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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Gareth Phillips says-
“While some posters really worry about renewable energy and condemn it at every opportunity, it can be really useful, and anyone who condemns it on principle without thinking it through is behaving just as badly as any mad warmist crusty at Glastonbury. If it works, use it and don’t worry to much about your image or politics”
I don’t think the majority of us condemn renewables out of principle but simply economics. I have a 2.1kw solar feed-in system on my roof compliments of the Australian Govt’s $8000 subsidy(tax clawback) and a further $1500 in Renewable Energy Credits, plus a net power feed-in subsidy to give me a riskless, after tax return of 10%. Sure it ‘works’ as you call it but sweet Jesus, what sort of ‘reshiftable energy’ is that? I’m a baby boomer and can avail myself of it but what about struggletown or the first home owners? The fallacy of composition problem here is just mind boggling but it’s every citizen’s fundamental right to stick his hand out for whatever dopey rort is going down.
“Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.”
That George has wrong. It’s clearly a campaign by a certain Big Green elite against virtually everyone else, especially the world’s poor and the developing nations.
Wouldn`t it be wonderful to live in that pollution free pre-industrial wonderland.
http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/filthy-cities-appalling-conditions.html
Here, here! Monbiot was in a discussion group on BBC a few weeks ago and was much more conciliatory about the views of AGW “deniers” than I expected. I’m about to put an air heat pump heating system to compliment the solar water heating already fitted, plus solar electric panels and low energy lighting in the kitchen and bathroom. I’m not doing all this to lower my “Carbon Footprint” or “save the planet for our grandchildren”, but to cut my extortionate energy bills, which are getting out of control in order to build windmills everywhere. End of sermon!
Interesting to read the comments below Monbiot’s article. So many of them are made by population control (crypto eugenics) nutters.
Pointman
Mike Haseler says:
May 5, 2011 at 12:07 am
To me, peak oil doesn’t so much mean the end of oil: it means the end of known supplies of oil
‘Peak’ anything is the point at which economic substitution occurs.
It is not a geology discussion.
In the case of transportation fuel at some point we stop building our vehicles out of inexpensive but heavy steel and switch to lighter but more expensive composites. We look at aerodynamic efficiency. We add regenerative braking systems….we add the ability to burn a range of fuels.
Others will re-evalutate their transportation needs. Maybe they decide they still need the gas guzzling SUV but adding a second more fuel efficient vehicle for everyday use makes sense for them.
Personally, I drive a scooter as my primary transportation…I still need my gas guzzling SUV for the various home renovation projects I do on the side.
A dual fuel gasoline/natural gas Chevy Aveo costs $1100 more then a gasoline only Chevy Aveo in India.
We used to produce electricity by burning oil…we phased off of that without much fanfare.
Business as Usual is adapting to ever changing circumstances.
You mean forcing people to do that which they do not or would not normally do is counter-productive?? Who knew?/sarc
Monbiot is tantilizing us with a handfull of straw (he picked up at our feet) to “Please come into the barn where it is warm and safe”. He hasn’t changed his mind, just his tact.
Monbiot says,
Immanuel Kant says,
Did Monbiot take a course on Kant at university?
John
Well he’s just a big ball of positivity.
It’s not just money, not even preposterous amounts of money.
Refusing to face contrary scientific evidence in the “Liberal” clique has led to corn for ethanol for fuel–and that is KILLING many thousands of people in the Mideast, mostly in riots, and also from hunger.
Our lawyers need to find their relatives in American mosques and bring them crying into the courtroom to name names.
And of course, counter suits by people with a measurable and horrifying loss.
Monbiot’s piece is astounding. He mixes what appears to be (to him) new-found logic with the same old errors that he and the rest of his kind have made from the beginning. Notice the real meaning in the following sentence:
Note the explicit assumption “Infrastructure is ugly” followed immediately by what they perceive as the real problem “controlled by remote governments and corporations.” In other words, if “we” cannot control everything, then it’s not a solution.
What outrageous hubris! Read the rest of his article carefully and it is littered with the same self-righteous complaint. But he’s on the right track; he is close to concluding that he and his friends have no valid solutions. That’s a real step forward. Too bad he’s just one guy.
Monbiot is a smooth privately educated smear machine. Sometimes he has flashes of reality, but his response is always to revert back to his bunker where he reads up more populist press releases, he then goes overboard and tells the rest of the world what to do.
He has been through this cycle so many times that his readers have gradually deserted him. They see him for the shallow contemptable dull character he really is.
He seems incredibly jealous of Richard North (EUreferendum blogspot) who does original research and comes up with a stream of interesting and original stories. Monbiot cannot understand why the rude and crude Richard North has so many loyal followers but find the smooth PC Monbiot a boring irrelevance.
