From the Mt. Pleasant, MI Morning Sun. Graphic by Anthony
WASHINGTON – There once was an Indianapolis concert featuring 50 pianos. Splendid instruments, pianos. Still, 50 might have been excessive.
As is today’s chorus summoning us to save the planet.
In the history of developed democracies with literate publics served by mass media, there is no precedent for today’s media enlistment in the crusade to promote global warming “awareness.” Concerning this, journalism, which fancies itself skeptical and nonconforming, is neither.
The incessant hectoring by the media-political complex’s “consciousness-raising” campaign has provoked a comic riposte in the form of “The Goode Family,” an animated ABC entertainment program on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. Eastern time. Cartoons seem, alas, to be the most effective means of seizing a mass audience’s attention. Still, the program is welcome evidence of the bursting of what has been called “the green bubble.”
Gerald and Helen Goode, their children and dog Che (when supervised, he is a vegan; when unsupervised, squirrels disappear) live in a college town, where T-shirts and other media instruct (“Meat is murder”), admonish (“Don’t kill wood”) and exhort (“Support our troops … and their opponents”). The college, where Gerald works, gives students tenure. And when Gerald says his department needs money to raise the percentage of minority employees, his boss cheerily replies, “Or we could just fire three white guys. Everybody wins!” Helen shops at the One Earth store, where community shaming enforces social responsibility: “Attention One Earth shoppers, the driver of the SUV is in aisle four. He’s wearing the baseball cap.”
The New York Times television critic disapproves. The show “feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed.”
That is a perfect (because completely complacent) sample of the grating smugness of the planet-savers, delivered by an entertainment writer: Reasonable dissent is impossible. Cue the pianos.
“The Goode Family” does not threaten Jonathan Swift’s standing as the premier English-language satirist. But when a Goode child apologizes to his parent for driving too much, and the parent responds, “It’s OK … what’s important is that you feel guilty about it,” the program touches upon an important phenomenon: ecology as psychology.
In “The Green Bubble: Why Environmentalism Keeps Imploding” (The New Republic, May 20), Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of “Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists,” say that a few years ago, being green “moved beyond politics.”
Gestures – bringing reusable grocery bags to the store, purchasing a $4 heirloom tomato, inflating tires, weatherizing windows — “gained fresh urgency” and “were suddenly infused with grand significance.”
Green consumption became “positional consumption” that identified the consumer as a member of a moral and intellectual elite. A 2007 survey found that 57 percent of Prius purchasers said they bought their car because “it makes a statement about me.”
Honda, alert to the bull market in status effects, reshaped its 2009 Insight hybrid to look like a Prius. Nordhaus and Shellenberger note the telling “insignificance,” as environmental measures, of planting gardens or using fluorescent bulbs.
Their significance is therapeutic, but not for the planet. They make people feel better: “After all, we can’t escape the fact that we depend on an infrastructure – roads, buildings, sewage systems, power plants, electrical grids, etc. – that requires huge quantities of fossil fuels.
But the ecological irrelevance of these practices was beside the point.”
The point of “utopian environmentalism” was to reduce guilt. During the green bubble, many Americans became “captivated by the twin thoughts that human civilization could soon come crashing down – and that we are on the cusp of a sudden leap forward in consciousness, one that will allow us to heal ourselves, our society, and our planet. Apocalyptic fears meld seamlessly into utopian hopes.”
Suddenly, commonplace acts – e.g., buying light bulbs – infused pedestrian lives with cosmic importance. But: “Greens often note that the changing global climate will have the greatest impact on the world’s poor; they neglect to mention that the poor also have the most to gain from development fueled by cheap fossil fuels like coal. For the poor, the climate is already dangerous.”
Now, say Nordhaus and Shellenberger, “the green bubble” has burst, pricked by Americans’ intensified reluctance to pursue greenness at a cost to economic growth. The dark side of utopianism is “escapism and a disengagement from reality that marks all bubbles, green or financial.”
Re-engagement with reality is among the recession’s benefits.
George Will’s e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com.
Read the complete column at the Morning Sun
Adam Gallon (00:44:30) :
The cracks are appearing in the marketing campaigns linked to “Greenness” over here too, sales of “Organic” foods are falling as people start to feel the pinch over the economy.
