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?
…
Even the ambitious climate goals laid out by politicians in campaign promises fall far short of what’s needed to stop the climate crisis.
…
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.
…
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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
But then there is the tithe that we would have to hand over to our betters, who, naturally, must exempt themselves from burdensome tasks if they are to be free to devise new ways to manage our lives, given that we clearly are unable to do so ourselves.
I just love the hubris of these people. The world has existed for a long, long time, and in all the time humans have been here, never have they been able to influence much of anything, globally, and certainly not the climate. This is another of the periodical “Tower of Babel” moments, not unusual, but unfortunately seen more and more in the age of mass media. Of course, ‘we in this age are the absolute pinnacle of human development and are special’…which I’ve heard multiple times in my lifetime. And in another generation or two, we’ll see another bunch of these pronouncements, which will of course try to tell us that those of us living in the early 21st century were backwoods idiots, and ‘we who are living now are superior and smarter and…’ blahblahblah.
“It” fails to mention the planets largest polluter. India escape censure,Russia likewise.
This is nectar for marxist reconstruction it’s such as Izaak W.
She is not a scientist or engineer. She is a communist who calls herself a journalist. Why should anyone care what she has to say?
From the Business Insider article :
That link is to an EIA webpage titled “Energy and the environment explained : Where greenhouse gases come from” which includes the graph at the end of this post.
P.E. Moskowitz appears to have made the classic mistake of constantly switching between “(Primary) Energy (Production / Consumption)” and “Electricity (Generation)”.
They are not freely-interchangeable terms !
Even completely “eliminating” coal and (natural) gas from electricity production in the USA would only reduce American CO2 emissions by about a third.
– – – – –
The more extreme environmental activists claim that the “risk” from CO2 (/ GHG) emissions is so great that “the end justifies the means” when it comes to reducing fossil-fuel burning, and that even if there would be hardship in the short-term by going to zero-emissions “immediately” it would be more than offset by the long-term gains for the environment … oh, and for people as well.
In a separate development they have already persuaded California to shut down their last nuclear power units, at the Diablo Canyon site, by 2025.
I propose the following “experiment” for the state of California to show the world just how many “benefits” would accrue from “eliminating” all fossil-fuel emissions immediately :
– Shutdown all coal and CCGT power plants (in California) immediately
– Disconnect all electricity transmission lines (to California) from states with majority coal and/or CCGT generation immediately
– Shutdown all methane (CH4, a “potent” GHG …) distribution networks for home, business and municipal cooking and heating purposes (in California) immediately
– Shutdown all “gas stations” (in California) immediately
– Eliminate all sales of “fuel oil”, including “marine bunker fuel”, (in California) immediately
– Eliminate all sales of kerosene, including “Jet Fuel A[-1]”, (in California) immediately
In their article P.E. Moskowitz claims that “the majority of people in most developed countries say they’d be willing to take action to prevent climate change”.
How about putting that particular “Proposition N : To show the entire world what urgent action to ‘prevent’ climate change would actually look like” to the people of California in a referendum ?
How long would it take for the benefits of such action to outweigh the short-term negative consequences ?
One only needs to review the history of Russia’s infamous and deadly series of Five Year Plans during Communist rule to see how wrong government planners and visionaries can be in their quest towards utopia.
Business Insider: Abolish Fossil Fuel To Stop Global Warming
Should be:
“Abolish Fossil Fuel To Stop Staying Warm Winter and Cool in Summer”
PS Don’t know that those seasons existed long before Jed Clampett “was shootin’ at some food and up from the ground came a bubblin’ crude …”
This book explains why fossil fuels are here to stay. You cant run a modern economy with stupid wind turbines.
The moral case for fossil fuels
Are we even sure that CO2 is not a net benefit? Until we more than double the amount of CO2 it will keep increasing the biomass of the planet which is a very good thing. As long as it does not have an negative effect by raising the temperature along the equator to the point where those areas become unhabitable by people plants and animals it is a net good. As far as sea level rise thats selfish of people to keep sea level from rising at the expense of CO2 levels in the atmosphere and the total biomass of the planet.
As far as renewable energy your unbiased engineers would tell you that it does not provide reliable energy. Just look at China during this winter. If the greens had not gotten in their way we would probably have 4th generation nuclear by now and lower CO2 levels.