Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t James Delingpole / Breitbart / Willie Soon – according to climate novelist William T. Vollmann, compulsion and coercion is the only way to convince people to comply with his climate ideals.
“Are we prepared to endure lives with less comfort?”: William T. Vollmann on climate change.
The famous novelist and journalist has a new two-volume tome on climate change.
By Eric Allen Been Apr 19, 2018, 8:40am EDT
“For a long time I was a climate change denier,” says author, journalist, and war correspondent William T. Vollmann. “I didn’t want to be stressed out by something that might someday affect people after I’m dead.”
And yet for Vollmann — a brilliant, idiosyncratic writer whom some have described as a plausible candidate for the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature — the reality of climate change has become a personal obsession. Last week, he released the first volume of a sprawling, two-volume polemic called Carbon Ideologies. Titled No Immediate Danger, it explores in more than 600 pages how our society is bound to the ideology of energy consumption. Addressed to humans living in a “hot dark future,” the book is highly technical, chock-full of tables, studies, and hundreds of Vollmann’s own photos.
Vollmann traveled the globe for years reporting for this project, going so far as to self-finance after his publisher’s patience wore thin. “I spent my own money,” he writes, “and occasionally other people’s, to hike up strip-mined mountains, sniff crude oil, and occasionally tan my face with gamma rays.”
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There are things that that can be done and maybe won’t be done if somebody says, “Well, it’s going to cost too much money to make that change.” Then what do you say? Do you say, “Well, we’re going to make you do it at a loss”? Or do we say, “All right, we’re going to give you money to help you change”? I can’t pretend to have an answer about stuff like that. All I can do is say, well, there are lots and lots of problems.
It’s not just what some consumer does at home. It’s niggling little issues that add up. In Japan, roughly 50 percent or so of all the methane emissions — and that’s one of the three most dangerous greenhouse gases — are caused by rice growing. All this stuff that seems so innocuous. It seems to me that you have to drag people into some kind of regulatory hell, unfortunately. Maybe there’s a better way to do it, but I don’t see one.
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Can you imagine what the world would be like with people like Vollmann in charge?
Vollmann is the real deal – according to the VOX article, at one point the police suspected him of being the Unabomber, because of the hardline anti-growth and anti-development themes of Vollmann’s writing.
This sounds like the dawn of a new form of communism. Just that its not about owning the production but owning nature, same result everyone has to suffer for the higher purpose.
Beside the fact that poverty is the strogest source of pollution and progress in return is the only way to a better and cleaner future, its a hubris to think you can MAKE man do and believe things.
Every action is born out of the own egoism, good politics gives a frame to create progress for all out of that egoism. If politics suppress the force from the ego the result is war, poverty and revolution.
So what is Vollmann’s ego about? He believe he is smarter and more worthy than other (psychopath behavior). Why? keeping the 3rd world in poverty and lower our standards means death for billions (the poorest countries have the fastest growing population due to the war index. 90% of the plastic infusion into the sea comes from the poorest regions. just 2 examples).
Having clean water needs energy. Having water and energy is an enabler for progress. Progress means less human population without war.
Vollman, like most Greenies, conflates Climate Change with other issues (strip mining, industrial air pollution (SO2), etc…). His real beef is with rising living standards. Like the aristocrats of old, he and his ilk just do not want the masses to benefit from anything. The masses should be living in huts, working the fields, and be happy with any scraps thrown their way (preferably Kale, and organic witch grass).
Folks, while I appreciate all of your comments, even those with whom I don’t fully agree; can we recognize the personality that has infiltrated this comment section? Kristi is a combative type whose desire to “win” an argument trumps her desire to learn. But, in reality, it is obvious she is not here to learn. She is here to instigate and push buttons to illicit negative reactions, so she can reinforce her religious bias. She operates no different than any other fundamentally religious type and because of that, no amount of logic, reason, polite discourse, anything along those lines, will shake her of her worldview.
So why engage? So that we can “win” the argument? There is no winning with these types. There is no educating. There is no genuine discourse because she refuses to accept reality. It is evident she suffers from worldview poisoning of moral relativism, wherein she is the sole arbiter of truth. Otherwise, she would cast aside her religious ferver and look at the evidence. I bet though, she scoffs at Christians who believe in the fairy-tale of a virgin birth. Pot meet kettle.
This is unfortunately the situation we find ourselves in today. If you are a moral absolutist (Truth is objective, knowable and only our perception of reality changes, not reality itself) then you will believe in a higher power than man (we didn’t create this universe, obviously, so something greater than thou did) and likely value human life, understand the necessity for non-violence as a foundation of society, etc… On the other hand, moral relativism is diametrically opposed to the rigidity of absolute moral law (theft is wrong). It is legitimately that simple. You either believe that it is wrong to steal, or you justify your actions to feel better about stealing.
This is why the left always advocates bigger government, stronger regulations, higher taxes, etc. etc.