Organic Feed, too. If you want organic, you grow it yourself. There’s no margin in it by the time middlemen are figured in. Just wait until someone figures out they can make an affordable car by bringing back the Model A, including the gas mileage it got.
Cap & Spill will put us back 100 years as far as Joe Consumer is concerned.
Frank Lansner,
I wonder if UAH will come in negative.
They’ve been coming in about a tenth below RSS the last couple of months.
This article is nonsense, because the green movement has only become stronger the last few years and show absolutely no signs of weakening. NONE. They are going to make are lives more expensive, slow down the economy and create meaningless “make-work” job to supplant meaningful activity.
It Has Only Just Begun!
Roger Carr writes that incadescent lightbulbs are not being imported to Australia. They’ve been banned in the UK too – phased out over the next year or so. The most ridiculous thing about this is that over the last decade millions of Brits have refurbished their homes and installed halogen lights, either recessed into the ceiling or on tracks. The lamps are typically 50 watts each with a 38 degree beam, and six or more are used to replace one hundred-watt bulb – yet it’s the bulb that got banned in order to save energy! The earlier halogens were 12 volts, but now they’re doing them in mains voltage too, but it’s the same wattage either way, yet I read in the home section of a respected national newspaper that we should buy the 12 volt ones because they’re energy-saving! When even Ohm’s law becomes the preserve of only the few, there’s no hope, is there?
Dave Wendt: Getting us to surrender large parts of our liberty may actually be the goal in all this.
Reinhard Bosch: There’s nothing wrong with your English.
It’s surprising what can be discovered from Wikipedia, notwithstanding the censorship of articles contradicting the AGW bias. There is mention of warmer times and then much colder times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Bronze_Age
“The Nordic Bronze Age was characterized by a warm climate that began with a climate change circa 2700 BC (comparable to that of present-day central Germany and northern France). The warm climate permitted a relatively dense population and good farming, for example grapes were grown in Scandinavia at this time. However a small change in climate between 850 BC and 760 BC and a more radical one circa 650 BC brought in a deteriorating, wetter and colder climate (sometimes believed to have given rise to the legend of the Fimbulwinter/Fimbulvetr).
Fimbulvetr is three successive winters where snow comes in from all directions, without any intervening summer. During this time, there will be innumerable wars and brothers will kill brothers.
There have been several popular speculations about whether this particular piece of mythology has a connection to the climate change that occurred in the Nordic countries at the end of the Nordic Bronze Age, about 650 BC. Before this climate change, the Nordic countries were considerably warmer.”
Here in the UK at 10-30 GMT the BBC weatherman has just reported that snow is falling across the Pennines. It looks like the Flandrian Integlacial is coming to an end.
Maybe he means there are x bodies (physical) and fewer y souls (spiritual) and the former without the latter are not ____fill in the blank____.
Well, them cave men musta been pretty darn soulful, in that case. (Even if they were brutal and probably ubiquitously cannibalistic.)
And good conditions would have to be inversely proportional to soul. Speaking personally, I’ll settle for the good conditions.
They have no shame.
Well, they’ve transferred it all over to their opponents, which leaves very little for themselves. Maybe what doesn’t work for souls works for shame?
Would some warmist who agrees that AGW promotes the spread of disease and death please explain how plague flourished in Europe during the Little Ice Age?
A reasonable and informed sceptic would like to know…
Little what age?
Disputin (01:40:45) asks: “How do you make bold characters?”
Substitute arrow brackets (<) for the curly ( } ) brackets shown below:
Bold = {b} word or words {/b}
Italic = {i} word or words {/i}
The New York Times television critic disapproves. The show “feels aggressively off-kilter with the current mood, as if it had been incubated in the early to mid-’90s, when it was possible to find global-warming skeptics among even the reasonable and informed.”
Such a dour grapes attitude! “Aggressively off-kilter” like, oh, Monte Python, Saturday Night Live, Mad TV, … someone needs to tell the nitwit this is called HUMOR!
Per the CFL and banning incandescents: I think it’s just hilarious that the folks most aggressive about this are often from colder climates. Places like Britain and Canada where the major effect is to move your power consumption from you electric lighting bill to your heating bill… Heck, even here in California it’s usually cool in the evening even if the day was warm.
