Friends who relocated in southern Utah from LA told me temperatures have been down to minus 20 to minus 30 for the past several nights, and people who were born and raised there say it’s never ever been that cold.

I was in minus 30 weather once in Vermont, plus there was a strong wind, which makes it life threatening weather to be sure. My friends well head froze so they have no water except snow melt or driving in to town, and neighbors all around them have burst pipes. (Water expands when it freezes which causes pipes to expand and sometimes split. Then when it gets above freezing, you have leaky pipes. Not good.)

This same freezing weather wreaked major damage on California crops too. Global warming doesn’t mean everything gets hotter, it can also mean abrupt and severe weather changes of all kinds.

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Three operations have failed. His death, it appears, could be near.

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When you step back and look at the gigantic urban sprawl that is southern California it seems evident it can’t continue functioning as it is. Think about it. Traffic, as blogged here before, is utterly dysfunctional. It gets steadily worse with each passing month. Virtually all the water is piped in from long distances from the Sacramento Delta and Colorado River. 50% of the electric power for the City of Los Angeles comes from coal plants in other states. Does any of this seem sustainable in any sense of the word? Or even rational?

Well of course it doesn’t. The bizarre, convoluted infrastructure of Los Angeles just sort of happened without any real thought being given to long-term consequences. The current system is hugely inefficient. Large amounts of water are lost by evaporation during the long trip to LA. Ditto for power lost in transmission from other states.

“Sustainability” has a treehugger ring to it. But I mean something crucial about the sustainability of southern California. It can’t keep operating the way it is. Sooner or later, something will give, something will break. It’s not sustainable in the long term. When the freeways become terminally clogged or water and power shortages begin happening regularly, Los Angeles will spiral into serious chaos. Then it won’t be Greens talking sustainability, it’ll be pissed-off citizens marching on City Hall as political firestorms erupt everywhere.

Alarmist? No. Not when it’s obvious that such a crazed system can’t and won’t continue as is. I feel a bit like a prophet howling in the wilderness on this. Sure, people say, you’re right. But the enormity of the potential problems is so huge that many just don’t want to deal with it or hope it won’t happen while they’re here.

Then there’s that 800 pound gorilla out there called global warming. Toss that into the Los Angeles water and power mix, and things start to look a bit apocalyptic, don’t they? Higher temperatures mean increased power and water consumption at precisely the time the antiquated infrastructure is already starting to crumble.

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Robert Kaiser, WaPo reporter who covered the Vietnam War for 18 months, bemoans that the US has made historical blunders twice, first in Vietnam, now in Iraq. He does lots of hand-wringing about US mistakes, but nowhere does he ask why does the US invade so many countries.

Both times, we put our fate in the hands of local politicians who would not follow U.S. orders, who did not see their country’s fate the way we did, and who could not muster the support of enough of their countrymen to produce the outcome Washington wanted. In Vietnam as in Iraq, U.S. military power alone proved unable to achieve the desired political objectives.

Drat those confounded ‘local politicians’ who don’t follow orders. Who do they think they are, elected officials from another country or something like that! Implicit in this arrogance is an almost complete unawareness of why the US lost in Vietnam and is losing in Iraq. Insurgencies emerged because the people grew tired of US invasion and then drove the US out. But mainstream media rarely if ever explores that issue or wonders why insurgents fight back. Why? Because, among other reasons, doing so would raise some unpleasant questions about why the US invades countries.

So, it’s better to bash insurgencies as being rag-tag terrorists and scold leaders of occupied nations for not being properly submissive than it is to question the motives of the US ruling class and ask why the US gets itself into so many losing wars and is rapidly becoming a pariah nation in the rest of the world.

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