George Monbiot has published a story in the Guardian with a strong dose of reality:
He goes on to say that maybe it’s time to give up “magical thinking”.
I hope that by laying out the problem I can encourage us to address it more logically, to abandon magical thinking and to recognise the contradictions we confront.
I’ll say. While I disagree with a lot of what Monbiot says, he does know enough not to lie to himself when things really aren’t going in his favor. He also hits on why the green/warmist movement is becoming so unpopular:
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.
Monbiot does have some realist sense about him, so I find it encouraging that he’s writing about the pickle the greens and warmists find themselves in. I recall during Climategate when he was the first to come out with a statement saying that the issue needs to be addressed square on:
Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can’t possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.
The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people’s denial. Pretending that this isn’t a real crisis isn’t going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We’ll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.
And, as he wrote there, many have continued with the “storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition” meme. Except the public knows better, and warmists are losing, and losing big. His article this week though is well worth a read, because he’s pretty well come to the conclusion that warmists and greens have painted themselves into a corner with demanding energy policy changes, while providing for no alternatives of substance, and the public is having none of it.
All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess.
Dogged reality bites – coming soon to an election near you. Canada this week, Australia soon, and the USA in 2012.
The way out, George, is the same as the way in. Let the free market decide. Shoving mandates down peoples throats like that dimwitted liar Julia Gillard is trying to do in Australia simply won’t work, and she’ll find herself knocked on her butt come next election. She must think people are too stupid to notice or care. People will embrace energy saving technology, but it takes time. And, the solution must have more value, not less. The modern world wasn’t built in 100 days, and neither will the postmodern.
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rbateman says:
May 4, 2011 at 8:39 pm
There are only 4 forces in nature.
Man’s worst inventions are still Greed and the Lust for Power, neither of which advances any hope of a brighter future.
There is a video out on youtube of Milton Friedman about Greed. Puts it in another light altogether, well worth watching
#
Best of the Best: Milton Friedman – Greed
29/10/2007 · Milton Friedman was an American Nobel Laureate economist and public intellectual. An advocate of economic freedom and personal liberty, Friedman made major contributions …
bestofthebestvideos.blogspot.com/2007/10/milton-friedman-greed.html
I put the quote make in the wrong place in my post above: ….illustrates that “wherever large-scale collapse…”.
Mark A says:
May 4, 2011 at 11:12 pm
Werner Brozek
“UK recorded its lowest temperature for 25 years”
Maybe it was in December last year, but I heard on the wireless this morning that the UK has a heatwave and bush fires, no rain in sight.
The night before last in East Anglia the temp fell to -5.8°C (minus 5.8). The coldest MAY night for 15 years. It is a prime example of how H²O affects night temps. Dry air is very cold at night because the CO² “trapped heat” is passed directly into space.
Gareth Phillips says:
May 5, 2011 at 2:27 am
Your actions make you a sensible resource scavenger for the benefit of your pocket and all credit to you. However, in many towns throughout the world people do not have the land / space to do what you are doing or the money to invest in the necessary infrastructure. Fuel is about supplying energy to all on the same equitable basis which is impossible using the greenie beenie approach. Coppiced wood won’t grow in the Sahal or Sahara or cannot been grown where their lives depend on having food avaible all year round and no supermarket for a few hundred miles.
I cannot count the number of times I have said this but I will say it just one more time.
Journalists like politicans have 2 skills, lying and deceiving. Sometimes they do both to themselves. Monbiot has been doing both for too long. We, the world, have no need of his prognostications and no need of his (what is the word in english?) public self -flagelation ? Anthony, I know you are a very generous person but you should ignore Monbiot and the Grauniad they have nothing to say of interest.
Well … that’s about as stupid a logic as saying: “CO2 must have some impact on planet earth” … both are entirely irrational
Mike
You need to explain this. Why must CO² have an impact on the planet? Why must energy run out? You are being irrational unless you can explain both of these assumptions through definitive scientific explanations. To my knowledge, non exists and I have been a degree physicist since 1978.