Oh, btw, we are continuing cold. Today was 68F at 6 pm. In summer. It’s a lot cooler now in the dead of night. And we’re not the only place it’s cold right now:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/23/south-hemisphere-record-early-snow/
BTW, I’m all for being efficient and saving my money, but “conserving” for the sole reason of using less is just dumb. We never run out of energy or stuff. There is no reason for Puritanical Guilt. We are not consuming our childrens future. We are not all going to die from some Malthusian Catastrophe. (Regularly predicted for approaching a couple of hundred years now, and regularly wrong. Malthus ignored technical advance. Advance that now puts us at an infinite horizon…)
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
BTW, while most of my fixtures have CFLs in them, they are no panacea. I’m stocking up on incandescents while I can for the places where the CFL is not a good choice. ( I have 4 years worth now, goal is 20 ).
Where do the CFLs fall down?
First off, anywhere that needs “instant on” like your refrigerator light or yard security lights. CFLs take up to 5 minutes to reach full brightness.
Anywhere with frequent cycling. You get about 10,000 on off cycles. Your 10 year bulb can be shot in a couple of years in any location with frequent on / off cycling like, oh, the bathroom. (365 x 10 = 3650 or about 3 years)
Dimmers. Haven’t found one that dims worth a darn yet, even the “dimmable” ones. Too much of a step function and hum.
Anywhere you don’t want a mercury spill if broken. Fridge? Oven? Plan to buy a new one if you break a bulb or accept a little Mercury Poisoning. Darkroom? Expect mercury fogged negatives for a very long time (a diminishing problem, but I still have some films…) How about in the nursery? Baby night lights?
Places that are very cold. The ability to run in very low temperatures may be non-existent or it may just be a very slow startup. I’ve had both.
Very Low utilization areas. That crawl space in the attic that gets lit up for 20 minutes every 5 years? …
“Rugged Use” areas like work lights on a drop cord. Yeah, that mercury thing.
Combined heat and power uses: Chick hatcheries, yogurt makers (cardboard box with lightbulb does it…), lizard warmers, seed starters, …
There’s more, but I’ll stop here. I’ll just note 2 non-usability issues. Some folks get headaches under fluorescent lighting (I’ve known 2 such folks) and you can’t ever throw one away. The CFL takes special hazardous waste handling… think about it…
So I don’t mind folks wanting to delude themselves by “being green” and “feeling better”; but I do mind folks forcing their delusional thinking on those of us who are reality based. I don’t care if it is ones religion, green think, or either liberal or radical conservative ideologies. You are free to enjoy feeling good about yourself for embracing whatever nutty belief you like; just leave me a lone and don’t put it in laws.
That the PC agenda has gotten so grating that it’s spawned a parody gives me great hope that the tolerance for enforced nuttiness is wearing thin among more than just me…
Now the other side is being called “skeptics” !!!
http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Study+Acknowledges+Solar+Cycle+Not+Man+Responsible+for+Past+Warming/article15310.htm
“Skeptics, though, argue that there’s little hard evidence of a solar hand in recent climate changes”.
Damn, Anthony–channeling George Will? Now you will be skewered as a right-wing, troglodyte, toady for “the corporations” who needs to be shouted down.
Because, as Wiley Miller demonstrates, cartoons can be devastating.
http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/the-preeminent-definition-of-agw-assclowns/
Reinhard Bösch (01:03:42) : My point is: Hardly anybody will change his views confronted with rational arguments. Emotions will prevail. Therefore,being a rationalist,one will always be in the minority.
Ahmen. I’ve found that being a rationalist just gets rocks thrown at you from all side from all True Believers of whatever sort. Oh Well.
FWIW, I’ve found it fun to point out to the anti-fur folks that they seem quite happy with leather belts, shoes, and upholstery. (Just look around them for a belt, handbag, shoes, or if they are in a Mercedes, the seats…) Then I ask them why it’s better to use the hide with the hair removed? Remember to duck 😉
If they have fabric or plastic shoes, ask why it’s better to have oil spills than use renewable leather. Then ask them if the hide from food animals ought to be thrown away when it could be used for leather? Or do they expect everyone to be a vegetarian too?
