosses for like literally weeks.

They are trying to get people to like, hey, you know, will you pay out the insurance money you're legally required to pay us? And they refuse. Like the local officials like won't even give them like surveillance footage of like what like of him on the job dying. even give them like surveillance footage of like what like of him on the job dying and you know after like several weeks of there's like four or five weeks they're finally able to get a sixth of the money they're supposed to get if you die if someone dies under sort of like they're able to get a sixth of the money that you're supposed to get under chinese law if one of your family members dies in the workplace and you know i'm focusing on this story because it's it's one of the few stories that

we have directly about sort of the sheer magnitude of the suffering this heat wave is causing. And part of what's going on here is that we don't know what the death toll of the heat wave is. There's nothing about it, right? You'll see a couple of reports that talk about like two or three heat-related deaths, but it is literally impossible that there are that few deaths. There was a study in the journal Lancet that was looking at heat-related deaths in China over the last 30 years. And it showed that heat-related deaths have increased by a factor of four since 1990. And so there was another heat wave in China that was pretty bad in 2019. There was another heatwave in China that was pretty bad in 2019.

They calculated that 26,800 people had died from heat-related deaths. Jesus. And again, that heatwave, the 2019 heatwave was pretty bad. This heatwave has just utterly destroyed every single record that heatwave set. It is in its own universe of heat waves so it has killed it like probably by the end of this it will have killed like tens of thousands of people yep and yeah which is really bleak and you know i mean i think like part of the reason also i wanted to talk about like this specific story is that like you know so the weather itself like is trying to like is is enough to kill you right but like okay so like like this kind of heat

is survivable if like you know if if you're in a situation where you can be inside and where you can be hydrated and stuff like that but you know hey capitalism exists that means you have to keep working during this shit and that's just going to keep killing people um i wanted to sort of also look at sort of some of the historical heat waves to also to get a sense of how many people like probably died in this one um i think like maybe the most famous heat wave like in in my lifetime well until this one i guess was a heat wave in europe in 2003 and that one killed something like 70 000 people um and there's a lot of very interesting stuff that we learned from this heat wave about what heat waves do is sort of in general uh the united nations like environmental program like released a report about this and there's a lot of really interesting stuff in it i mean okay so the the obvious one is that this has a massive effect on agriculture, which, okay, yeah, like, you can ask a four-year-old and they will tell you that this is bad.

And this is affecting China right now, too, because this drought is hitting, like, right in the middle of a lot of China's breadbasket. So, yeah, there's all these sort of, like like downstream effects that we'll see later um one of the other fun parts about this this is from 2003 heat wave uh i'm just gonna read this quote massive alpine glaciers decreased by 10 in 2003 and yeah okay so you know what you're seeing here right is this sort of secular thing where each heat wave does things like melt glaciers, right? And that makes the next heat wave worse because when you lose glacier mass, you're losing surface area that reflects light, which increases the level of warming. And this is one of the sort of feedback loops that we're dealing with. Another thing that we've been seeing a lot in the u.s uh 2020 had this like

pretty badly i mean i guess like anyone who lives in the pacific northwest like understands this uh there's just there are just fires constantly because it turns out that when it's really hot things just light on fire um in the in the 2003 one there were 25,000 fires and they burned something like 650,000 hectares of forest and even the places it didn't burn it causes sort of like severe ecological damage to these forests

because like the the heat leaves trees for example like a lot weaker than they're supposed to be and this leaves them vulnerable to things like plagues and to like into the waves of insects. And this, you know, like everything that's happening here with these heat waves, like weakens the environments that are supposed to be sort of like mitigating the effects of climate change. So we also like on the sort of like human front, we talked about how heat waves can knock out, heat waves can knock out hydroelectric power. It turns out they can also knock out nuclear power plants

because nuclear power plants rely on like dumping their cooling water back into rivers. Now there's like, there's legal limits on how hot like the water that you can dump into these rivers is supposed to be, because it turns out, you know, okay, if you dump a bunch of boiling water into a river, it's going to kill everything in it but as the sort of pooling process like gets more difficult because the water levels are lower uh you have to take power plants offline

because otherwise you're going to just kill everything in the river when you when you're venting your sort of exhaust heat and into it got in 2003 it gets bad enough that like a bunch of companies get exemptions, right? They're like, okay, it's an emergency. We can turn this on. We can vent all this hot water back in the rivers. But you can only do this so many times before you irrevocably fuck up the ecosystem of the river. And again, this is the problem, right?