I a little surprised you waste space reporting the views of this has been, I think even the green movement have become bored by him
But that is what their initial intent was, and was all along.
They were industry haters, all come together in one big Kumbaya, dancing around the Maypole they’d found in climate science. They had succeeded with the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and then with the ozone hole scam (yes, it is there; no it isn’t man-made).
I well remember the moaning of the industrialists in the 1970s about having to install scrubbers and taking care about discharges into the waterways. The hue and cry was that it would make America less competitive in the world marketplace and help our competitors. Looking back 40 years later, it is hard to not think they were right. But am I glad we have cleaner air and water than in 1970? Yeah. America was one polluted place back then.
At the same time, they used scare tactics then, and they’ve done it ever since. Most of their exaggerations succeeded, but not all. Acid rain is one that died a merciful death, when the government actually went out and checked out the acidity in lakes and ponds in the Northeast – and found next to zero.
But they got a free run-up on the ozone hole and the next ice age, and then on global warming.
ONLY the efforts of Steve M and Anthony and the other skeptics has finally called their bluff.
Anthony, we all owe you and Steve a huge thank you.
Does it matter, though, that Monbiot (or any other activist warmers) has awakened to reality a little bit? Nah. Them beating their chests and rending cloth makes no difference. The Climategate emails – their own words – sank their ship. The war is lost to them. Nothing they can say will make a difference now.
Monbiot (from his article):
Rather than slagging off the ‘Moonbat’, some of us actually talk to him and provide him with logical and scientific information. It would be easy to be offended at the ‘denialist’ tags but that doesn’t actually change minds. I have had my share of mud slung at me – not by Monbiot – but from most unexpected academic quarters and not at my arguments, but at my person for being contrarian enough to make them.
Monbiot is an environmentalist in that he cares about what happens to ‘the environment’ – that is, human habitation and ist surrounds that affect health and mentality – such as beauty and biodiversity, tranquility and continuity. Environmentalists are not automatically dishonorable as so many who post here like to think. The ‘free market’ so many like to espouse is no respecter of the environment and it is the poor and vulnerable who get the most degraded surroundings. I despair at the atttitudes displayed on this site and yearn for the ‘old days’ when the issues were primarily science (I still cannot fathom why today’s page begins with a picture of a spy-plane – what is it…..a boy thing?).
If this site is going to extend to comments about global energy policy and the environment in addition to climate science – then for quality’s sake, find people with real knowledge of the issues. Monbiot’s syndrome should be a lesson. It takes a lot of self reflection to realise that things you have accepted and believed are flakey. As an environmental writer I have done my best to tell them about climate science and mostly been ignored – but there is a shift occurring.
So – a dose of reality please –
1) the era of cheap energy is over – peak or plateau in production matters little – it is all about energy density and cost and no renewable strategy can replace fossil fuel, neither can nuclear. So the greens have started to do the frigging sums at last – but so now must nuclear advocates – they don’t add up either!
2) some rich countries may be able to buy their way out of a crisis, but many such countries – and most especially Britain, though rich, have very large impoverished subsections for whom energy (and food) costs are a susbtantial proportion of their income and benefits – the really poor countries have no chance – they simply cannot follow the western development model, but their elites will not recognise that fact and divert what little money the country recieves by selling its resources or gets in aid to make sure they at least can follow the western way (and that usually involves a sizeable investment in prisons, militias and secret police).
3) the real issue is whether the West cares that much! And any reading of the business and financial pages will tell you it does not. As for government aid – the UK is increasing it, but earmarking a large proportion for ‘climate aid’ (mitigation strategies that use western technology) rather than ecological adaptation to a shifting climate;
4) the global population issue is real, but a red herring for most…..the current rapid growth is in precisely those countries that cannot follow the western economic development model but pretend that they can – so not much can be done to avoid the crisis or help them when it hits (they will get a double whammy of high fuel prices and vulnerability to natural climate change) – much more real as an issue is the rising demand from the new rich countries (e.g. China, India, Russia and Brazil) and this stresses the global environment – in terms of forest destruction, biodiversity loss, ocean depletion, pollution, depopulation of rural areas and the migration to mega-cities).
What is to be done —- maybe not much can be done. We in the West are rich but intent on getting richer. Two billion people remain poor and live in a degraded ecological environment. Who would vote for a western contraction and shift of money to aid the poor – and is money what they most need?
Monbiot and many other Greens concern themselves with these issues (as does the ‘left liberal’ Guardian) when the vast majority don’t care or might care but don’t act. The tragedy of the Greens is that they were seduced by ‘big science’ because it appeared to be giving them a huge campaign boost and means of financing a better (they thought) environment. It was easy to believe because not just the UN said so, but every single science academy worldwide (as Monbiot pointed out to me as reason not to bother reading my book on revising the theories of global warming!).
