The Great Chinese Heatwave

you in a few funny ways. Actually, yes they do. It's a list of the most powerful people in podcasting. Um, of course got me obviously all the great On page forty seven 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 us on some

of the weightiest issues and problems facing policymakers. I will say this, if you are a policy maker 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, don't listen to Chris do it policymakers. I do like that. Robert Evans is right above the serial creators, So that's that is I'm above Trevor Noah. I mean, I don't. I literally don't think it's like it listed, because there

is no way in in the list. Ben Shapiro is above Joe Rogan, and that's just not not accurate to the to the to the to the way the industry functions. But it's a very silly listening. It's been fun reading through our latest tissue of our favorite of our favorite podcast magazine, podcast Magazine made by podcast News Daily, where you can get all your news about podcasts. The thing that I totally knew about for for I've known about this for clearly for longer than fifteen minutes. Actually that's

that's not true. I've known about it for longer than eight minutes. Maybe twelve. Yeah, m hmm. It's an amazing photo. Was happy to get I was it. Was happy. Was happy to get in some fine reading today. Uh So, anyway, what's what's what's this? What's our episode actually about? That's a great question. It's a podcast power rating episode. Yeah, yeah, we're We're I don't even have any order to go

with that. No. The thing, the thing the episode is actually about is heat waves, and very specifically a heat wave in China that has been going on for Why this is day seven as we're recording, this is day seventy two. I think by by the time Let's Go Out goes out, it will probably be like day seventy four. Um. Yeah, And this is and and incomparable heat wave. I'm just

gonna read this from Axios. The extreme heat and drought that has been vost roasting a vast swath of southern China for at least seventy days straight has no parallel and modern record keeping in China or anywhere else around the world for that matter. Now, okay, so that sounds bad, right, but it's actually worse than that, because okay, so if if if if you were to read that, you you might believe that this heat wave is just affecting southern China,

and that's like not true. It's also affecting northern China. It is affecting like most of China. It's like affecting almost like most people alive is nine million people, which is like quick question, is that a lot? So okay, so if if 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 in India. Okay, okay, so that's that's several people.

It's it's fun, is it? More people than the British people who have been logging on to post about it being like five degrees and them 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

the tanning needs burning of your body. 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 some known as possipital or if you're getting into a fist fight as well. Well. The number of folks pull their shirts off and fights in London. Yeah, it's it's part of a natural heritage for many. It's it's

a beautiful country. But please continue, Chris, Yeah, okay, so so you know, to get a sense of like the stakes of this, right, so okay, and like they just just the sheer scale of this, because people is an amount of people that like, we like is incomprehensible. You think that's a number that's too large. So okay, Sichuan Province, right, this is this is one province that is being affected by this. This province has eighty three million people in it.

This is the entire combined population of California, Texas, Indiana, and New York City. Um, here's here's in France twenty four about what's happening here. Since July this year, the province has faced 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 drier than it has ever been except and and this is the

fun part. This is the similar similar happening in Texas. And I think, yeah, well, I'm texts probably the best example this. Okay. So it's really really, really unbelievably dry, except for when there's giant flash floods and they've killed twenty two people already have to have died from the flash floods um the different province, but yeah, it is unbelievably bleak um. One of the big things that's happening is that the Yanksy 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 is happening here, like there is no record of it ever being this bad. And this is a real problem because particularly in sich One, because of this, province's power is drawn from hydro electric and you know, it turns out it's it's really bad if the rivers that you are relying on for your

hydro electric power are basically drying up. And like like there's there's pictures of like like you can go find pictures of this that there are pictures of the Yanksty that like it looks like a riverbed on Mars, Like it is just just completely dry, like it's like dry ragged 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 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 hydro electric power isn't going to be reliable in a huge chunk about like the 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 in India all over yeah yeah, and and you know, okay, so the seat wave in China, like there's been very very

little English coverage of it, and the thing everyone focuses on is the fact that like the power out ofgy well, the the reduced ability to generate power and the fact that everyone has to turn on the air conditions so not like literally die is you know, it's wreaking havoc on China set of productive capacity since such one has like there there there's an enormous like industrial base there that you know, produce stuff from everything from like Tesla

to apple. And this is what the sort of the anglephone media cares about, right, like everything that almost everything written about the heat wave is about this effect on like supply chain disruption, disruption to like semi conduct your production and like batteries for electronics, 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 we're 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 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, that day was a hundred and three in Shanghai, like two weeks before that, it was a hundred and eleven. And I found out that from July to August, the like the high temperature, like the daily

high temperature like did not go below a hundred. On the one it finally rained and that dropped the temperature to merely four. I think either tomorrow today or tomorrow, I think it will go below ninety. This is at now this is this is this is this is the temperature of the day. But after you in the night aren't going below like seventy either, then a lot a lot of times are the eighties or nineties. And and that 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 were able to cool your body down at night. It's one of the like one of the saving graces the Pacific Northwest end during its heat waves. But yeah, and and this is this is a real like so Chunking, which is an enormous city. It has nine million people

