Guest anti-social justice warrior-ing by David Middleton
Real Clear Energy was a veritable treasure trove today…
Wednesday, September 5
Brent Nears $80 as Gulf of Mexico Rigs Evacuated Staff, Gulf News
Iran Will Exert ‘Every Effort’ to Export Oil M. Sergie & A. Shahla, Bloomberg
India to Buy Iranian Oil Despite Sanction Threat Staff, The Hindu Business Line
Iran May Use Secret Oil Shipments to Skirt US Sanctions T. Paraskova, Oil Price
Natural Gas Is Already a Bridge Fuel Robert Rapier, Forbes
Blame Your Bank for Climate Change Chris Saltmarsh, The Ecologist
Biggest US Pension Funds ‘Must Consider Climate Risks’ Gail Moss, IPE
We Need to Respond to Climate Change Now Maya Spaur, The Washington Post
China’s Solar Farms Transforming World Energy Chris Baraniuk, BBC News
Offshore Wind on East Coast Would Bring 25,000 Jobs V. Rajamanickam, FW
Petro Companies Not Telling Shareholders About Climate Risks Mose Buchele, KUT
Parenting Like No Other in the Age of Climate Change Wendy Becktold, Sierra Club
A Parenting How-To Like No Other in the Age of Climate Change
Mary DeMocker’s new book is an essential resource for parents
BY WENDY BECKTOLD | SEP 4 2018
Like most parents I know, I am sometimes seized by anxiety about climate change, usually in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep. I lie in the dark wondering whether my children will grow up to face life on an uninhabitable planet. At the same time, I often feel too mired in the day-to-day challenges of parenting to do too much about it, beyond committing to green habits like recycling, composting, and driving a fuel-efficient car. The hard truth, though, is that these activities, while valiant, aren’t going to save us from climate change.
Years ago, Mary DeMocker found herself in a similar position. “When my children were young,” she writes in her book The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution (out this year from New World Library), “my husband . . . and I rocked green family living—voting, recycling, insulating, fixing leaks, biking, and ‘living simply.’”
But as the years ticked by, the news about climate change grew more and more dire, and DeMocker found herself feeling increasingly anxious about the world her children would be inheriting. Her solution? “I stopped worrying so much about shrinking my family’s carbon footprint and started focusing on shrinking industry’s,” she writes. DeMocker cofounded Eugene, Oregon’s 350.org chapter, organized protests, and created political artwork.
In the process, she discovered that she felt better…
[…]
Isn’t that nice? “She felt better.”
WTF?!? She felt better because she “stopped worrying so much about shrinking [her] family’s carbon footprint and started focusing on shrinking industry’s,” She felt better because she stopped worrying about something she had control over and started obsessing about something she had no control over?
The only way she could reduce “industry’s” carbon footprint is to convince the sane people of the world to stop eating, traveling and using electricity… In other words, voluntarily revert to a Late Pleistocene lifestyle.
Amazingly, the stupidity of the Sierra book review escalates…
DeMocker told me by phone. “We have to be strategic and look at what needs to be done right now. We have to change policy to leave fossil fuels in the ground.”
That means that if we only have three minutes a day for some kind of climate activism, it’s better to skip washing out the peanut butter jar and instead of recycling it, toss it in the trash—and then use the time to call our congressperson.
“During this holy-shit moment on Earth, it’s far more critical to enact bold climate-justice policies,” DeMocker writes, “than to shrink your family’s wee footprint. . . . It’s better to get yourself—by Hummer, if necessary—to city council meetings and town halls to demand policies that break dirty energy’s stranglehold on everything.”
The only way “to change policy to leave fossil fuels in the ground,” would be for Thanos to snap his figures and wipe out half of humanity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0-YICEhMVY
And there’s another reason why they would need a Thanos-style solution…
In fact, the book is essentially one big resource guide, full of ideas—100 of them to be exact. Its subtitle is “100 ways to build a fossil-free future, raise empowered kids, and still get a good night’s sleep.” Many of the suggestions only take a minute or two and cost very little to nothing. At the end of each chapter, DeMocker presents extensive lists for how to learn and do more. Want to go on sustainable family vacations? See the list at the end of tip #17.
They want “a fossil-free future”…
It literally does…
A Parents’ Guide is full of wide-ranging and sometimes unexpected advice that you probably won’t find in most green parenting books. For example, DeMocker talks about the importance of avoiding debt and teaching our children to do the same. That way, they can be free to live the lives they want to and will have time to agitate for change when they need to. If that means making do with less, well, that’s better for the planet anyway.
She even takes on American parents’ obsession with competitive sports: “We can’t be giving over our weekends starting when our kids are four to year-round soccer clubs,” she told me. “They’re expensive, they’re time-consuming, and they take away from spiritual life, from birthday parties, from downtime in nature, from parents being relaxed.”
Imagine a childhood in which your parents didn’t let you play real sports, like baseball and football… And instead took you to social justice warrior protests and marches. Imagine a childhood in which you couldn’t get a Johnny Seven O.M.A. for Christmas because your parents were “making do with less” to free-up work days to “agitate” for “climate-justice policies” (whatever the frack those are), because “that’s better for the planet anyway.”