The environmentalists I knew in the 1970s and 1980s would never have been so hoodwinked. So – the key questions are – why were their successors so easily misled and what happened to the global science community? I would rather see a discussion of these themes on a climate blog than pictures of a U2 or celebrations of the death of the most wanted man on Earth.
Here’s the real test for the Greens. Let’s say, hypothetically, we found a source of energy that was cheep, clean and abundant. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing in the eyes of the Greens. I think, deep down and unspoken, the majority of Green’s would view such a development as a bad thing.
The reason for this is that cheep, abundant and clean energy would allow people to produce more stuff, live more prosperously and expand the population. They fear that an expanded population will lead to a collapse of elite society. In the end, it’s the success of the modern human life style that the Greens find objectionable. This is the essence of the Malthusian belief system that animates the Green movement.
In the Malthusian/Green world, its ok to have a small number of Elites and large numbers of peasants; but its dangerous to have an increasingly numerous and prosperous middle class.
The problem is one of interpretation, what they consider to be “planet-wrecking” isn’t. That is the actual problem, their interpretations of the “data” (assuming it’s not manipulated) are always extreme to uber extreme.
In Vancouver a few years back they were widening the road way through Stanley Park that provides access to the Lions Gate Bridge, this was being done to bring the width of the three lanes up to modern road width safety standards. Environmentalists where up in arms that about 25 trees where to be cut down. Oh, and they we planting new trees to compensate, but I guess that is never good enough. The road was widened in the end of course. Then a few years after Nature tossed a very windy storm at Vancouver and presto knocked down 10,000 trees in Stanley Park! Yes, 10,000! That’s 400 times as many! Oh and the park is recovering nicely. So, Nature can dish it out orders of magnitude worse yet when humans work to manage a park people freak out about the most trivial of things.
It’s a lack of perspective on the “greens” part. They “deny” the biological benefits of CO2 while panicking over doomsday scenarios that have almost no actual chance of happening. Maybe some people just need to see “doomsday futures” as part of their psyche?
DeanL says:
May 5, 2011 at 4:47 am
“Dimwitted Liar Julia Gillard”
Wow. Spoken like a man of science.
DeanL, have you ever seen the evidence supporting the above remark? The glare would get through arc-welding goggles. I think Anthony shows a fair bit of restraint. Gillard’s bizarre, empty-headed arrogance is a sight to behold…and getting the reaction it invites.
It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less.
Says everything you need to know.
Well said.
What the warmists missed was a solution. Starvation and economic collapse may help their cause, but the rest of us would not stand for it. Had they proposed a workable solution that was affordable, and that did not require redistribution of tax money to fund it, they might have made some real progress. Instead, they chose to scare us with lies and exaggeration.
The disaster in Japan put the brakes on a re-awakening nuclear power industry. Unfortunate, because new designs are much safer than the ones in Japan. The Chinese are not slowing down, building modular nuclear plants and coal plants as fast as they can. We need to replace our aging, vulnerable nuke plants with better cited, better designed plants. That is where the effort needs to be, and the sooner we get going the better.
In the UK we are getting a carbon tax in the next few years, and nobody minds. at least in Aus they have the balls to oppose it, as all parties are eco socialists. we face economic powerdown. Naturally none of our industrial competitors are introducing it.
Indeed. Though, even when trying hard, he can’t quite get away from the required doom laden prose. I think that George is slowly discovering that the whole environmentalism/green/sustainability “movement!” is just a dumping ground for every kind of Western malcontent from Prion rights campaigners to “ex” communists of the EU trying desperately trying to recover some kind of power.
Although they appear to live under the same umbrella, other than being “anti” they have nothing whatsoever in common and that is his blindingly slow discovery. The truth is that while George may have had a clear vision for the future of mankind he now finds that “the movement” never did. Perhaps, after the inevitable nervous breakdown and, one hopes, recovery, George can guest here at WUWT.
Yes Werner, we also had a 2.2 earthquake last month centred on Blackpool. A drink can was moved.
We once had a summer with all that you describe in addition to drought and locusts – 1976. Thank [insert deity] that we haven’t had a 1976 summer recently – the cult would have a field day with anyone under 35.
I think the news you read does a great disservice to those who have genuine heatwaves, bush fires and drought.
BTW Its raining here in Yorkshire now.
Monbiot has his half-clear moments, but unfortunately he was also one of the most vile warmist propagandists; remember his “AGW Denier card game” or what it was called? He knows no shame; he’s an attack dog. Maybe he’s just a tired attack dog now; a good opportunity to win; not one to forgive.
My gloomy vision kicks the behind of Monbiot’s with one arm tied behind its back. My gloomy vision is based on both geological and recorded history.
There WILL be another period similar to 450 – 800AD. In addition, there WILL also be another period like the Pleistocene.
These things are inevitable.