You're getting into these feedback loops. You're destroying it. You're destroying the ecosystem. You're destroying the ecosystem you're showing the river ecosystems this also again has problems with like it reduces it's it's the river's ability to serve as a carbon sink and but but it's like you know but what choice do you have right because your energy consumption heat waves massively increases because you need to cool yourself down you need air conditioning you need things like fans or people are going to die and so every single one of these like heat waves just sort of spirals welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts yeah I guess the last thing I wanted to talk about is something that we haven't we talked about this in like the very very early episodes of the something that we haven't i i we talked about this in like the very

very early episodes of the show but like haven't talked about much since which is wet bulb temperature oh yes oh yeah yeah so for for people who don't remember what this is um i mean we were talking a little bit about it earlier and that when you can't cool down at night like yeah the big things about a wet bulb temperature but yeah it's it's more complicated than that yeah so like i guess the basics of it is that okay so your body like cools itself down by sweating and when when the water evaporates off your skin it cools you off and this is one of the big ways that your body sort of keeps your internal temperature under control the problem basically is, what if your sweat can't evaporate? And that brings us to what wet bulb temperature is.

Here's NASA. Quote, wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which an object can cool down when moisture evaporates from it. So what it's measuring for us is how cool our bodies can actually get from sweating. The problem is that at a wet bulb temperature of about 97 degrees Fahrenheit, your sweat

stops evaporating and you can't cool yourself. And this kills you really, really fast. Here's NASA again talking to Colin Ramins, who's from, I think he does climate stuff at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Once wet bulb temperature exceeds 35 degrees Celsius or 95 degrees Fahrenheit, no amount of sweating or other adaptive behavior is enough to lower your body to a safe operating temperature, said Raymond. Most of the time, it's not a problem because the wet bulb temperature is usually

5 to 10 degrees Celsius below body temperature, even in hot, humid places. But, you know, it's a point to note here, by the way, that, like, the wet bulb temperature is, like, not the same thing as regular temperature. It's measuring something, like, that's different from how hot it is. And it's worth noting that, like, the current heat waves, like, they're really bad, but it hasn't really been hitting, the wet bulb temperature hasn't really been hitting the place

places where they just are absolutely lethal and start killing hundreds of thousands of people but that is going to happen right even even in sort of like even even even in like even in the climate models where you know we act we keep emissions to like two degrees right which which at this point is looking like some of the optimistic models, like this stuff is going to happen in the next 30 to 50 years. And unless something drastically changes, like we're going to watch this happen. We're going to watch countries hit these temperatures.

We're going to watch enormous numbers of people fall over dead. And yeah, this is where climate change is heading and it sucks. And the heat waves that are hitting China, the heat waves that are hitting India, the heat waves we've seen here are... This is as good as it's going to get. It's just going to keep getting worse. I guess I should back up one second and talk a bit about the Chinese heat wave, which is that the Chinese heat wave isn't just a a is it just a climate change thing there's other stuff going on here there's there's there's like a very

specific like confluence of like weather phenomenon like the londonia and stuff like that that like cohen's had to coincide to make a heat wave this bad but the problem is like that stuff is all going to happen again and you know so we're going to get like yeah we're going to keep getting heat waves like this and yeah unless we do something differently

yeah I mean we won't I mean we'll you know we'll twiddle around the edges um the biden administration snuck some language into the the the inflation bill that might allow the federal government to regulate co2 still after the supreme court said they couldn't but maybe not could you chris would you why don't we send a message to the people in Shanghai and let them know that? That'll, that'll help.