I have no illusions: Life as a farm animal is not good. But life as a wild animal is far less good. Shorter, hungrier, colder, and much more likely to be attacked by another animal. Bunnies in the wild live, on average, about 1 year. Bunnies as pets live 4 to 6 (that’s about the upper bound). On a farm, the herd is guaranteed survival at the cost of part of the young. Rather like people have done for generations with wars and young soldiers…
Sorry for my poor English
Reinhard, had you not apologized I’d have thought you a native speaker. I find nothing wrong with your English. It is far better than many folks with whom I grew up… there are some really bad native speakers of English out in the “sticks”…
More chinks in the armor of the global warming contingent: click
And: click
Politicians are always later than the crowd. In the beginning the crowd was told that the planet was warming because of us. The politicin reacted very late and are actualy only planning to raise taxes on carbon gasses. Now the crowd is strarting to know the truth person by person. The politics strating to like the extra taxes so they stall the truth from comming out.
Greg Cavanagh (19:52:21) :
I’m surprised any television station had the gumption to actually air such a comic strip.
My guess is it will run for less than two seasons, get canceled, and the AGW crowd will say that that is proof that there are not many skeptics in the world and that we should get with the program.
Let the ridicule begin …
evanmjones asked: Little what age?
Wiki has a reasonably accurate, easily understood precis. Enjoy. :0)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
While your trashing my show…
WUWT trashed by NSDIC’s Dr Mark Serreze
Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice and the “breathaking ignorance” of blogs like WattsUpWithThat
Ubuntu
If your thinking the MM GW Alarmist will change their views then you are not connected to history. They have said too much, posted too much, published too much, exaggerated too much and repeated the exaggerations to too many people to change.
In fact, the colder it gets will only trigger more catastrophic MM AGW theory’s. It will not surprise me if a new theory comes into play. Let’s call it the “Rubber Band” theory.
The current STATE RUN MEDIA will begin reporting………….
“Somehow through dark CO2 science; unmeasured, undetectable heat is being stored in the special extra Man Made emitted CO2 which now makes up another 1/10,000 th more of the atmosphere. As predicted by new CO2 models this unmeasured, undetectable heat will trigger, at some point just outside the life span of the youngest AGW theorist, an explosion (like a Rubber Band) sending murderous heat throughout the atmosphere and killing 90 percent of this planets life forms. “
Movie to follow.
When you start seeing these reports then you will start to understand what Hitler was thinking the last few weeks of WW II.
Serenity now……………….
I noticed from one of the article’s comments that Joe Romm is bloviating over at http://climateprogress.org about this article, and in the headline article, talks about the “breathtaking ignorance” of sites like WattsUpWithThat (a quote by the new NSIDC director Dr Mark Serraze).
But it might be a good opportunity for a point by point rebuttal if anyone’s interested. Should not be difficult to see who suffers from Joe’s Anti Science Syndrome (A.S.S.), and who doesn’t…
Read about his vision for the NSIDC. Sounds like the NSIDC is no longer as much a provider of information, it’s an advocate of preparing for change. Interesting twist, Mark, should we change it to NSIAC, substituting Advocacy for Data?
evanmjones (03:33:45) :
Surely the global warmers are religious. After we all die form this or that alarm certainly they’d like to believe in resurrection so they can raise us all from the dead just to have us die once more from from this or that other alarm.
I don’t know if the bubble’s burst yet or not, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it when it does. Think green slimy goo everywhere.
I hate to admit it…But we bring “reusable grocery bags to the store” and often purchase over-priced heirloom tomatoes. It has little to do with “fresh urgency” or “grand significance.” We had a bad habit of keeping grocery bags – they do come in handy sometimes. Before long, we would have a couple of drawers full of grocery bags…And then we would throw them away. As for heirloom tomatoes…they look cool and sometimes taste better than regular old tomatoes.
Of course we tote our “reusable grocery bags to the store” to buy over-priced heirloom tomatoes in a Jeep Commander with a 5.7L Hemi Engine (360hp 12mpg). And just like “57 percent of Prius purchasers,” we bought that particular Jeep because “it makes a statement about” us. (We’re both geoscientists).
Do we have any peer-reviewed science about these “souls”?
I believe they do.