Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A sneak preview of the next level of climate activism.
The Most Honest Book About Climate Change Yet
William T. Vollmann’s latest opus is brilliant, but it offers no comfort to its readers.
NATHANIEL RICH
OCTOBER 2018 ISSUEAuthors like to flatter themselves by imagining for their work an “ideal reader,” a cherubic presence endowed with bottomless generosity, the sympathy of a parent, and the wisdom of, well, the authors themselves. In Carbon Ideologies, William T. Vollmann imagines for himself the opposite: a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation. Vollmann can’t blame this reader, whom he addresses regularly throughout Carbon Ideologies, because she lives in the future, under radically different circumstances—inhabiting a “hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet.” He envisions her turning the pages of his climate-change opus within the darkened recesses of an underground cave in which she has sought shelter from the unendurable heat; the plagues, droughts, and floods; the methane fireballs racing across boiling oceans. Because the soil is radioactive, she subsists on insects and recycled urine, and regards with implacable contempt her ancestors, who, as Vollmann tells her, “enjoyed the world we possessed, and deserved the world we left you.”
Carbon Ideologies is a single work published in two parts, No Immediate Dangerand No Good Alternative, the bifurcation due to the insistence of Vollmann’s weary publisher and the limitations of modern bookbinding. Of all the writers working today, Vollmann must be the most free: He writes fiction, essays, monographs, criticism, memoir, and history, usually merging several forms at once, taking on subjects as diverse as Japanese Noh theater, train hopping, and the Nez Perce War, all the while dilating to whatever length suits him. (After 25 books, his career word count now rivals Zane Grey’s.)
…
Nearly every book about climate change that has been written for a general audience contains within it a message of hope, and often a prod toward action. Vollmann declares from the outset that he will not offer any solutions, because he does not believe any are possible: “ Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.” This makes Carbon Ideologies, for all its merits and flaws, one of the most honest books yet written on climate change. Vollmann’s undertaking is in the vanguard of the coming second wave of climate literature, books written not to diagnose or solve the problem, but to grapple with its moral consequences.
…
Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/william-vollmann-carbon-ideologies/568309/
Author William T. Vollmann seems a bit special even for a climate advocate. Back in April this year, Vollmann called for “regulatory hell” to force everyone to accept a greener lifestyle – an insight Vollman apparently reached by bathing his face in gamma rays, and other risky sounding activities.
My first thought after reading The Atlantic review was that I would rather choose the diet of radioactive insects and recycled urine than read Vollmann’s latest opus. But perhaps I am being unfair – after all, I haven’t read the work itself, just The Atlantic reviewer’s impression of the work.
If Vollmann wants to send Anthony a reviewer’s copy, I shall make an effort to read at least the first chapter, and report my impressions.
Will take my chances.
What? No phone no lights no motorcar, not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it’s as primitive as can be.
Yeah but Gilligan and co didn’t need to eat bugs, Mary Ann provided them with a never ending supply of Banana and Coconut Cream pies. Though they did once have radioactive vegetables.
[The mods note that they may have had radioactive vegetables, but never did get a radio-active radio to emit radioactive … .mod]
Maybe the enlightened folks of San Francisco living in the streets with their filth, drug needles, and feces are actually working to pre-adapt to climate change?
As I always do with environmental imbecile authors like Vollman, I find out about their personal life and their education. With a wife who is a radiation oncologist he has no money worries so he can play at pseudo science. Like so many of the environazis, like Harvard English major grad Bill McKibben, he has no science training whatsoever. He has a degree from weird Deep Springs College out in the desert and a degree in Comparative Literature from Cornell. Why are so many of those who scream the loudest about AGW liberal arts majors from Ivy League schools or Berkeley? He’s the worst sort of BS artist who “don’t know nuthin bout nuthin.” He’s merely pitiful and what he writes is total nonsense.
They are economically useless. They look for nooks and crannies where logic and productivity don’t apply.
But I thought the Green Blob wanted us to eat insects because climate change.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/06/09/unpalatable-eating-insects-helps-to-curb-climate-change/
I wish they’d make up their minds… good or bad? /snark
Yes, they want us to give up meat and eat insects to prevent climate change from forcing us to eat insects in the future. I think I’ll take my chances. I’m guessing that climate change won’t be near as bad as they claim it will be. They have a vested interest in exaggerating the possible effects of climate change to further their own political agendas.
