Two short essays by Steve Baer, both from mid-2000, written from his Corrales address. They are companion pieces in tone — each uses irony and provocation to challenge the dominant assumptions of the environmental movement as Baer saw it.
The title is a trap. The essay is a four-page dark satire in which Baer imagines, in deadpan earnest, the rational project of eliminating clouds and weather to achieve permanent sunshine.
The mechanism: a global network of water extractors, desiccants (glycol, silica gel), and genetically engineered dual-leafed plants — one set green to grow, one set black to pull moisture from the air at night and drip it out in sunlight. The consequences Baer traces with care:
The desiccated world is fragile and anxious. Its owners — Water, Inc. and Wet Worlds — live a few days from catastrophe: a plant blight, a sabotaged glycol fountain, and "mounting humidity would return the old clouds, storms, the lightning, rain and hail."
The essay ends with the scenario the industry fears most: a rainstorm escapes, people scoop water for free, grass grows on hillsides, and they might "riot and destroy the valuable desiccators" — or simply "forget to be ashamed of the clouds and storms that mankind had worked so hard to get rid of, and even start singing in the rain."
The piece is a reductio ad absurdum of techno-optimism applied to weather and solar access. The logic mirrors Baer's critique of the satellite-based solar collector in The Antarctic heat collector: the desire to turn a natural process into a controlled commodity is its own kind of ruin.
A direct, non-satirical provocation. Baer's opening: "The only good thing we have done for Nature is to create CO₂ burning fossil fuels."
His argument runs against two targets at once:
Against the efficiency argument: More fuel efficiency means fewer animals roadkilled per gallon, less CO₂ to fertilize plants. "More efficient power plants make man thrive and Nature wilt." The danger for nature is not warming — it is efficiency.
Against the advocacy apparatus: The Environmental Foundation, backed by Rockefeller, MacArthur, and Pew, "concentrate entirely on advocacy (propaganda), omitting funds for research, demonstrations, prototypes, etc. This is alarming, like a tow truck that has no tow chain, just a bigger horn to increase alarm."
On measurement: anyone taking global average temperature changes seriously should "try measuring ambient temperatures for himself. It isn't easy. The outside is a crossfire of thermal radiation affecting everything that emits and absorbs it." He questions whether shelters, thermometers, and paint are comparable across a century of records.
The essay closes with a question directed at the "elite of attorneys, government functionaries, and non-profit cause people": "Why in the world would they ever want us lower life forms to come to our senses? What better way to keep us confused than by crossing signals about CO₂?"
These essays sit at the edge of the archive's thermal vision. The CO₂ piece explains why Baer focused on passive systems — windows, skylights, water storage — rather than joining the renewable energy advocacy of his time. He was not opposed to solar energy; he was opposed to the institutional form it was taking. The same argument appears thirty years later in Tax, shine, and sunshine.
"Sunny Days Ahead!" prefigures the Corrales Comment irrigation letter in method: a thought experiment carried to its logical extreme until it becomes absurd, to make visible what is wrong with the premise.