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Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The latest IPCC Climate change report is so depressing, greens are wondering on social media if they should just give up the struggle. But the Guardian offers a dangerous solution to the hopelessness and despair some of their readers may be experiencing.
Don’t despair: the climate fight is only over if you think it is
Rebecca Solnit
Sun 14 Oct 2018 18.10 AEDTAfter the panicky IPCC report on climate change, it’s easy for pessimism to set in – but that would be conceding defeat
In response to Monday’s release of the IPCC report on the climate crisis – which warned that “unprecedented” changes were needed if global warming increases 1.5C beyond the pre-industrial period – a standup comic I know posted this plaintive request on her Facebook: “Damn this latest report about climate change is just terrifying. People that know a lot about this stuff, is there anything to be potentially optimistic about? I think this week I feel even worse than Nov 2016 and I’m really trying to find some hope here.”
A bunch of her friends posted variations on “we’re doomed” and “it’s hopeless,” which perhaps made them feel that they were in charge of one thing in this overwhelming situation, the facts. They weren’t, of course. They were letting understandable grief at the news morph into an assumption that they know just how the future is going to turn out. They don’t.
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Taking action is the best way to live in conditions of crisis and violation, for your spirit and your conscience as well as for society. It’s entirely compatible with grief and horror; you can work to elect climate heroes while being sad. There are no guarantees – but just as Sakharov and Sharansky probably didn’t imagine that the Soviet Union would dissolve itself in the early 1990s, so we can anticipate that we don’t exactly know what will happen and how our actions will help shape the future.
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We also need to shut down production directly, with a just transition for workers in those sectors. Five countries – Belize, Ireland, New Zealand, France and Costa Rica – are already working on bans on new exploration and extraction, and the World Bank sent shockwaves around the world last December when it announced that after 2019 it would no longer finance oil and gas extraction.
Given that the clean energy comes with lots of jobs – and jobs that don’t give people black lung and don’t poison surrounding communities – there’s a lot of ancillary benefit. Fossil fuel is, even aside from the carbon it pumps into the atmosphere, literally poison, from the mercury that contaminates the air when coal is burned and the mountains of coal ash residue to the toxic emissions and water contamination of fracking and the sinister chemicals emitted by refineries to the smog from cars. “Giving up” is often how fossil fuel is talked about, as though it’s pure loss, but renouncing poison doesn’t have to be framed as sacrifice.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/14/climate-change-taking-action-rebecca-solnit
On one level the IPCC has overplayed their hand – their predictions of imminent doom are so ridiculous the IPCC are straining credibility with their claims, even amongst their believers. Jumping the shark with ever more ridiculous claims will eventually lead to the total downfall of the IPCC’s credibility.
But there is an inner core of fanatics – people who truly believe the world is about to end, unless they personally act to shut down fossil fuel production and consumption.
In my opinion these are the people who think it is acceptable to physically attack oil infrastructure, chase government figures out of restaurants and target political opponents in their homes. Until their belief system finally collapses, I believe this inner core of fanatics will become increasingly dangerous and violent in their pursuit of their impossible goal.
In my opinion outlets like the Guardian are fanning the flames of this dangerous fanaticism. Although the Guardian stops short of openly inciting violence, they are repeatedly promoting the message that the only relief committed greens will find from the pain and despair they are suffering is direct action.
A garbage news organization (Guardian) , quoting from a garbage, hysterical politically motivated report (IPCC).
As the dire predictions and warnings increase, so does the credibility of the initiator.
Isn’t society supposed to evolve, not devolve.
Regards
“Don’t despair: the climate fight is only over if you think it is”
The climate fight is only one battle, one front, and we’ve already won over the masses.
“the IPCC report on the climate crisis – which warned that “unprecedented” changes were needed”
Such as getting rid of capitalism. Which is worth doing anyway, even if we’ve passed the global warming tipping point. Fight on!
SARC!!!!
These doomsters can take direct action themselves by renouncing the use of all petroleum products, and setting an example for the rest of us…
That’s not how it works, Greg. It’s everyone else that has to change their ways, never the doomsters. After all, they need to jet around the world and make use of all those petroleum products in order to tell everyone else what they should be doing.
The Guardian (Hope Solo) also warns about “USA women are dominated by white girls next door”. I wouldn’t trust a publication known for its rabid diversity (i.e. color judgments – racism, sexism).
“But there is an inner core of fanatics – people who truly believe the world is about to end, unless they personally act to shut down fossil fuel production and consumption.”
