Guest essay by by Eric Worrall
The climate visionaries have set the target. Now it is up to you engineering types to figure out the details.
How do we solve climate change? Abolish fossil fuels
P.E. Moskowitz 12 hours ago
- Our climate change goals are way too small for the severity of the crisis.
- Calling for the complete end of fossil fuel extraction is the only way forward.
- Other movements have proven that bold calls for abolition can radically change politics.
- P.E. Moskowitz is an author, runs Mental Hellth, a newsletter about capitalism and psychology, and is a contributing opinion writer for Insider.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
As Joe Biden campaigned for president in 2020, he outlined an environmental agenda that included achieving 100% clean energy in the US by 2050. The goal was ambitious, but details were scant on how to get it done. How, for example, would Biden meet the target while simultaneously promising to not ban fracking, an extractive process that contributes tremendously to the climate crisis?
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Even the ambitious climate goals laid out by politicians in campaign promises fall far short of what’s needed to stop the climate crisis.
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Having a concrete goal (stopping the worst effects of climate change) with a concrete target (stopping oil and gas extraction) is the only way to move a pro-environment agenda forward.
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There are already many groups who have gotten the memo to push for massive, systemic change on climate. Students have forced over 100 colleges and universities to divest from fossil fuel corporations. Indigenous rights movements blocked 1.6 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from being released through protest campaigns, pipeline blockades and other actions, equivalent to 25% of the emissions of the US and Canada each year.
But these movements, as powerful as they are, still remain on the fringe of the fight against climate change. As Klein points out, mainstream environmental organizations push for incremental change, while people thirst for something more radical.
We cannot end climate change without ending the extraction of fossil fuels. But if we keep considering that an unrealistic proposition, we’re doomed to use up massive amounts of people’s energy to push for small reforms, a cycle that creates cynicism and defeatism.
It’s a tall order to abolish all fossil fuel extraction, but the first step is simply naming it as a goal.
Read more: https://www.businessinsider.com/solve-climate-change-crisis-abolish-fossil-fuels-oil-gas-2021-10
According to her bio, P.E. Moskowitz is the author of two books: How to Kill a City and The Case Against Free Speech. They write the newsletter Mental Hellth, which explores our current discourse on psychology, self-help and care, and critiques popular conceptualizations of mental health from an anticapitalist perspective. They are the co-founder of Study Hall, a freelancer services and advocacy organization with over 6,000 members. They also guest-lecture on media, democracy and free speech at SUNY Purchase. They’ve written for many magazines and websites. P.E. was born, raised, and lives in New York City. Their dog’s name is Remi.
Moskowitz’s main website, “Mental Hellth“, has posts like “How to break through our neoliberal selves – a Buddhist therapist on how capitalism fractures psyches, and how to repair them“.
What can I say – I don’t like breathing exhaust fumes any more than anyone else.
But many years ago I tried working a small vegetable plot by hand, to feed my family during a particularly lean year. Back breaking physical work, yet even with the aid of lots of pesticide and fertiliser, I only produced enough vegetables to feed us for three months.
That is why people die young in peasant societies, or hunter gatherer communities. Only the very young can keep up the magnitude of physical effort required to keep themselves and their loved ones alive. By the time they reach their 40s, assuming they haven’t died of disease, or overwork, or injury, most people’s bodies simply cannot maintain the effort required to keep up with their needs. So they slowly starve to death.
Or in communities which live in particularly harsh environments, like the old time Inuit, in bad times the old folk asked their relatives to help them die. They did the honourable thing, they removed the burden of their continued maintenance from their edge of survival community.
Fossil fuel liberated us from all that.
Fossil fuel is the reason why people like P.E. Moskowitz have the leisure time to pontificate about the need to end the extraction of fossil fuel, on their fossil fuel powered computer made of plastic.
Can we have a list of words that fail moderation please?
I posted a factual post on the background of Insider/Business Insider – with links – twice and it has disappeared; twice.
Is WUWT linked in some way to Business Insider?
I think we should be told.
Now it’s back pending ‘approval’
What is going on today?!
Due to it’s outage, the Facebook fact checkers haven’t gotten to your post yet.