like regularly in the city. It's Chunking. The city is also the municipal like government there, so there's a whole sort of complicated thing there. But like the municipality of Chunking is thirty two million people in it. Uh. They had a night I a couple I think a couple of weeks ago that was ninety four point eight 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 looked this, I I looked this up. Shanghai has not had a day where the high has been below eighty nine degrees for two consecutive days since mid June. It has been over ninety degrees every single day, like with without two days back to back. It wasn't that hot since mid June. Um and you know, okay, so like the theft, this

is having enormous effects. One of the big ones, the most noticeable ones, is lie 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 four pm because it's literally just too hot and you can't deal with electricity load and yeah, like and you know the other the other problem here again it's

like it's not cooling off at night. And if it's not cooling off at night, yeah like that this is this is the thing that kills people, um and so well, the 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 level, because this stuff also just sort of gets ignored. Um, 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 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 other state when they 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 is this is depots about like two and a half hours outside of Shanghai, and Okay, so 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 a hundred and four degrees and that night it only cooled off to eight four.

Here's from six Tone about sort of just the conditions that people are working in here on the hottest days, the temper side of the carriages is at least fifty degrees celsius, which is a hundred and twenty two degrees fahrenheit. Says you. He had Dong, a worker from Drunk c and other Inland province. It feels like you're on fire standing here. Around noon, his employer, an outsourcing agency, hands out heat stroke profession drugs, which he takes twice a day.

At the freight depot. Managers sit in air condition rooms, but workers like him rest under trees. The office is not for us, you says, now, okay. In theory, under Chinese law, if it hits a hundred and four degrees outdoor work is supposed to immediately stop, and you're supposed to move everyone indoors and like give them water and stuff. Because it turns out if you're working like a hard many or labor job outside and hundred and four, you

might die. But you know you and you're you're supposed to get paid heat breaks and like you know, as as anyone who is familiar with, for example, how American farm labor works, you know what happens about to happen next? Uh, it turns out that, you know, okay, so you can take a break, but your employers won't pay you for it, because like they don't know who's who, who's gonna at who's gonna atually force them to do it. John, who's the work of 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 he's a migrant worker, and he you know, he can't he can't afford to take a break on his ship. So he doesn't die, and so he 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. And he died on a bed that was held up by two broken cinder blocks,

making maybe four dollars an hour. Yeah, and you know, yeah, and I mean, you know, the the thing about this, right is so in theory he's working for for a state owned company, right, but you know, as as as we talked about like a little bit in that 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 what happens is that the state owned firms like outsourced of labor to the to these contracting firms, and the contracting firms just like pick people up and bring him to the side. 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 insurance.

And it turns out this matters because 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. The Chinese General Trong calculated that in funk One, 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, it would cut corporate profit by and bankrupt, like most of the company's working here. You know, the entire economy is based

on this. And Jong's family drives like three d and fifty 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. And you know, after like several weeks of his like four or five weeks, their finally able to get a sixth of the money they're supposed to get if you die if someone dies under sort of like there's they're able to get a sixth of the money that you're supposed to get in a Chinese law if one of your family embers dies

in the workplace. And you know, I'm focusing on this story because it's one of the few stories that we have directly about sort of the sheer magnitude of the suffering the heat waves is causing and part of part of what's going on here is that we don't know what the death told heat wave is. There's there's nothing about it, right. You'll see a couple of reports talk about like two or three heat related deaths, but it's it is literally impossible that there are that few deaths.

Um there there there was a study in the journal Lancet that was looking heat related deaths in China over the last thirty years and it showed that like heat related deaths have died increased by a factor of four since and you know, so there was there was another heat wave in China that was like pretty bad in twenty nineteen, and they calculated that eight hundred people have died from heat related deaths Jesus, and you know, and again that that that heat wave, heat wave was pretty bad.

This heat wave, like it has just utterly destroyed every single record that heat waves set, Like it is in like its own universe of heat waves. So it has killed 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 what I mean.

I think like part of the reason also I wanted to talk about like the specific story is that like you know, so the weather itself like is trying to get like is enough to kill you, right, But like okay, so like this like this kind of heat is survivable if like you know, if 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. I means you have to keep working during

this ship 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 I tell this one, I guess was that heat wave in europeousand

three and that one killed something like seventy people. Um. And there's a lot of very interesting stuff that we learned from this heat wave about what heat waves to you. It's sort of in general. The United Nations, like in finne mental program like released a report about this, and there's a lot of really interesting stuff in it. I mean, okay, so 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 it.