As a suggestion, these fanatics should take an inventory of their personal positions and toss anything that is a petroleum byproduct. I suspect the Antifa protestors in the top photo would have a hard time dressing for their cold-weather protest.
It looks like the IPCC report has scared some people. There they are getting all worked up over nothing. They have been sold a lie and it is detrimentally affecting their lives. If only they knew the truth: The UN IPCC and all their scientists couldn’t prove any of their dire claims if their lives depended on proving it.
An aside: I watched an interview with President Trump on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” program tonight and he was questioned about whether he still thought climate change was a hoax after Hurricane Michael and other recent hurricanes.
Trump said (I’m paraphrasing) he knew there were stronger hurricanes in the past and when asked if he believed the climate was changing because of human activity he said he didn’t agree, and the interviewer, Leslie Stall, wanted to know why he didn’t believe when scientists said it was true, and Trump said some of his scientists didn’t agree with that, and Stall asked who they were, but Trump didn’t name anyone.
A transcript of the interview would be interesting for the readers at WUWT.
“We also need to shut down production directly, with a just transition for workers in those sectors. Five countries – Belize, Ireland, New Zealand, France and Costa Rica – are already working on bans on new exploration and extraction,”
The latest Green mad PM of New Zealand has already banned exploration, but not for another 30 – 35 years.
Jeeze. Next the Guardian will be calling on Trump to nuke China and India thus cutting the world’s CO2 emissions by half.
OMG! The Guardian identifying today’s “progressive”, designer-brain mobs with Soviet dissidents Sacharov and Shcheransky! The a shame is bottomless. The dissidents were the 3% and you marxytotes are the 97% for cryssakes! The UN/IPCC is The Soviet Presidium of the new тотаliтагуаи putsch. You mugs would have put your 97 million boots to the dissidents with gusto and bloodlцst.
I remember when the Poles rebelled at the Gdansk shipyards, marking the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire. They called their movement Solidarity. So, the British Columbia Teachers Union renamed their organization Solidarity! The unmitigated gall of of well fed, well paid and pampered Canadian teachers purloining the name of this group of death defying freedom fighters shocked and dusgusted me. Invoking Soviet dissidents as “just like us” by the mob of spoiled, moronic, misanthropic climate activists shows the breadth of the disconnect.
I count at least 8 with faces covered. Plenty of synthetics, plenty of tech. And they want to ban fossil fuels?
And you did not mention the belts and shoes…
. . . and eye glasses with polycarbonate lenses.
Maybe start saving the planet by cutting electricity to The Guardian. They should love it if I understand them correctly.
Exactly.
“Taking action is the best way to live in conditions of crisis and violation, for your spirit and your conscience as well as for society. It’s entirely compatible with grief and horror; you can work to elect climate heroes while being sad.”
What crisis? The only thing being violated is other people’s freedom to chose. For society? By destroying the systems and resources that brought them their society!
These people are insane. Not only that, criminally insane!
they create nothing of value. they are spoilers.
they don’t need smarts because destruction is easy.
expect it. if the manipulators can’t rule the world, they’ll burn it down.
everybody is making open threats – maxine, hillary, holden
while the msm censors reporting. ‘mob’ has been banned from use .
there will be no restraint
all the pawns are disposable
heh- i can imagine all the preppers saying ‘see!’
i
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How Tamino proved himself wrong.
Tamino has made it clear, that he is a slowdown, pause, and hiatus, denier.
But in a recent post, Tamino has made a stupid mistake.
In his eagerness to show how bad global warming is, Tamino has accidentally acknowledged that the recent slowdown exists.
https://agree-to-disagree.com/how-tamino-proved-himself-wrong
Take away all the stuff made by heating raw materials, stuff like …. steel, glass, concrete, bricks, and things made with the machines containing those materials … cotton fabric, automobiles, roads, satellites, multi-story buildings.
What goes away?
Too many to consider.
Back to MWP tech. Wahoo.
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“but just as Sakharov and Sharansky probably didn’t imagine that the Soviet Union would dissolve itself in the early 1990s”
Well they should have. Really…it was not that hard to see. Sometime in the earl 70’s, while attending high school, I learned something about socialism and I learned something about the Soviet Union. Not all that much, really. Just enough to know that the Soviet Union would not exist as a country by the end of the 20th Century. It clearly wasn’t sustainable.
The collapse of the Soviet Union still surprises those on the left. They really can’t understand what happened. They seem to have no ability to see that socialism is a really horrible way to organise human beings.
They also seem to have no ability to understand what ‘2 degrees warmer’ is (barely discernible), or how absolutely horrible their lives would be without fossil fuels.
