Climate Change is real, the solutions are fake

As is custom, I spent quite a bit of time yesterday monitoring how people have been talking about the fires in Los Angeles. This is obviously an event that falls outside our purview as a Nashville publication, but there is something we can glean from it that can inform how we understand local concerns. It also speaks more broadly about how we interface with distant tragedies.

C.S. Lewis has a good quote about this:

“It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning.I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know). A great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious.”

Not going to speak directly to this dynamic, but wanted to get it out there.

Generally speaking, the coverage of the LA fires fell neatly along partisan lines. If you scrolled through Twitter (refuse to call it X), you’d see everything from “Jewish space lasers” and conspiracies about the fire’s origins to detailed breakdowns of California state laws that impede the ability of the LAFD to manage the forests in the area.

Over on Bluesky (the leftist version of Twitter where our mayor, local journalists, and the local political class hang out), the commentary was almost exclusively about climate change.

I learned a lot about forest management yesterday and how California’s failure to prioritize it led to the state’s most destructive wildfire in LA’s history. Just to rattle off one particularly incisive insight that cuts to the quick of the matter, it takes an average of 4.7 years to get a “prescribed burn” through environmental reviews. Prescribed burns that reduce fuel (dead plant matter) are the primary means by which authorities can manage wildfires.

To further complicate the matter, there exists a coterie of NGOs that have repeatedly sued to halt prescribed burns on environmental grounds. The net result is that state agencies in California have simply stopped trying to manage the forests.

Just to complete this thought, it seems that we need to do whatever we can to empower fire departments like those in Los Angeles to carry out controlled burns so that when fires inevitably do start, they are relatively starved of fuel. Unclouded by the vague dictates of climate change, we can see a clear solution to a present problem.

But those who insist climate change is at the root of all this will crow endlessly about it. Just a sample from Bluesky where this phenomenon is most pronounced. “The insanity of being a fire ecologist in the epicenter of a major fire event,” writes UCLA professor Morgan Tinsley, “bags packed and ready to evacuate, watching active fire from my window, while taking media requests and explaining to the public, for the 100,000th time how climate change is largely responsible for this.”

Another Bluesky-er, Brian Goldstone, quotes a writer named Mike Davis who says of the Tubbs Fire in 2017, “You say fire, I say climate change, and we both ignore the financial and real-estate juggernaut that drives the suburbanization of our increasingly inflammable wildlands."

I’ll let you get up off the ground and dust yourself off because I know reading those two things was like getting cold-clocked by a cinder block to the head. What I’m trying to say here is that generally, the left’s approach to issues like wildfires is making their adherents dumber. Daily, they get stupider.

Instead of addressing crime directly by locking up criminals, they want to implement byzantine welfare plans and palliative care offerings. And in the instance of wildfires, instead of managing forests, they propose rain dances, burnt offerings, and tithes to the gods running NGOs with mission statements like “cooling the planet” who imbue this whole issue with moral valence and encourage rituals like reusing grocery bags or buying this brand instead of that brand to maintain good standing. They’re like natives praying to wooden idols as they burn grass and chant, “One planet, one chance!” at mountains of paperwork.

Climate change is real. In fact, the only thing the climate does is change. It’s the solutions that are fake. Not only that, but the solutions are making people dumber and the solutions tyrannize us. Every day these delusions persist, we take one step back towards the primordial soup that we allegedly emerged from and in the process, lose a degree of agency. DAVIS HUNT

🎉 New Year, New Ho(me) In 2024, house sales in Middle Tennessee rose compared to 2023, including a 15 percent closing rate increase in Nashville this December compared to last year. According to the Nashville Business Journal, closings on single-family homes in the region were also up, with 26,911 homes sold in 2024 compared to 25,348 sold in 2023. Meanwhile, the sale of condominiums has gone down. 

The median price for both homes and condos have continued to rise since the pandemic—and so has the demand. Back in October, USA TODAY’s research team published statistics on Tennessee that showed that, as of 2022, the Volunteer State still has more people coming in than moving out.