I this is bad, and this is happening. This is affecting China right now too, because um, this drought is hitting like right in the middle of a lot of China's bread basket. So yeah, there's all these sort of like downstream effects that we'll see later. Um. One of the other fun parts about this this is when she doesn't three heat wave. I'm just gonna read this quote.

Massive alpine glaciers decreased by ten pc in two thousand three and yeah, okay, so you know what you're seeing here, right, is this sort of sickler thing where each each heat wave, you know, does things like melt glaciers, right, and that makes the next heat wave worse because when when you when you lose glacier mass, you're you're you're you're losing surface area that reflects light, which increases level of warming. And this is sort of you know, this is one

of the sort of feedback loops that we're we're dealing with. Um. Uh, you know another thing that we've been seeing a lot in the US had this like pretty badly. I mean, I guess like anyone who lives the specific Northwest like understands this. There's just there are just fires constantly because it turns out that when it's really hot, things just

lead on fire. Um. In the in the two thousand three one there were twenty five thousand fires and they burned something like six fifty thousand head acres of forest. And even the places it didn't burn, it causes sort of like severe, severe ecological damage to these forests because like the they the heat leaves trees, for example, like a lot weaker than's supposed to mean. This leads in vulnerable to things like plagues, into like into the waves

of insects and this. You know, like everything that's happening here with these heat waves, like we weakens the environments that are supposed to be sort of like mitigating the effects of climate change. Um So we also like on the sort of like human front. We we talked about how heat waves can knock out uh, heat waves can knock out hydro electric 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 there's legal limits on how hot like the water you can dump into these rivers is supposed to be. Because it turns out, you know, if okay, if you have a bunch of boiling water into the river is gonna kill everything in it. But as the sort of cooling process like gets more difficult because the water levels are lower, 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 into three. It gets bad enough that like a bunch of companies get exemptions right there, like okay, it's an emergency, we can turn this on. We can like we can vent all this hot water back in the rivers. But you know, you can only do this so many times before you revocably funk up the ecosystem of the river. And again this is this is this is the problem. Right like you you get you're getting into these feedback loops, You're destroying it.

You're destroying the ecosystem like 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 the harbon sink and but but it's like, you know, what, what choice do you have? Right? Because you're energy the 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 like every single

one of these, like heat waves just sort of spirals. 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 show, but like haven't talked about much sense, which is wet bulb temperature. Oh yes, yeah, so for for for people who don't remember what this is, um, I mean we're talking a little bit about it earlier, and that when you can't cool down at night, like the big things about a

wet bulb temperature. But yeah, it's it's more complicated than that. Yeah. So, like I guess the 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 you sweat can't evaporate, and that that brings us to what what web bult

wet bulb temperature is. Here here's NASA quote. Web bulb wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which an object can cool down when moisture evaporates from it. So what is measuring for us is how cool our bodies can actually get from sweating. The problem is that at a web bulb temperature for about nineties seven degrees fahrenheight, your sweatsofts evaporating and you can't cool yourself, and this

kills you really really fast. Um. Here's NASA again talking to Colin Raymonds, who's from Who's I think he just climate stuff at the nasag Gepropulsion Laboratory. Once wet bulb temperature exceeds thirty five degrees celsius or ninety five degrees fahrenheit, no amount of sweating or other adaptive behavior is enough to low 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 five to tend degree celsius

blow body temperature, even in hot, humid places. But you know, I mean it's a point of no here by the way that like the wet bulb wet bowl temperature is like not the same thing as regular temperature. Um, it's it's measuring something like that's different from how hot it is.

And and it's worth noting that like the current heat waves, like they're really bad, but it hasn't really been hitting the web bowl temperature hasn't really been hitting the place places where they just are absolutely lethal and start killing

huntreds of thousands of people. But that is going to happen, right, even even in sort of like if even even in even in the climate models where you know, we 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 ex thirty fifty years and unless something drastically changed, is like

we're we're going to watch this happen. We're gonna watch country city seperatoris We're going to watch enormous numbers of people fall over dead. And yeah, this is um, this this is where climate change is heading. And it sucks. And the heat waves better that are hitting China. The heat waves are hitting India. The heat waves that we've seen here are like this is this is as goes is 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 it like the Chinese seat wave isn't just like 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 Indi India 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 we're gonna we're gonna get like, yeah, We're we're gonna keep getting heat waves like this and yeah, unless we do something differently, yeah, I mean we won't. I mean, well,

you know, we'll twiddle around the edges Um. The bind administration snuck some language into the inflation bill that might allow the federal government to regulate CEO to still after the Supreme Court said they couldn't but maybe not could you, Chris, would you why why don't we send a message to the people in Shanghai and let him know that that'll that'll listen to the podcast. Yeah, policymakers who listen to