Julia Gillard is neither dim witted (though I admit she ‘sounds’ dim witted) nor a liar.
Julia is an intelligent middle ranking beaurocrat politician. She had to be consistently cunning if not clever, to be chosen by the party cabal that (for reasons so lost in the mists of time it would be pointless to even begin explaining…read ‘The Wild Men of Sydney’ for an account of the origins of NSW politics between the late 19th and early 20th Centuries) she had to be clever and charismatic to be chosen by the ‘faceless men’.
And no she’s not lying either she is reading from the script provided and sometimes you can actually hear that she is clawing desperately at the failing narrative the ‘faceless men’ have provided her.
It’s the green/independents that maintain her government that are truly going to be put to the cross come the next elections.
We’ve had a cool wet summer and now the cold is setting in and for those who might think otherwise, it does get cold in Australia and just as it gets cold Julia must deliver some laws or regulations to mitigate ‘climate change’ which is ABC code for GLOBALWARMING; but the carbon tax is slaughtering her in the polls…all of the polls and the surge of public concern, which was so effectively exploited during the recent drought and forest fires has faded.
No wonder sea levels are ‘levelling off’ , weather systems have dumped billions of tons of water into and onto Australia just recently.
And Australians being fundamentally sensible folk have witnessed this cyclical shift in climate…and only the very looniest…and those in the media who have been so rabidly evangelising ‘climate change’ for so long that to turn back now would mean the collapse of what little credibility they might have possesed as journalists. They’re the only voices you hear now…fading and growing fainter.
Phew!
Piffle,
Monbiot and his ilk have just shifted in discomfort with the recent facts on the gross and inhumane suffering by women and children mostly in developing regions and nations.
But Monbiot et al are well entrenched in the cities, where they have always been holed. Now these same misanthropes have long been become entrenched and employed in the nanny state (and local government) with their capacity for anti-development, spreading housing in greenfields and deliberate and population capping of our cities.
Paul Keating in ‘muesli-chewer’ blast at Sydney mayor Clover Moore
FORMER prime minister Paul Keating has launched a colourful attack on Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, labelling her a supporter of “sandal-wearing, muesli-chewing, bike-riding pedestrians”.
source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/paul-keating-in-muesli-chewer-blast-at-sydney-mayor-clover-moore/story-e6frg6nf-1226050623430
Naughty Nannies
Background to Hon Paul Keating, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Keating Barangaroo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barangaroo,_New_South_Wales and Clover Moore http://www.clovermoore.com.au/
Monbiot should have stuck being a scrub scout in emergency surgery of outback Africa for a few months.
Poor George, he’s been writing tosh for the Grauniad for so long, he’s in a difficult spot trying to realign himself.
He got it right on Climategate, he knew right then that it AGW was a fraud, and he’s been slowly repositioning himself for ages, each new post reaffirming his credentials as a green, while at the same time pointing out how wrong green policies and solutions are.
Sorry George, your new clothing is a welcome sight, but your credibility is still very doubtful, especially when you continue to use insulting references to “deniers”.
So, essentially, a hippie can start out with sounding all rational with a logical reasoning but come the end they can’t but come out suffering the worst case of hubris.
How can they, the poor fellows in the communist hippie, err green, movement save us all from them, err, ourself, and the weed, err green, garden of Gaia too?
Here’s a thought: Maybe they could start out small, say by saving the good folks of North Korea from their evil smurf masters. Would probably be a tad bit more manageable project. And besides the hip(pie) green movement seem to be on the same hubris page as the overlord smurfs, which would make things easier in the rainbow communication department.
Anyone know why the early adopters of the LED based screen technology consited mostly of hippies in the weed movement?
F O U R B I L L I O N C O L O R S :p
It’s May 5 and Monobot surrenders.
Heheh, I predicted this, I’m a fricking prophet:
“John Silver says:
November 11, 2010 at 9:22 am
Die Ökofascisten are getting desperate.
Don’t worry, this is just like the Battle of the Bulge, cruel but irrelevant for the outcome in the end. By May next year, they will surrender.”
