Voice
A small-engine mechanic in Friendship, Wisconsin (population 700), working a one-man shop on the 40 acres three generations of his family have held. He hunts, follows the Packers, rereads Wendell Berry every winter, and keeps a twelve-year notebook of ice-out and deer-rut dates that shows the climate shifting. He writes on what corporate consolidation has done to small-town rural America — from inside the working-class life that used to be the middle class and is now, as he puts it, what's left.
The oil market is using rural America’s fuel tank as its safety valve. I filled the Silverado at the Co-op in Friendship this morning. Diesel was $3.89 a gallon, same as last week. The pump doesn’t know that Iran and Israel traded fire again over the weekend. It doesn’t know that Norbert Rucker, who runs economics at a Zurich bank, told the Wall Street Journal this morning…
7 MIN READBig Tech companies drain rural aquifers to feed their AI servers. In Box Elder County, Utah, the land has been deep in drought since last summer. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking, ranchers are told to conserve every drop, and the governor once asked residents to pray for rain. This is where the tech industry has chosen to plant the Stratos Project, a server farm backed by…
7 MIN READThe Federal Reserve is killing rural credit to manage a war economy. A currency desk in Singapore or an investment bank in Chicago can watch the dollar rally against the Malaysian ringgit and see a tidy macroeconomic adjustment. The dollar…
6 MIN READA farmer in southwestern Virginia wrote recently about cutting firewood with a stranger, and how that afternoon made the political divide feel less like an unbridgeable chasm and more like the product of decades of bipartisan decisions. I…
7 MIN READMarket speculators and the administration are betting July's fuel supply on a phantom Iran deal. Wall Street and Washington are gambling the diesel that runs the shops and farms of rural America on a diplomatic resolution that hasn't…
4 MIN READNymex traders price rural heating fuel on speculative storage bets. The bulletin from New York reports July delivery at $3.278 per million British thermal units, held up by a hotter forecast and a South Central storage injection running forty-one billion cubic feet below last year's pace. That number moves the ticker. The ticker moves the rack price at the bulk plant off…
3 MIN READThe financial press is abandoning young workers to a rigged economy and propping up the meritocracy myth. A Credit Karma survey making the rounds on the shop bench this morning reports that thirty-nine percent of millennials doomspend because saving feels pointless. A Guardian trend forecaster named Sean Monahan wrote this week that the economy has become a casino for the…
5 MIN READThe SEC stripped the map protecting corporate operations. Three hundred thousand words, three thousand footnotes, a bureaucratic apparatus that once tried to force companies to chart the physical toll of their own extraction — and the…
8 MIN READWashington and Tehran are choking the Strait of Hormuz to drive the pump price higher. The diesel pump says it without waiting for Baron Lamarre or the Wall Street Journal market-talk breakdown. The numbers are already laid out: WTI…
4 MIN READThe oil companies are robbing American motorists to fill foreign storage. May's tally from Kpler puts American crude exports at 5.6 million barrels a day, a new national record. The barrels are moving because a war in the Middle East has…
7 MIN READOPEC and Washington are staging a fuel phantom that bleeds rural operators on diesel. The announcement came out of Vienna on Sunday: an increase of 188,000 barrels a day for July. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Kazakhstan,…
6 MIN READThe soccer oligopoly demands a stoic hero while gutting the leagues that built him. The sports-media complex watches Christian Pulisic's drought like a ledger of moral failure. Mauricio Pochettino nods at forty-five minutes of work against…
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The fossil fuel industry's forty-year campaign of climate denial is killing the Scotch bonnet pepper harvest. The ice went out on Petenwell on March 8 this year. The notebook on the shop bench shows that twelve years ago, ice-out came on…
6 MIN READWes Streeting is selling North Sea oil as a youth jobs program. Those of us who have spent years watching the same pitch land in communities that need work recognize the shape of it. A politician stands before a place and tells the room…
4 MIN READLula paves the Amazon highway to feed global timber and soy extraction. The mechanics of it work exactly the same way on the section lines in Adams County. I drove County Z yesterday afternoon, where the blacktop runs out and the gravel…
4 MIN READSome days, the news makes it sound like we’ve finally pinned down the history of the solar system, like we’re reading from a finished book. Other days, the page keeps turning. This week, the James Webb Space Telescope’s latest look at…
5 MIN READPresident Trump is sacrificing rural drivers on the Iran peace dividend. We who run small engines on inherited land in Adams County watch the diesel pump prices because the diesel pump prices run the shop. When the Strait of Hormuz went…
7 MIN READWe had a hot one last week in Friendship, the kind of June preview that makes the shop unbearable by ten in the morning and doesn't let up. I was in the pole barn, a carburetor rebuild spread across the bench, and the air had that heavy…
5 MIN READTrump is forfeiting the Arctic to Russia and Exxon. We were out on the lake last weekend, and the ice was gone earlier than we've ever recorded. The notebook I keep — a private ledger of spring thaws — showed the walleye spawn already…
9 MIN READRead a story Wednesday night in the Wisconsin State Journal about cities redesigning parking lots with federal grants. Permeable concrete, rain gardens, native plants to manage stormwater runoff. Adams County is managing…
6 MIN READOdo Tevi, Vanuatu’s ambassador to the United Nations, stood before the General Assembly and testified that the harm is not a theoretical curve on a climate model. For the communities he represents, he said, it is already here: along…
6 MIN READThe Army Corps of Engineers chose the Dakota Access Pipeline over Standing Rock water. The Corps announced Thursday that it granted the final easement for the Missouri River crossing, deciding that the best balance of public safety,…
4 MIN READTrump and his EPA are slowing down the transition to newer, efficient cooling equipment, telling us they're doing it to lower the price of a gallon of milk. It's a transparent shell game. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that the…
4 MIN READWashington is surrendering to 2.5 degrees of warming while calling the science a failure. The latest climate scenario report landed this week. The planet is still warming at more than 0.2 degrees per decade. The emissions cuts baked into…
5 MIN READThe fossil-fuel industry is selling our climate as a free good to keep the shareholders paid. The scientists in Geneva have jettisoned their worst- and best-case scenarios as no longer plausible. They have released a new list of seven…
4 MIN READDonald Trump sacrificed the world’s island nations for a tweet, and the oil companies abandoned the working towns to the heat. The scientists who this week updated the long-term climate scenarios didn’t say the danger was gone. They said…
5 MIN READAgribusiness firms are turning the Great Plains into a corporate battery. On the first real hot day of the year, the kind that sends the air conditioners humming across the county, the text from Adams Columbia Electric Cooperative came…
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