People devoid of deductive reasoning should not be telling everyone else what to do! I will not go well!
Well, it wasn’t really true communism you see. /sarc
We are already much more than 1.5 degrees C warmer than the coldest periods before the industrial revolution. The current warming up form the Little Ice Age looks alot the warm up from the Dark Ages Cooling Period except that the current Modern Warm Period is not yet as warm as the Medieval Warm Period. The previous interglacial period, the Eemian, was warmer than this one with more ice cap melting and higher sea levels yet no tipping points happened, life went on and the last ice age followed.
from an analysis of the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, one can conclude that the climate change we are experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. Despite the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rationale that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. The AGW conjecture depends upon the existence of a radiant greenhouse effect caused by trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere with LWIR absorption bands. Such a radiant greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, in the Earth’s climate system or on any planet in the solar system with a thick atmosphere. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction so hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction as we.
There may be many good reasons to be conserving on the use of fossil fuels but climate change is not one of them. Our current civilization depends upon the use of a lot of energy. To significantly reduce that use of fossil fuels be need to replace fossil fuel based power plants with new technology nuclear based power plants.
Those that really believe that the use of fossil fuels is so bad should immediately stop making of any goods and services that have involved the use of fossil fuels. For most of us that includes the food we eat. the water we drink, the clothes we wear. the homes and buildings that we live and work in , the transportation we use, and even the surfaces that we walk on. I have yet to see many returning to the wild and I doubt that few could survive without making use of goods and services that make use of fossil fuels.
Re. clean energy provides lots of jobs. I recall the little Old Lady saying to the foreman on a building site with modern machinery, that he should employ 100 men with shovels instead of machinery. He replied “What about a 1000 with teaspoons”.
But as we are now finding with automation and robot assembly lines, for the first time we may be creating a situation when there are insufficient jobs for those willing to work. W hat them ?.
Who knows, the Greens have realised this and are creating the likes of “Teaspoon jobs”for the future , Ha Ha.
But the big snag is that such workers will still want a 40 hour wage package.
MJE
On past evidende of several cycles of automation and innovation since the industrial revolution, which resulted in the creation of more jobs than the machines replaced, I surmise that your prediction is incorrect. There will be a lot of jobs, we only do not yet know what they will entail.
” we only do not yet know what they will entail”. Right! But one thing that WILL be required is a decent education. In the “4th Industrial Revolution” (whatever that is), workers are going to have better (or at least more applicable) qualifications that a degree in Womens Studies. Of course, there’s always (spit) politics! In almost every country, one doesn’t seem to need education or even understanding to be successful (or at least rich).
Automation makes stuff cheaper, the result being that you don’t need to work as many hours in order to afford the basics.
I read a science fiction book once where automation had replaced all jobs. People worked for social prestige.
But as we are now finding with automation and robot assembly lines, for the first time we may be creating a situation when there are insufficient jobs for those willing to work. W hat them ?.
Not if history is any indication. Automation creates new jobs that didn’t exist prior to automation. Granted the new jobs require a different skill set to the old jobs that were replaced, so displaced workers will require training and education to move to a new job.
“On one level the IPCC has overplayed their hand – their predictions of imminent doom are so ridiculous the IPCC are straining credibility with their claims, even amongst their believers. Jumping the shark with ever more ridiculous claims will eventually lead to the total downfall of the IPCC’s credibility.”
Yes sir. This is true.
But do you think they can regain their credibility with the “hidden heat” dynamics of changes in ocean heat content?
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/10/06/ohc/
How ’bout we just shut down the IPCC
A lot cheaper that way.
“renouncing poison doesn’t have to be framed as sacrifice.”
(Until your heating gets turned off, that is).
PREDICTION: IGPOCC’s Special Report 15 will give the pro-nuke green faction (Hansen, Gore, Gates, Trenberth (?)) enough ammo to de-marginalize them. Soon we should see opinion-eds and articles from their spokespeople. Next they should have a seat at the table and be a part of the conversation within green circles. Journalists will give them good coverage.
Let them fry in their own fat…
Long live NIPCC !
these are the people who think it is acceptable to physically attack oil infrastructure
These are the people running the federal and Alberta and BC provincial governments in Canada.
Sounds to me like we have big dark money circulating, a lot probably from China, to move to wind and solar, funding a disinformation campaign.
The charges against the activists who shut down pipelines have recently been dropped. Another reason for a Guardian article!
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/09/climate-change-activists-necessity-defense-charges-dropped