Events seem so dire these days – from a resurgence of the COVID pandemic to Ukraine and the imperial fantasies of Vladimir Putin to struggles to defend democracy in the United States and elsewhere – that a dramatic warning issued by Professor Michael Byers in an op-ed the other day was almost a welcome distraction.
Byers, who is co-director of the Outer Space Institute at the University of British Columbia, warns that Canada is due to experience a major solar storm, a “coronal mass ejection,” one of which narrowly missed Earth in 2012.
“We’re near the peak of the current cycle now,” he writes, predicting: “The entire sky will turn red as a deluge of high-energy particles from the sun strikes Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere. As a result, power grids, telephones and the Internet could be inoperable for months – perhaps even years.”
High-voltage transformers would fail, subways would grind to a halt, water and sewage plants would shut down. Satellites could fall out of the sky. James Green, former chief scientist at NASA, told Prof. Byers: “We’ll all be chopping wood and hunting squirrels.”
Yikes! The Great Rogers Outage is a trivial glitch next to this doomsday from space.
But wait! A ray of hope. It will happen, Byers writes, “at some point – perhaps next year, perhaps decades from now.”
If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll have time to try to salvage democracy. So let’s start with the United States.
Its political system is a disaster – increasingly vulnerable to pressure from, among others, militant advocacy groups, religious fundamentalists, anti-abortionists, gun owners and violent neo-fascists backed by criminal elements. The country’s ability to protect its democratic underpinnings is being weakened as its political structure, developed for two competitive parties has become a mare’s nest of five.
Three parties are Republican. There’s the Trump Republican Party – the true believers; they “know” Donald Trump won the 2020 election and they embrace his nonsensical campaign to reverse the result. They will vote for him if he runs for president in 2024 (a decision to be announced soon), or for anyone he chooses.
Next, the Old Guard Trump-Skeptical Republican party (so named by Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr.) is the party of the GOP Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Washington Post editorial page.
Last and least is the Traditional Republican Party, a powerless rump with senators like Utah’s Mitt Romney, a shadow of his once significant self.
On the Democratic side, two parties – Center-Left Democrats: President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the MSNBC show “Morning Joe; and what columnist Perry calls the Left-Left Democratic Party, with senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and New York’s controversial Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Two big decisions lie just ahead. Will Trump run again? Will the sorely divided Democrats nominate Biden again?
A Trump campaign to recapture the White House would spell chaos. Poor Biden. He’s too old (79 now), unable to muster congressional support for crucial policies, incapable of preventing one of the Democrats’ own senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, from cutting the heart out the administration’s domestic program, as he did when he declared last week that he would not support funds for climate or energy programs or tax increases on wealthy Americans and corporations.
Biden is a leader with no coattails and no vision to offer his unhappy country. His national job-approval rating was down to 33 per cent in a New York Times/Sienna College survey last week. And 64 per cent of Democrats said they’d prefer to run someone else in 2024.
Barring the distraction of a coronal mass ejection, Goodbye Joe.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com