Proof of prophetism is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/11/germany-gets-ugly-with-skeptics/
“Dimwitted Liar Julia Gillard”
Wow. Spoken like a man of science.
So you think Monbiot recognizes denial when he sees it? What does he think o f WUWT then? Why don’t you ask him, Anthony. Or is it the same as with scientists: You only back them when they support you view of the world?
The last couple of paragraphs demonstrate what this site is really about: self-interested politics.
It occurred to me many years ago that the austere lifestyle the Greens demand of everyone else is, in reality, a demand that Man ignores his basic drive to invent and build clever stuff and to experience pure unalloyed joy. Watching children inventing stuff to play imaginative games with is not only fascinating, but a real pointer to Mans’ real nature. Children automatically understand and accept that the world is an exciting place, if sometimes a bit scary; the child in all of us will lead to all sorts of wonderful discoveries and inventions in the unknown future, but the Greens all seem to be born with a major genetic mutation which makes them instinctive joyless control freaks and bullies without the wit to see that their aims and aspirations are basically both inhuman and inhumane.
I am convinced that Mans’ natural state is a joyfull quest for ways to enrich our individual and group existence. This is a reality that Greens can’t get their heads around, but hopefully, like every other maladpatation throughout the long sweep of evolution, they will eventually disappear from the world.
@Mike Haseler says: May 5, 2011 at 12:29 am
“Martin Brumby says: May 4, 2011 at 11:35 pm
“Martin Brumby,
I don’t understand your comment. If you are saying the premise is that we have to cut fossil fuel BECAUSE of global warming, then I entirely agree with you. But the conclusion is more “if we are to meet this … then the implication is this””
No, my comment was that a bunch of highly qualified and competent Engineers (OK, several with ‘alternative energy’ interests) produced a report (in essence) on the implications of complying with the then fairly recently enacted Climate Change Act 2008. This requires an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050.
(Note that Monbiot refers – with approval? – both in his 2 May piece and in his 5 May follow up to the Zero Carbon Britain 2030 “Report” which was penned by a bunch of nutters including Geoffrey Houghton and which espouses the idea of ZERO emissions, without nuclear, by 2030)
Now the RAE report, having given a serious analysis of the legal requirement of the Act, comes up with various prescriptions, largely depending on by how much current demand for energy can be curtailed. The prescriptions they give are absolutely mind boggling in their potential cost and, (even if you neglect little details like how ineffective so-called renewable energy solutions have so far proved to be) it is far from clear that they could physically be achieved almost regardless of cost.
This I described as:-
“Mind boggling conclusions. But no check of the reality of the initial premise.”
Their premise in this case being that there was a real problem with CO2 emissions and that this problem needs to be solved and further that it needs to be solved in accordance with the ludicrous ‘legal’ requirements of the 2008 Act.
In the case of Moonbat, he is starting (apparently) to realise some of the consequences of his belief system (and it IS a belief system, underpinned by extremely shonky pseudo science) and has been forced to admit that some of the consequences are not only really bad news by any sensible reckoning (destruction of treasured landscape for the erection of BigWind, destruction of manufacturing industry and a return to ‘living off the land’) but are politically unachievable unless we are to live in a state like North Korea.
He has questioned (and now belatedly rejects) his belief that his Greenie chums’ attacks on nuclear power are scientifically defensible.
He still can’t stand to question his beliefs that CO2 is really a major problem, nor that BigWind provides useful and affordable energy. He thus finds himself in a cleft stick. His conclusions must seem risible even to himself but (like the RAE Engineers) he can’t bear to question whether his starting point is sensible.
My reaction is to roll on the floor laughing. If I was more charitable towards him (unfortunately, I don’t, due to his past behaviour, for example towards Ian Plimer and his childish climate deniers deck of cards) I might content myself with a face palm moment.
