As strange as it seems given the whole, you know, this, the United States is only a small part of the world.

Little Donald ordering closed coal plants to reopen like a Captain Planet villain is only going to impact a relatively small number of power plants - and those coal plants are going to close back down as soon as they're legally allowed to, for the same reason they closed in the first place, because they don't make economic sense anymore.

Meanwhile, the people buying solar because they can't trust oil and gas supplies, and the governments investing in renewables because they don't want to be held hostage the next time the United States gets a bug up its ass about Iran, will still have those solar and renewables long after Little Donald has retired to his private massage parlor in Mar-A-Lago.

not intended for direct human consumption

Certainly. But it's still edible. Dent corn, for instance, can be and is used for cornmeal, masa, tortillas, and so on. The industrial monoculture varieties of dent corn are optimized for animal feed, ethanol, or whatever, but nothing's stopping us from eating them (except, in theory, the ridiculous amount of herbicide and pesticide that gets dumped on them).

The reason why we're growing so much corn that's not intended for direct human consumption is because of a whole shitload of broken incentives and megacorporation subsidies and America's meat addiction and the nagging worry that if we don't keep the land in use we can't justify stealing it from the natives however many generations ago.

Which is part of what the article goes into.

And it's why the idea that ethanol opposes Big Oil is so ridiculous. Ethanol and Big Oil go hand in hand. Their interests are aligned and Trump loves them both.

If that was true (it's not) why are we wasting so much land growing inedible corn? Maybe we could, you know, like the article says, use the land for better purposes?

Field corn is edible for humans. It makes perfectly fine cornmeal, grits, hominy, etc. And of course it's processed into corn syrup, which is technically edible for humans.

It just doesn't have as much sugar as sweet corn does, so it doesn't taste good when eaten as a vegetable.

You don't need to feel ashamed. The system is so broken that just surviving each day is a victory on its own. If that's all you can do - if every day is a recovery day from the last day - it's still worth celebrating because you're still fucking alive.

Bonus:

Believe it or not, people on the left have been discussing this for centuries.

The general idea is recognizing a right to "personal property", which you get from using something, instead of the capitalist idea of "private property", which you get from buying something.

Currently in Western capitalist societies, if a rich person buys fifty houses, he owns fifty houses; he can live in one and collect rent from the other forty-nine, or leave the other forty-nine vacant, or tear them down to build one giant fortified survival compound, as he chooses. His property, his choice, whether it benefits the community or not.

In a society without private property, that rich person could only own one house - the house he lives in - because he lives in it and uses it. The people who live in and use the other forty-nine houses would own those. And the land underneath the houses would be owned by nobody, but belong collectively to the community, so no one person or company could accumulate land to the detriment of everyone else.

Landlords hate this idea.

Here's a really super basic summary:

https://www.workers.org/private-property/

And here's a long complicated discussion:

https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/anarchism-and-private-property

I don't.

I remember when American conservatives in the '60s claimed to support states' rights. But what they actually supported was segregation and Jim Crow. They used "states' rights" as a rhetorical tool to hide their racism behind a facade of principle, just like the Confederacy had a hundred years prior.

Among the American right, only useful idiots (like libertarians) actually believed in states' rights - or small government rhetoric in general - as a principle. It was always empty rhetoric. And now that Republicans are openly supporting Trump's big government authoritarian conservatism, it's become obvious how badly the Ron Paul types were used.

You don't understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn't like it. Responsible protests don't hurt people's feelings. They went too far.

Here in California, utility companies are "solving" this by instituting extremely high fees for the privilege of connecting your solar power to the grid. If I recall from the last time I ran the numbers, rooftop solar panels no longer make economic sense for the vast majority of residential customers - it costs more money to install me solar panels and pay the monthly connection fees then you'll save by producing energy over the lifetime of the solar panels.

Edit: I just googled and it looks like after public outcry the regulators pulled their really bad fee schedule to replace with a slightly less bad fee schedule. The system works!

Probably the one time in history PG&E tried to fix a problem ahead of time. 😆

AOC is calling for protests. Equating protests to terrorism puts you in the ignoble company of the Iranian government, the Saudi monarchy, and the Georgia cops who charged protesters with felonies for distributing flyers.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.