Ah, this means they have reached the 5th and final stage of grief – acceptance, on the death of their precious ideology. ‘Bout time. Now, if they would all just shut up about it.
This story (and that’s exactly what it is) sounds exactly like the plot of a 1980’s post nuclear holocaust sci-fi film, of which there were many…. if he is going to write fiction, at least he could be a bit more original.
You don’t get originality in a hive-mind.
Isn’t this kind of what they had in mind for us anyway?
Living in caves? eating insects? isn’t that what the green blob wants for mankind in order to “save” the planet? the radioactive soil and drinking urine is a new twist, but basically that’s the same results as the “solution” for “fixing” AGW. So basically, we’ll be living in caves and eating bugs if we do nothing about AGW and we’ll be living in caves and eating bugs if we waste all our time and money “fixing” AGW. Damn if we do and damned if we don’t. Might as well save our time and money for other things then.
So he’s writing a redux for “Waterworld” except there’s no water…
Plus it will be hot, so we don’t have to cut firewood. So we have that going for us.
Boiling oceans hot. Not sure, but I think you need at least a 20km asteroid strike to get enough energy for that?
Psychiatric disorders in advanced stages are not a pretty simple.
I hope he receives the intervention and long term care he desperately needs.
…. pretty sight….😜
So one female of the future (no date given?) will be living in “… the darkened recesses of an underground cave”. Good, the underground kind are the best.
And the Atlantic review states that Vollman “… writes fiction”. Clearly.
Agreed. Much cooler than the sky caves, what with all the clouds of burning methane flying about.
Laughable crap! There’s much better science fiction to be had in the kid’s section at the public library.
I want to know more about the methane fireballs racing across the oceans…they sound what any self-respecting student would call “really cool” no matter how deranged the author of this latest brain malfunction wants to terrify us all.
All he missed was Satan rising from the depths to eat us all. Wonder what his food additives are and who might be putting them in there?
The Chernobyl experiment, the only one of its kind, evidently indicates that the radioactive landscape of Mr. Vollmann’s heroine may be rich in biodiversity and floral wonderfulness.
Why eat insects, when slightly radioactive moose are available? With a miner’s lettuce salad on the side.
And who knows, Vollmann’s Ms. Heroine may end up living longer and be more healthy from her dietary radio-hormesis, discussed here.
Of course, she may like eating insects and drinking recycled urine. Maybe the true horror of Vollmann’s story is that Ms. Heroine is living out her eco-nutter fever-dream of a ruined country side while the actual external world goes on in fine order.
The tortured look in his pic suggests he’s eating radioactive insects to give his prose authenticity. Why didnt we all make a fuss and take sides when Einstein’s general relativity came out? Probably because, unlike today’s dumbed down everyman’s post normal science, few could understand it.
Sounds more like the future should we follow the alarmists prescriptions.
I suggest that he moves to central East Antarctica and sits down and waits. As soon as 600 meters of ice has melted the Gamburtsev mountains will begin to emerge as nunataks and he is free to start looking for suitable caves. Probably not a lot of radioactive insects there, but he might find the odd frozen dinosaur (nobody knows how long the Gamburtsevs have been glaciated, 40 million years is a minimum figure).
Better dress warmly while waiting though.
“an insight Vollman apparently reached by bathing his face in gamma rays, and other risky sounding activities.”
Not as scary as it sounds. We have all done that. It is more commonly known as “taking a dental X-ray”.
gamma rays come from nuclear transitions. X-rays come from orbital electron transitions. All high-energy radiation, but different origins. Gamma rays can reach much higher energies than X-rays.
Actually both can originate by several processes, medical X-rays for example are usually produced by bremsstrahlung, which is from electrons, but not from orbital transitions. Originally they were distinguished by energy, but you are right that nowadays they are often separated by source. X-rays from sources outside a nucleus and Gamma rays from nuclear processes. Which means that some X-rays have much higher energies than most Gamma rays.
Except in astronomy, where the exact source process is often not known, and the distinction is still based on energy.
Well, I suppose – there’s even a bird that suggests this will happen, saying “drink your peeeeee!”
He can safely suggest that. Birds don’t pee, strictly speaking.