Considering the author is involved in mental health, curiously, right now a huge Facebook/Instagram scandal with whistleblower Frances Haugen is all over the media. Internal FB documents documented the dangerous impact on kids. I just wonder if any mentioned climate doom and depression.
FB planned to go after the tweeny market and had to can that idea.
Whistleblower: Facebook research showed Instagram is worse for teenagers than other social media (“60 minutes”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT2sMDCW_2k
Note the title comment on feedback. I suspect climate doom works exactly the same way.
It sure looks like FB is using applied behavioral psychology.
I’m a member of the Free Speech Union but if I needed anecdotal evidence to argue against it the effusions of Mrs Moskowitz would be where I started. What a load of (dangerous) tripe.
It’s not even wrong.
No problem! Them and their families first.
Mental Health must be named on the same basis as the American Cancer Society.
Okay, Eric, if you are going to have a garden that will feed your family for a year, you need a minimum of two (2) acres of fertile soil and you need to get your kids involved because they are closer to the ground than you are. You also have to be willing to chase off the squirrels, because they are patent thieves of everything, and it’s a good idea to ask a beekeeper to loan you a working hive to fertilize the tomatoes, squash (zukes and hard shell both), peas, beans, watermelons, cantelopes – etc, etc., etc. – and then enlist your offspring in the business of growing your own food. I grew up with this. It was worth it to plant five rows of red and icicle radishes and pull them up, wash them with the garden hose and put them in the fridge.
We also planted popcorn and potatoes and bought a box of ladybugs every year to turn loose on the world. That was fun. I planted parsley and other herbs one year, not realizing that parsley is a biennial, and when it came up the second year, it attracted enough honeyseekers to populate a city. When they were done, the flower heads were fertilized and I got to harvest the parsley seeds for the next year.
Gardening is good for you. If you do this, then your kids know where their food actually comes from and don’t assume it arrives on a truck that unloads it at a store. Yes, I know: not everyone has room for a garden like that, but it’s worth it. And it is not backbreaking if it’s done right. Plenty of people are still gardening into their 80s.
That painting, BTW, is Millet’s “The Gleaners”, 1857, and gleaning was done after grains were harvested so that nothing was wasted or left to birds to steal. Gleaning goes way back in time, part of human history.
I remember gleaning as a kid in wartime Britain, to eke out the balancer meal that we got for the chickens in lieu of an egg ration. I can still smell that balancer meal cooking up with potatoes and vegetable scraps to a warm crumbly mix that the chickens fought for. Allotment gardening, 10 evacuees Mum fed for a few months and three for the duration and after to finish their schooling. The Gasworks was bombed, I watched it has from my school window, a lone plane flying low in the valley and a direct hit on the gasometer, whoosh, great excitement for an eight year old. We went back to a wood burning stove for hot water and cooking, be difficult to find the wood if everyone did that now.. People today in the cities have no idea of the work involved in growing harvesting preserving foods, salting, drying bottling smoking,mounding root vegetables, and watergas trailers for lorries cars and buses, one hill the passengers had to get out and push, Trouble is with electric buses they are too heavy to push, just have to wait for sunshine for the rooftop solar array to kick in.
Thank you for those memories of yours, Julian. It does make a difference that you (and I) can relate to these things, which happened because of shortages (wartime) or a salary that had my dad just getting by. I think you should put all that down on paper for your grandkids. It’s family history now, and you don’t want that lost.
Something is certainly going on. Are these those “interesting times” we hear about now and then?
Sara,
Smart idea.
My Dad – dead this quarter of a century did something like that for – I think – a local school.
I have taken the [UK-based] questionnaire, and prepared it for an electronic world.