the podcast, UM, I don't know like it. This is it's one of those if we were to take if all of the policymakers who listened to our show were to take all of our advice immediately, um, and we were to transition every city away from being vehicle centered and like effectively cut our emissions by or more, we would still be locked into 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 well, which of other diseases you know. I watched the first seven seconds of the movie snow piercer, and that does

seem like an idea that would work. It's funny when 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 the thing we do for like ten 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 a Barack Obama's favorite book, Ministry for the Future, which is legitimately very good book. It's just funny that he likes it because it absolutely embraces terrorism in different 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 that yeah, like like a lot of the characters in that book would have killed Obama. Like it's yes, it's very like um, but one of the things that book deals with. The inciting incident of that book is a horrible wet bulb um moment in India that kills I think it's millions of people and

just that like a nightmare disaster. Um. And one of the things the Indian government does, as a result, against the express wishes of the global community is start like essentially like an atmosphere exceeding 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 ship 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 of lake mead um, that will like you can't funk 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. Um And it's certainly something that our media ecosystem is not ready to deal with and it it it will happen. This is an inevitability in my opinion. I mean, yeah, one of the things that we do want to talk more about is the reaction to this type of thing is going to be by capitalist countries and like the climate Leviathan model is going to be too basically privatize the atmosphere and privatize the sky um and different ways that sure, but in pure hate in

your face their gear. But between all of like the corporate like space projects and then stuff with g engineering, it's just gonna be renting out sections of the atmosphere so that people can pump things into uh to for whatever, for whatever kind of carbon neutral thing they want to do, or pumping ship into the atmosphere here is what got us into this problem and it's what's going to get

us out so true to make money somehow. It's uh, it's kind of funny that in the U. S H. I don't know if you saw this, but like this month which we were 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 that I did I did read that yes, very very depressing report. It's it's yeah, yeah. I just it ended with like basically each of them chest stumping at each other, a big like no funk 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 it is the opposite of what we need to do. But here we are doing it. I was in Utah last this month looking at new golf courses being built by Fisher towers. Sound of the desert there and it's great.

There's a fun Okay, So andreas Mom's last book before he kind of went off the like weird Nico leninist rails, it was called Fossil Capital, and he's a really interesting argument that like one of the reasons that we got into his mouse in the first place, one of the reasons like country companies started adopting Cole 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 laws around who controls rivers is really sort of unclear, like they were just like not screwed this where it's 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 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 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 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 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 any like four thousand and even six seven thousand pounds to heat their houses during the winter. Which

is like ten to fifteen thousand real dollars. It's a lot of money, um, and it's substantially an excess of of what they have been paying in the past. And it's like that is enough. I mean, imagine yourself how many people live. I mean, I guess it's a small fraction of people listening who could afford an extra ten to twelve thousand dollars in builds this winter and not have it completely fucked their lives up. So obviously people

cannot a 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, and but the fun part about this too is that like okay, it's like, well, okay, well okay, well nationalize this and that will save us. And then you look at like what do act what do most of the world's nationally owned corporations look like? And it's like, well, okay, so the government owns it the stock, but then it functions actually like a normal company. I'm not saying like the solution is not Sorry James,

you're you're the actual Britain in this room. Yes, it's kind of funny because in Britain people are living on state pensions or a certain other like state programs, state

disability and stuff. Get a winter fuel allowance normally, and the winter fuel allowance to schedule to go up like like less than a tenth of that that that amount that you just said would be the increased 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 labor under kiss DAMA like a clustered under a neoliberal consensus and

kiss that like, rather than considering doing anything, they are bickering over like how much of a pittance they want to throw to poor people. I 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, the levels of salt in the water would change and that would make the decentation And it's fucking I think it's bio diesel 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 ship together, I think the UK um. Yeah, you've got to remember that Nazis used bicycles when you're considering your options for transport and climate change in the future.

Deranged British tweets of the day. Yeah, I mean, hey, okay, look, look the one the one very dim silver lining is that maybe this will cause the British the entire British political system to collapse. It never happens like twice a year, right, No,

but but what collapse? 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 Maltov's that stuff like this is a it's like this, this is actually a pretty reliable like one of the very reliable things that gets people to go fight police is like you suddenly increased the price of gas that you don't 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. Yeah, with dignity. It's one thing we love to do. Yeah, it's it's a it's a it's a fun it's a fun country. Oh yeah, it's a fun tree. Oh man, all right, well are we are? We? Are we good? Have we have we solved this one? For all the policy makers who listened to our show, Yeah yeah, hit me up.

Fucking Lindsay Graham, huge fan of the pod, Lindsay Graham, Old yeah, Lindsay Graham's actually just voted to subsidize Molotov cocktail production. So thank you, Thank you. Lindsay are are based fan of the policy makers who listened to our show. He must have been looking at the research. Mm hmmm. It's the only way, it's the only real way to stop climate change, to make use of fossil fuels in cocktails. Yeah, it could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could Happen here, updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.