🍞 Grab You Bread, Milk, & Sled Nashville is preparing for lockdown as weather forecasts predict up to seven inches of snowfall Friday through Saturday. “We've got more snow plows ready to go than ever before,” said Mayor O’Connell last week when addressing the possibility of winter weather in Middle Tennessee. “We've adjusted routes to improve [the] effectiveness of those plows in the fleet.”

The Mayor went on to encourage patience and safety for those traveling over the next few days. “If we do have a winter storm event, we are ready for it,” he said. You can find more information about how best to respond when icy weather hits by going to Nashville.gov/snow.

💗 The Beating Heart Of Nashville Over the last year, the new Titans stadium has evolved from a pile of dirt to a rudimentary structure near the East Bank, where it’s being erected within spitting distance of the old stadium. But according to the Nashville Business Journal, the stadium will really start to take shape this year once workers add the exterior facade, framing, metal panels, and glazing.

If everything goes according to plan, the new Nissan Stadium should be up and running by February 2027. After the official switch, the old stadium will be “mechanically crushed and disassembled by cranes and machines, as opposed to being imploded.” For now, the new stadium still looks like the bare bones of a colosseum. You can watch the construction on the Titan’s live stream network. “Are you not entertained?”

DEVELOPMENT

• Local firm tackles 22-acre neighborhood development in South Nashville (NBJ)
• British Airways will add second nonstop flight to London via BNA (Post)
• Rezoning sought for planned 12South project (Post)

✹ FILM REVIEW: A REAL PAIN (2024)

Most living Americans remember the days when Woody Allen would crank out at least one seminal film a decade. So it comes as little surprise that the much-bemoaned death of the big-screen comedy over the past years coincided with the Woodman’s forced exile. Allen may well be an irreplaceable talent, but, as actor/director Jesse Eisenberg proves with his latest film, A Real Pain, at least some of his successors have taken the right lessons from America’s raucous Jewish uncle. 

For his second film as a director, Eisenberg plays tourist as a nebbish New York City digital ad designer who books a Holocaust tour through Poland with his charismatic slacker of a cousin (Kieran Culkin). They’ve made this trek to visit their recently deceased grandmother’s childhood home and honor her legacy as a survivor. Though rooted in the tropes of buddy comedy and the power of secondhand embarrassment, A Real Pain employs its outlandish conceit to probe the motivations behind the rise of “dark tourism” and its psychological effects on our always-online culture of narcissism.  

A lesser film would have succumbed to easy ugly American tropes, but Eisenberg resists turning his ragtag tour group into one-note parodies. The overly amenable couple in the throes of empty nest syndrome, the sad middle-aged divorcee, and the Rwandan millennial convert to Judaism who survived his own genocide convey full inner lives within their precious few scenes on the road to make their own piece with the Majdanek death camp.

In feeling his way through such bleak territory, Eisenberg remains game to serve as the butt of jokes while showing the cracks in a reserve he’s adjusted to perfection–an utter lack of vanity that propels A Real Pain into the top tier of contemporary comedy. As impressive as Culkin is as the bombastic (and most likely bipolar) scene-stealer, on his way to a seemingly inevitable Oscar, both actors know this trip wouldn’t have gone far without Eisenberg’s quite un-Woodylike step out of the limelight. 

A Real Pain is now playing in theaters and available for premium digital rental.a

THINGS TO DO

View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.

📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.

🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.

👨🏻‍🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide.

TONIGHT

🎻 Manny Plays Mozart @ Schermerhorn Symphony Center, 7:30p, $29+, Info

🎸 Peter Rowan w/ Sam Grisman Project @ Ryman Auditorium, 7p, $35.50+, Info

🎸 Lee Roy Parnell and Gary Nicholson @ The Bluebird Cafe, 9p, $39.79, Info

🍀 Live Irish Music @ McNamara’s Irish Pub, 6p, Free, Info

🎸 Kelly’s Heroes @ Robert’s Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info

🎸 Open Mic @ Fox & Locke, 6:30p, Free, Info
+ vet community here

📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.