Here it is: –
How We Used to Live
1. What was your home like when you were ten?
2. Did you live in a city, town, village, or elsewhere?
3. Which invention in the home has changed the way we live the most?
4. What was your favourite meal? And favourite drink?
5. Where did your family do its shopping?
6. As a child, were you expected to do any household chores?
7. Did your parents have anyone to help with work around the home?
8. How many children were in your family?
9. Were there any ‘dangerous’ childhood illnesses? Did you know any child that died as a child?
10. Did you – and your family – observe any religious festivals or customs?
11. Did you worship regularly – and if so, how?
12. Please describe a typical day when you were about ten years old.
13. Can you tell me briefly about the stages of the year; Christmas, holidays, etc.?
14. How old were you when you started and finished school? How many schools did you attend?
15. What was school like?
16. Who were your favourite teachers? Did they teach your favourite subjects?
17. Were there any school punishments, and what were they for?
18. What did you like – and dislike – most about school?
19. Can you remember any school friends? Are you still in contact with any school friends?
20. Did you, or your friends, try to go to university?
21. What job[s] did you have when you left schools? Did you think to follow your father or mother?
22. How much were you paid? And did you then contribute to the household expenses?
23. What types of transport did you use most often?
24. Did you take any family outings/holidays? Where did you go?
25. How did you travel on holiday – or on outings?
26. When did you first travel by airplane?
27. Did you learn to drive? At what age? Did you have a car?
28. What are the differences between dress for a ten-year-old today, and when you were ten?
29. What influenced the way you dressed as a teenager?
30. How did you get ‘News’ when you were ten?
31. What did you do in your spare time? What games did you play with friends at ten?
32. Did you have any hobbies at about ten?
33. Did you have a radio or TV in your home? If so – what were your favourite programmes?
34. Did anyone in your family play a musical instrument, or sing?
35. Did you have any pets?
36. Did you have a favourite book or toy?
37. What music was popular? Did you have any favourite performers?
38. Did you go to the cinema very often? Who were the famous film stars of the day?
39. What sports, if any, did you play?
40. Did you have any sporting heroes?
41. Did you get any pocket money? How much? How did you spend it?
42. When did you first drink alcohol? Smoke? [and try illegal drugs]?
43. During your life, which personalities have you most admired? And why?
44. Which important events have most affected your life?
45. What are your dearest memories?
46. Did any world event change your life a lot?
47. Do you have any wartime memories? If so – which war?
48. What do you think are the greatest scientific and medical achievements in your lifetime?
49. Can you tell me a little about your grandparents? Names, jobs, places of birth, etc.
50. What is the greatest difference between your life at ten, and a ten-year-old’s, today?
It’s not copyright.
Please use – or distribute – as you would, including all or just some of the questions. No acknowledgement needed
Auto
Some of those questions bring back some real memories. Thanks!
Thanks Auto, great list. And Sara, I did write “My Story” in a class of that name at U3A (University of the 3rd Age) a great two year course, we learned the most interesting private histories of everyone as we read our 4 foolscap page assignment to the others, in sworn confidence of course.
“P.E. Moskowitz is an author, runs Mental Hellth, a newsletter about capitalism and psychology”
So he’s a Marxist then. I bet he uses fossil fuels and their products every day without realising.
It’s easy to end fossil fuel use … we just relabel them as 100% organic stored solar energy … and the greens will love them …. job sorted
P E Moskowitz is just another depressed woman trying to drag every one else in to her depression with her. She needs MEDS and lots of them.
There is no polite way to put it: The author has gone “full retard” on climate, and specifically on energy.
Sure. Let’s also reduce the overall population on the planet by about 90%, too. I vote we start with those advocating we eviscerate the economy for an imagined cause-effect relationship to an imagined problem, and then see what difference it makes first. Not by violence, mind you, just deny them the benefits of the fossil fuel economy and all the products that depend on it—which is just about everything, including foods farmed using energy that was produced (even if indirectly) by fossil fuels, or dependent on fertilizer or insecticides and transported using fossil fuels and sold in markets lit using fossil fuels. Even the tools of exploiting solar and wind energy depend on fossil fuels, to mine, fabricate, transport, store, and link the energy.
What exactly are we teaching in schools?
You have to also deprive them of heat and water and shelter, or it doesn’t really work. Oh, and plumbing – that’s gotta go.
Have you ever wondered how these self-important mopes would get along if we (the self-supporting noonches) and they were sent back to the 17th or early 18th century, and who would do better? Us or them? I think we’d all be okay, and they’d be crying to be let in out of the cold.