Better for the planet… Are people really this stupid?
WARNING: LOTS AND LOTS OF PROFANITY…
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“For example, DeMocker talks about the importance of avoiding debt and teaching our children to do the same.”
This woman is a congenital idiot. Debt management is a necessary skill for our kids, and it can be profitable. So much so that a prominent British financial journalist (one with his head screwed on) turned financial life hack advisor has recently made £85M from selling his web site!
Martin Lewis (https://www.moneysavingexpert.com) actively promotes financial education in schools to our government so kids leave with a functional understanding of how simple things like credit cards, mortgages and insurance can help, rather than hinder us. He shows people how to live a life off credit cards and never spend a penny in interest.
How does this idiotic woman expect her children to get a mortgage to buy a house? Perhaps she expects them to buy an old banger and drive around like rednecks (apologies to rednecks) in clunky old cars spewing out the demon CO2? Does she also expect them to live in a tent?
Or perhaps she’s doing well enough to pass her fortune onto them as an inheritance. Best she be careful though, there are many socialists who are desperate to tax the money an elderly parent passes to their children in the form of inheritance, despite income tax already having paid on it in the first place. It already happens in the UK but the bastards want more. Two bites at the tax cherry, that’s what’s cost the UK so many stately homes, pay the inheritance tax which is unaffordable or leave the home to rot.
Effing money grubbing socialist scum!
Does anybody remember the Twilight Zone episode where the woman was living in a future where mankind was frying because the Earth had somehow moved closer to the sun, and then it turned out she was really in a coma and the reality was that the Earth was freezing up because it was actually moving away from the sun? Or was it the other way around? Anyway, I couldn’t help thinking of that show when I was reading this woman’s hand-wringing drivel.
We are not allowed to recycle peanut butter jars……
I guess since parents lie to kids about the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, etc, lying about a fossil fuel free world is just one more deception they dump on the kid.
People like DeMocker should shut up and stay in the shadows.
Of the three tax lots that she co-owns, two are about a ten mile commute from town.
1) The tax lot in town house is a small 1950’s with (inefficient) baseboard electric heat.
2) The two rural lots are side by side. The smaller of the two (1.7 acres) is taxed at $430 and is listed as being vacant (although it has a separate driveway and a shop/garage that is not included in the assessment). The larger 5 acre parcel has a house and what appears to be a non-permitted garage (garage isn’t listed in the tax records…).
Given that Democker has her in-town house, and her rural property, it is reasonable that she would need to rationalize her impact to “the climate problem” as being unimportant in grand scheme of things.
If I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, I would assume that the rural property could simply be a rental that they purchased 10 years ago (all tax statements go to the in-town house), but I am going to assume the worst in her, & her partner.
(In any event, it is likely that her taxes will go up in the future).
Most of the Real Clear site isn’t completely one-sided.
But Real Crony Energy is really bad.
It does seem to have gone downhill lately.
“Are people really this stupid?”
Yes. And they choose to stay that way.
Marvellous.
After “Like most parents I know, I am sometimes seized by anxiety about climate change, usually in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep”, I was literally shaking (™) with laughter.
I half expected it to break into “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius..”
The problem, good people, is that green energy schemes do not work – I wish they did – but grid-connected wind and solar power FAIL based on high-cost and intermittency – and there is no practical super-battery in most situations to solve the problem.
Energy is my area of expertise and I have a very successful predictive track record. I have two engineering degrees and have studied this subject for many decades.
Fully 85% of global primary energy is fossil fuels, and the rest is hydro and nuclear. Green energy would be near-zero except for massive wasted subsidies and use mandates. Only a few places have enough hydro to provide their needs, and greens hate hydro. The only practical alternative is nuclear, and the greens hate nuclear too.
Without fossil fuels, most people in the developed world would just freeze and starve to death. This means you and your family.
It IS that simple!
The only way “to change policy to leave fossil fuels in the ground,” would be for Thanos to snap his figures and wipe out half of humanity.
But surely is that not the entire objective?
The author is wondering”….if my children would grow up to face life on an uninhabitable planet.” I’m wondering if Wendy’s children will grow up to understand that words have meaning. If the damn thing is uninhabitable you ain’t gonna grow up on it. You’d probably have less to worry about if you developed some standards of precision for your thinking, Wendy. You might even be able to pass them on to your children who would find them useful in a habitable world.
‘leave fossil fuels in the ground’ !? How you going to get your Hummer to that city council meeting to keep them in the ground? (he asked knowingly)
Lying in the dark and worrying about the future is going to lead to sleep deprivation:
If this lady were to get some sleep all of her troubles will disappear
she “often feel[s] too mired in the day-to-day challenges of parenting to do too much about it, beyond committing to green habits like recycling, composting, and driving a fuel-efficient car.”
________________________________________________
Until about 100 years ago, there were maybe 3 horse owners in a village “on the countryside”.
Today, every single average household sports up to 3 SUVs.
the times they are changing.
“Are people really this stupid?”
There is abundant evidence that they are!