It is because they do not like reductionism. They are what amounts to a petulent child who was not given that toy in the market, even though said child has 100’s of similar toys at home. They need constant positive feedback, they rely on external sources for authority, and refuse to recognize they are bound by simple moral laws. DO NOT STEAL. Once you recognize the foundation of a persons worldview, it becomes evident whether discourse is a worthy endeavor. In the case of this broad, it is not a worthy endeavor. There is nothing you can say or do, no matter how genuine or polite, that would ever change her worldview. The only way for her to understand her internal conflicts is to decide to genuinely question herself in that regard, and then genuinely desire to eliminate internal conflict. It isn’t easy and most people refuse to do that hard work. I have little regard for weakness, so I’m not polite to such people because coddling children (whether actual children or adults suffering from emotional immaturity (grown children) only creates entitlement. She has to WANT to be a truly undivided individual. Until then, she’s only going to come on here spouting post-modernist, Neo-Marxist horsehockey couched in some sense of saving the planet, and she’s going to do it like she always has, with derision and intransigence.
In my case, having a child and discovering Natural Law was what opened my eyes from the immense suffering of the aforementioned amoral worldview. It is amazing how the wonder of raising a child changes so much. Many of these relativists don’t have children; they have pets. They praise Marx because they don’t know what they don’t know, so they need to pretend they are gods unto themselves to hide their insecurity of being just another human. It is so glaringly obvious yet I see many people continuing to engage. Why? It is a waste of your precious energy, much like my writing this ridiculously long mini-essay post.
A favorite wordplay I’ve learned is the word Ignorance, which is quite different from nescience. IGNORE-ance is always willful. One must IGNORE information in order to remain ignorant. It is quite obvious Kristi suffers from personally inflicted, willful IGNORE-ance.
@honestliberty
Please see my April 23 3:36 response to one of Kristi’s own comments (addressed to moi, no less).
I have a little different take on Kristi, and suspect she is not what she seems–hence the question I posed to her in my April 23 comment, along with the analysis of her commentary that prompted my question. Kristi has yet to answer my question (no obligation on her part to do so, of course), but I see she is back on this thread, and hope she will choose to answer my question and the follow-up questions I intend to pose to her, as well.
Just maybe “someone” is havin’ a little “bad-faith”, impish, prankish good time at our expense, but my suspicions could turn out to be unfounded.
Indeed. Excellent post. I’m running out of patience for the left, and I’m an anarchist. sheesh. Weren’t the left the folks that claimed they loved freedom?
As I said above, I have been traveling and did not have electronic access.
Dmitri Mendeleev is credited with being the first to hypothesize that
hydrocarbons are created deep in the earth. For another example of
his thinking, look up his table. Methane has been created on the bench.
See article below.
file:///C:/Users/jerry/Documents/Lab%20created%20methane.html
The belief that hydrocarbons are only created bioitacly on earth is similar
to thinking that humans control weather. There is a huge body of work that
says that so, Of course, some is fossil, but the vast majority of the part that
we call oil and natural gas (not just methane-the terms are not
interchangeable). The vast layers of carbon containing rock being lain
down for millions of years give visual evidence of the massive continuous
cycle of hydrocarbons being created, rising to the surface, being
oxidized by microbes or by the atmosphere, being mostly absorbed
by the oceans, being deposited as layers on the ocean floor, then
to be taken back deep in the earth by subduction, continuing the
process.
When the hydrocarbons rise and hit layers of shale that is impermeable,
it is trapped there, becoming what is erroneously described as “source
rock rock” by western geology, or called shale oil and gas currently.
I started my research into topsoil formation after seeing the ’07 video,
part of which is linked below.
The part which convinced me that upland topsoil is powered by natural
gas occurs about 2;30 into the video.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=the+secret+of+el+dorado&&view=detail&mid=10AC45CC2C27D8B5271710AC45CC2C27D8B52717&&FORM=VRDGAR
I met with Dr. Bill Woods shortly before his death at KU, Lawrence, Kansas.
It took me about 30 min to explain the errors of the original video, no longer
available on youtube, and convince him that the soil is powered by
hydrocarbons.
Nor all layers of shale are impermeable. Some are semi-permeable, which
means that the smaller molecules escape and rise to the surface, and if
there is adequate moisture, the aerobic microbial culture consumes the gas,
enriching the topsoil in relation to the amount of “food” available.
The hydrocarbons rise all around the earth, but are not evenly distributed.
They tend to rise along fault lines and continental plates. If the shield is near
the surface, as it is in the Atlanta, Ga area, the gas is mostly blocked, and
and the soil is very poor.
In areas where a great amount of hydrocarbons are rising, and the rock
layers are impermeable or nearly so, the result is Arabian light crude.
In areas where a large amount rises but has a poor cap, the lighter
hydrocarbons evaporate, leaving tar, as in Canada.
The Russians know how the carbon cycle works, and have been the
largest producer of hydrocarbons for a long time. Their teaching of
petroleum geology is more nearly correct then in the West, but as
far as I have been able to discover, no one else has credited top
soil richness to rising hydrocarbons but me.
I have proved that hydrocarbons rise continuously and are a renewable
resource. As the pressure is relieved above, more can rise.
My findings also predict that where ever there has been a blocking
layer of stone which blocks the upward flow of hydrocarbons, gas
and oil will be found in that area.
For some reason, my link to lab created methane didn’t work-try
again.
file:///C:/Users/jerry/Documents/Lab%20created%20methane.html
Try again
http://www.wnd.com/2005/11/33476/