So, the present neoleft is too far right for this author. Just stop ff production. Just stop living for 75% of us. This lady wants to stop free speech, too, although obviously she thinks she should be free to talk her ugly how-to-kill-a- city stuff.
Business publishers have clearly been a target of the silent totalitarian takeover, but what is wrong with the business people who support these organs of enterprise wreckers.
Here is an axiom (said by many here). If you give ground to these evil folk, they are encouraged to take more. I’d rather be ruled by Ghengis Khan than by idiot elites.
The latest clueless climate caterwauler’s confabulation: “Back to the Middle Ages Now”.
“Now it is up to you engineering types to figure out the details.”
Us engineering types have been saying for a long time that the 2 billion casualties and several billion more living in energy poverty and real poverty won’t like your very poorly conceived goals.
And they will likely react by asking engineers to build guillotine factories to be used on the elites.
He is suggesting destroying the US as a world power.
He deals with the intangible in his work while suggesting the destruction of the very tangible.
P.E. Moskowitz seems confused about numeration, switching back and forth between self-referential plural pronouns while acting under the singlular verb to be.
I.e., “P.E. Moskowitz is the author… ” [but] “They write the newsletter…”
PE Moskowitz is transgender and appears to be in the process of becoming a female. I think that’s the reason for the use of both singular and plural.
No matter; that’s one big bag of crazy to think that we could do away with fossil fuels without significant pain and mass loss of life.
“P.E. Moskowitz is the author … They write … They are the co-founder … They also guest-lecture … They’ve … Their dog’s name …”
How many of them are there? Is it a whole group? or just one human with 17 personalities?
They = non gender specific opposed to She or Her
Can anyone tell me if she has set a time line for abolishing fossil fuels?
Timeline? Nope, the point of the article is it must be done right away, without such niceties as figuring out how we are all going to live after it’s done. That’s for later, and if it doesn’t work out, blame it on the engineers who failed to make it work,
How dare pro-humanity individuals and governments support banishment of fossil fuels, when their banishment would be the greatest threat to civilization resulting in billions dying from starvation, diseases, and weather-related deaths?
Lysenkoism runs rampant in
the green movements . “We give you political science goal ,Five years comrade,or the gulag.”
At the risk of repeating myself here, billions of deaths is not a bug, it’s a feature. Socialism/Communism/Fascism all ways, and every time, leads to mass death.
It’s been clear all along that the main agenda is abolishing fossil fuels, but like abolishing the police, it’s easier said than done. When is this supposed to happen? Immediately?
If the burning of fossil fuels was completely banned, people with access to trees would start burning wood to heat their homes in winter. This would emit CO2 into the air, and also the rate of removal of CO2 by trees would decrease, which would tend to further increase the accumulation of CO2 into the air.
Wind turbines and solar panels don’t produce enough energy to solve this problem. Among known technology, natural gas is the best in the short term, with a transition to nuclear in the long term.
i guess they want us naked and starving. around 75 % of all clothing is from oil. with out oil we will not be able to grow enough food to feed the world population. this person must want to kill around 1/2 of the worlds people.
“Calling for the complete end of fossil fuel extraction”. Do these idiots have even the slightest conception of what this would mean. Back to the Stone Age with war, famine, disease and a short brutal life. Maybe that is what they really want
It’s already been done. Look up Pot Pot. They only managed to kill of 25% of the population before even the Vietnamese Communists couldn’t stand it any more, and took over. Left to their own devices, the only Cambodian’s left alive would be top members of the Party.
How do we solve climate change? Abolish fossil fuels
Or wear appropriate clothing, heat and cool buildings as necessary and adjust outdoor activities according to the season.
As for effects for slightly warmer or cooler seasons, adapt like our primitive ancestors did.
Wear more when it’s cold, wear less when it’s warm…
Warmer is better
TOGA
TOGA
TOGA
Can’t tell if that’s sarcasm, or if you are simply totally insane. 🙂
I thought he posing a question and offering two options for answers:
Q: How to solve (the problem of) climate change?
A: Stop using fossil fuels, or
B: Use both old and new approaches to cope with climate change.
(N.B. old approach, move to better climate; new, get HVAC installed)
Personally, I support B.