On the one hand, it is really refreshing to see a Greenie ‘fess up to the irrationality of the Green position. However, what I find remarkable about Monbiot’s article is that it is darker than the idea of blowing up school children. Consider the following:
“And even if there were an immediate economic cataclysm, it’s not clear that the result would be a decline in our capacity for destruction. In east Africa, for example, I’ve seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don’t give up cooking; they cut down more trees. History shows us that wherever large-scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over. This is hardly conducive to the rational use of natural assets.”
Monbiot is quite willing to consider economic cataclysm as a partial solution of humanity’s “capacity for destruction” [of the environment]. Monbiot does not reject pursuit of economic cataclysm because it would be, well, cataclysmic for humanity but because it would be ineffective; that is, that awful humanity stuff would just squish out elsewhere and continue its destruction. Has there ever been a darker vision of humanity? Given this vision, mitigation of humanity’s impact on the environment cannot be the goal of the Green movement. On this view, mitigation is comparable to installing a breathalyzer in the automobile of an enthusiastic, happy, binging alcoholic. The alcoholic will find another car. It is the alcoholic that must be eliminated, not the probable threats posed by his drunken behavior. Monbiot is considering eliminating humanity and its potential for destruction of the environment.
Monbiot concedes that within the Green movement there is a radical faith darker than anything outside of Pol Pot’s faith in his Maoist transformation of Cambodia. This concession should be communicated in clear and stark terms to all Americans and to everyone. Everyone should understand what these ideas portend.
Gareth Phillips says:
May 5, 2011 at 2:27 am
“I must admit that my solar powered water heating, insulation and renewable energy source ( I burn coppiced ash) has saved me a fortune in energy bills.”
I heat my water with solar. In Central Florida. December through February I take cold (as in absent all warmth) showers. Why would anyone north of the Florida-Georgia border use solar? Why would anyone in Britain use solar? Surely, Brits would require a thousand square feet of solar panels to create enough hot water for one shower. By the way, I know that my solar works well because my water is boiling hot during the summer.
Is there some reason why anyone should care what Moonbat thinks? He is a second-rate Marxist intellectual writing opinion columns in a third-rate left wing rag. Yes, he does on rare occasions inadvertently mumble some platitude that appears to be grounded in reality. Call it curious. Call it pathetic. Call it whatever you want, but don’t call it newsworthy.
Moonbat still uses the word “denier” like it’s going out of style. Please stop dignifying his column by giving him extra publicity and/or by praising him for grasping something that any semi-intelligent 10 year old already knows.
“And, the solution must have more value, not less.”
This simple statement is the key to ALL progress. By definition, solutions are better because they do something positive at lower cost. It’s so obviously tautological that it’s a wonders that anyone would disagree. Willis would identify it as Constructal Law.
“Skeptic”, “Denier”, “Warmist”, “Alarmist”… Ah, for the time we can all accurately call ourselves “Realists”. No clear-thinking human should identify with any other term.
Does a Monbiot change his spots? I’m not so sure… He’s realised perhaps sooner than most warmists that the ‘shove it down their throats’ plan didn’t work, so now he’s trying the ‘softly softly’ approach to try and ultimately get the same outcome. They don’t give up that easily…
I have pointed Warmists to this point. Deprive the Third World of fuel and they will decimate their forests. Nobody wants to eat raw chicken, potatoes or rice. It’s as simple as that.
With George Monbiot we are dealing with a Watermelon. They want pain for everyone else except themselves. Monbiot has a secure job and house. Now read this!
I do hope he has changed his ways.
There is a lot of fuel locked up in the forests of the world. The ‘global players’ would see MASSIVE deforestation, the likes of which the world has never seen before. The way to reduce population is to increase standards of living for the poor, educate girls, provide cheap contraception and energy. The other way will fail very badly.
I agree. The country I live in is hot and sunny 11 months of the year. There are quite a few solar powered water heaters, winpowered water pumpls and small wind turbines used by some residences along the coast. When it makes economic sense and supplements your energy needs then I have no problem with it. In the same vein I don’t think Anthony Watts has a problem with it either.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/er-outlook-sustainability-my-missing-article/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/07/swapping-my-lights-fantastic/