They'll feel better. Policymakers who listen to the podcast. Yeah, all the policymakers who listen to the podcast. I don't know, like, this is, it's one of those, if we were to take, if all of the policymakers who listen to our show were to take all of our advice immediately, and we were to transition every city away from being vehicle-centered and effectively cut our emissions by 70, 80% or more,

we would still be locked in to escalating heat waves like this all over the world for the rest of our natural lives because of the way the carbon cycle works um not that that wouldn't help in the long run but it would certainly not like that's one of the things that's so scary about this is we're all girding ourselves for the inevitability that this will just become more common and more devastating so true um and for everyone that has a hard time breathing there's always always the hope that via geoengineering we can just pump more pollution into the air to reflect more sunlight which will increase a whole bunch of other diseases you know i watch the first seven seconds of the movie snowpiercer and that does seem like an idea that would work it's funny when i was in school i read like i read one of the first papers that

was talking about this and like the guy in the paper is like the opening of the paper is him literally going this is a bad idea we should only do this if there's literally no other choice and then also like this is a thing we do for like 10 years to buy us more time to deal with regular climate change and then as the years have gone on and as nothing has happened you just gotta watch like well yeah there's um barack obama's favorite book ministry for the future uh which is a legitimately very good book it's just funny that he likes it because it absolutely embraces terrorism in defense it embraces like killing politicians it embraces sneaking into the house of oil and gas executives and murdering

them in the night as well as a wonky carbon crypto fucking investment portfolio but like there's a lot of different ideas yeah like a lot of the characters in that book would have killed Obama like it's yes it's very like

but one of the things that book deals with, so the inciting incident of that book is a horrible wet bulb moment in India that kills, I think it's millions of people, just like a nightmare disaster. And one of the things the Indian government does as a result against the express wishes of the global community is start essentially like an atmospheric seeding program

in order to mitigate how bad the heat waves are and like there's a bunch of consequences to that and i kind of think one of the things that's most realistic about that book is as we have more shit like this happen you will have nations on their own carry out climate mitigation efforts that could have serious effects on other countries because any of this stuff you do like if you if you if you seed clouds in the southwest or whatever in order to increase rain to raise the level at lake mead um that will like you can't fuck with the water cycle like that and not have impacts other places um and and this is a thing that certainly global law like like the international legal system is not ready to deal with. And it's certainly something that our media ecosystem is not ready to deal with.

And it will happen. This is an inevitability, in my opinion. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter... Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows. Presented by I Heart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast i mean yeah one of the things that we do want to talk more about is the the reaction to this type of thing is going to be by capitalist countries and like the climate leviathan model is gonna be to basically privatize the atmosphere and privatize the sky

um and different ways that sky that ties sure uh but in terms of all the pure hate in your face there garrison but between all of like the corporate like space projects and then stuff with geoengineering it's just going to be renting out sections of the atmosphere so that people can pump things into uh to for into for whatever kind of carbon neutral thing they want to do. Pumping shit into the atmosphere is what got us into this problem and it's what's going to get us out.

So true. Make money somehow. It's kind of funny that in the US, I don't know if you saw this, but this month, we were recording this in August, there was a discussion about how the water was going to be used in the US, which I don't know if you saw this, but like this month, which we're recording this in August, there was a discussion about how the water was going to be used in the Colorado River by the various states.

I did read that. Yeah. That was a very depressing report. It's fucked up, yeah. Yeah, it ended with like basically each of them chest thumping at each other and being like, no, fuck you. I'll take as much water as I want.

I'm upstream of you. I think Utah were the ones particularly belligerent in that case. But yeah, it is the opposite of what we need to do. But here we are doing it. I was in Utah this month looking at new golf courses being built by Fisher Towers out in the desert there it's great there's a fun okay so uh andreas mom's last book before he kind of went off the like weird eco-leninist rails uh was called fossil capital and he has a really interesting argument

that like one of the reasons that we got into this mess in the first place one of the reasons like country companies started adopting coal was that even though coal was less efficient as like a source of electricity than having like water mills water like having a succession of water mills going down the same river requires a bunch of different corporations to like coordinate with each other and they don't want to do that and because sort of like the the the laws around who controls rivers is really sort of unclear like they were just like now screw this we're just gonna use coal even though it's worse and the fun part about this is now we get to get this again with like river law where it's like oh hey it turns out that uh capitalists and capitalist states are just