“..subsists on….recycled urine”
Come to think of it we all do that all the time. After 4.5 billion years every water molecule (except a few recently arrived by comet) has passed through countless millions of creatures, including e. g. trilobites, Tyrannosaurus rex, giant redwoods and Homo sapiens to mention just a few.
tty, a natural disproof of homeopathy. 🙂
Actually he’s close to insightfulness but can’t escape what was done to his mind in gradeschool and college. It’s not ‘nothing can be done’, it’s ‘nothing need be done’. He doesnt have the deeper life experience that comes with age to appreciate that ‘nothing will be done’. One way or the other.
I had planned to attempt to show that even willfully, man hasnt the capability, energy resources,point of attack… to do other than localized, temporary damage to this giant rock ball. The thought occurred to me because of:
1) puny imaginings of great horror in measuring the damages in thousands of Hiroshimas (terrible to be sure, but within a year, radioactivity was back to background and they rebuilt the city; the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone became a Serengeti-like park with species, some of f which were thought to be extinct), or break up of ice sheets measured in Manhattans, or melting of Greenlandic ice in Olympic sized swimming pools worth.
2) the horrific wipeout of Cretaceous life in one mighty asteroid impact that healed up like a papercut with newer forms of life rapaciously reclaiming the dusty scarred ball and once more making a Garden of it.
3) the mighty spreading of the Atlantic ocean floor, fragmenting continents and setting them adrift and the concurrent grinding subduction zones swallowing ocean floor marked by the Pacific Ring of Fire and the throwing up of the Cordillera mountain chains. The Himalayas thrown up by the mighty collision of the Indian subcontinent crashing into Asia!
4) and, in the human bantam weight corner, puffing SUVs, cement kilns and iron ore smelters, farting cattle and sheep, plunking down cash to pay for our CO2 flights…get a grip!
5) Finally humans have a venerable history of world ending doom forecasting. Ya know what, not one has ever come to pass. I see this as empirical data. Try to imagine how we could go about a carefully planned destruction of the planet. Even scifi writers havent attempted to imagine it. Even Clisci guys havent been that clear on it themselves and thats what they get paid for.
lol… the sky is falling.. the sky is falling… the complete book of chicken little.
and then he woke up!
except he didn’t…
Your sitting in your grade school class and there’s this nice, pretty girl looking at you and seeming to flirt a little bit. Over time you become friends. The both of you reach high school. She’s prettier than before. She’s fairly smart. She’s fun. She giggles and laughs. After the last few years you’ve become good friends, but there’s a difference now; you’re both adolescents. So, the both of you experiment, and grow to a delightful understanding of what the different parts of your bodies’ are for. After such escapades you race home; hiding under the covers when you get there hoping your mother doesn’t walk in as you’re, so to speak, remembering the night.
After high school she goes off to college. But, during the breaks and the summers she comes back home and she calls you up. She’s becoming beautiful now. And sophisticated. But delightful parts from the giggly high school remain. She’s becoming more than just a friend now.
She graduates college. Comes back to town. You’ve known each other from childhood, through adolescence, right on up to young adulthood. She’s deeply in love with you. And, you’re deeply in love with her.
So, you grab that rich velvet box you saved up for all year, put it in your pocket, pick that wonderful young woman up, drive out to the flower filled park. And, right before that princess, you get down on one knee, pull the box out, open it, and say;”Will you …”
Before you can even complete the sentence she says,”Yes, yes, oh yes.” You both agree to go to each other’s homes and meet the families. And you’ve assured her you’ll also ask her father for her hand in marriage. And, as you enter her front door to greet him you discover that her father is … Vollmann.
Poor sap, been eating rice again.
Just look at his picture – A Shadow of his former self
Should have took his own advice and eaten the bugz and got some colour back into his cheeks. not least
Well, this Vollmann chap sure has an imagination, I’ll give him that. There’s no way that a few degrees of warming will produce the lurid results he describes in his book, so he just adds a zero, and presto, you have global warming hell. He is right about one thing though- nothing will be done, because the earth does not need saving.
For the seas to boil he’ll have to add two zeros. And for equatorial seas to reach boiling point even with the party line climate sensitivity of 3 C per doubling will require about 20 doublings, i e an atmosphere consisting of 99.75 % CO2, which makes any questions about food somewhat academical.