utterly incapable of like sharing resources with each other and they're just gonna try to section off increasingly large parts of it which just going to try to section off increasingly large parts of it which is going to go increasingly badly yeah i mean it's like one of the things you're the failure to be able to imagine anything that exists outside of a profit and loss kind of mentality um is is one of the major problems that we have like all over with this like there's right now one of the big stories coming out of the uk is that as is one of the major problems that we have like all over with this. Like there's right now, one of the big stories coming out of the UK is that as a result of the war in Ukraine and gas prices,

the cost of heating is, has risen fucking massively. This is a problem for all of Europe. Um, and a lot of families in the UK are looking at the numbers I've seen are anywhere from like 4,000 to even six, 7,000 pounds to heat their houses during the winter, which is like 10,000 to 15,000 real dollars. It's a lot of money. And it's substantially in excess of what

they have been paying in the past. And it's like, that is enough. I mean, imagine yourself, how many people, I'm going to guess it's a small fraction of people listening who could afford an extra 10 to $12,000 in bills this winter and not have it completely fuck their lives up so obviously people cannot pay for their heating um this winter and like if you can't pay a bill you're not going to pay a bill right that's one of the laws of the iron laws of finance bills that can't be paid won't be paid so the state is coming in but the state is not, again, these companies, basically all of these companies are, would be essentially insolvent, like

if things were allowed to proceed naturally. So the government's going to have to do something. But the thing the government isn't going to do is like actually nationalize any of these heating companies. It's, it's just going to like pump more tax. Anyway, it's, it's, it's, it's the same thing. It's a failure to kind of imagine anything outside of this. Well, maybe if capitalism has broken down around this issue, this isn't an issue that should continue to be in the hands of corporations. Yeah, well, but the fun part about this too, is that like, okay, it's like, well, okay, well, okay, we'll nationalize this and that will save us. And then you look at like, what do most of the world's nationally owned corporations look like? And it's like, well, okay, so the government owns like 51% of the stock, but then it functions exactly like a normal company.

Well, right. I'm not saying – like the solution is not – sorry, James. You're the actual Briton in this room. Yes. Yes, it's kind of funny because in Britain, people living on state pensions or certain other like state programs, state disability and stuff get a winter fuel allowance normally. And the winter fuel allowance is scheduled to go up like less than a tenth of that amount that you just said would be the increase in the cost of heating. Right. And it's still sort of it's just so funny to see. in the cost of heating, right? And it's still sort of,

it's just so funny to see, like in theory, Britain has several political parties, all of them, especially with Labour under Keir Starmer, like are clustered under a neoliberal consensus and Keir, like rather than considering doing anything, they are bickering over like how much of a pittance they want to throw to poor people.

Yeah, I mean, yes mean yes yeah it's also very funny that britain did build a desalination plant in the thames estuary um and forgot to account for the fact that due to it being an estuary the river coming in and out uh the levels of salt in the water would change and that would make the desalination and it's fucking i think it's biodiesel fueled it's just awesome it's magnificent yeah we've got great leaders over there and we don't need to change yeah no you you you seem to whenever i think of countries that have their shit together i think the uk um yeah you've got to remember that nazis use bicycles when you're considering uh your options

for transport and climate change in the future deranged british tweets of the day yeah i mean hey okay look look the the the one the one very dim silver lining is that maybe this will cause the british the entire british political system to collapse like you never know it's like twice a year right well no but but i mean like what is collapse here well like okay here's the thing right if if you have enough people who the government is trying to pay their bills they start throwing molotovs at stuff like this is a it's like this this is actually a pretty reliable like what one of the very reliable things that gets people to go fight police is like,

you suddenly increase the price of gas that they either need to drive or need to like heat their houses. So maybe, I don't know. But then British people will also be barking for us to send the troops against the people who are protesting for the right to live with dignity. That's one thing we love to do yeah it's a

fun country it's a fun tree oh man alright well are we good have we solved this one for all the policy makers who listen to our show yeah yeah throw a brick at yeah yeah um hit me up

fucking lindsey graham a huge fan of the pod lindsey graham yeah uh get a molotov if you're old yeah uh lindsey graham's actually just voted to subsidize molotov cocktail production so thank you thank you lindsey our our based fan uh of the policymakers who listen to our show he must have been looking at the research it's the only way it's the only real way to stop climate change the only legitimate use of fossil fuels is in most of cocktails. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com,

or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.