Friday, April 18, 2008

I get spanked.

David Roberts, blogmaster over at Gristmill has spanked me for being a bad boy on his blog. No surprise it comes quickly after I've jumped all over WalMart's pet environmentalist Adam Werbach. Read over my shoulder now......

Pangolin,

Let me be crystal clear. The current path the human race is on amounts to mass suicide of about 5 billion people.(quoting me-pangolin)

The fact that you believe this is crystal clear from the first ten million times you said it. You say it on every thread; it is your response to every subject, no matter the size or nature.

You might think that hectoring people for whom you radiate contempt (and frequently refer to as "sheeple") is a good way to avert the outcome you fear, but I assure you it is not. When people see that discussion here is dominated by strident cries that The End Is Nigh -- and, by implication, that anything else they have on their mind reveals them to be deluded and selfish -- they run the other direction. Adam and I have both had reports of people who wanted to discuss his article but were put off by the vitriol in the comments here.

I can't imagine that anyone who reads these boards doesn't know where you're coming from by now. If anyone's mind was going to be changed by it, it's changed. I think you should take the gentle advice offered more than once now and tone it down.

grist.org
by David Roberts at 1:32 PM on 17 Apr 2008


What to do, what to do? I guess I must make my case.....

Solution sets

David- In my little town the western border of the town is bisected by the train tracks that run from Sacramento to Seattle. All day long you can cross those tracks, look north, look south and see nothing; no train. For 23 hours and 20 minutes per day there is no train on those tracks. If you don't live by the tracks and just happen across them for five minutes here or there you might think them a safe place to hang out. Somebody makes this mistake every few months.

A person who is "hysterical" about a danger that others can't perceive may be crazy or they may have more information. The danger is real, it is global, it has the potential to cause a mass extinction and eliminate the support systems for the majority of the human race. None of these ideas originate with me or lack support in peer-reviewed science.

A few years ago I wasn't concerned about the climate all that much. I drove small cars and biked around in good weather so it wasn't my problem. Took my cans, bottles and paper to the recycling bin, kept a little veggie garden and left well enough alone. The 9-11 thing and the resulting wars woke me up to the fact that we were going to war to preserve the right not to drive but to drive really big vehicles. I started reading.

Mike Rupert, Jan Lundberg, Mathew Simmons, Paul Chefurka, the crew over at The Oil Drum, all built on foundations laid by Edward Abbey, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ernest Callenbach. They all point to the same conclusion. That the human race is walking down a very dark path. This isn't even close to my idea; I walk a very well trodden and exquisitely mapped path that starts at Homer and continues to the edge of tomorrow.

The earth is limited. Our space on this earth is a small portion of the total space. You cannot place your emissions or waste in a place that is sufficiently "away." You cannot push your neighbor far enough "away" that the damage your conflict caused will not somehow come back to you. If you take from your neighbors share that person will be angry with you. If he then is forced to take from his neighbor they both may be angry with you.

You know very well that you and I and especially AW and the people he works for exist by taking from our neighbors share. It's the heart of our culture. That very concept was driven home here on Grist with Michael Tobis' post "My Little World (and yours)

So, yeah, I'm a PITA on your board and other boards sometimes. Nothing new there; you have jabailo, Black Wallaby, Manaker and many others in your peanut gallery. I also propose solutions, valid, tested, solutions regularly. I earned my living with my hands so star-wars carbon defense systems don't appeal to me as much as digging charcoal into the soil with a hoe and then planting orchard trees.

I've proposed or promoted solutions on concentrated solar power, organic gardening, transition economics, carbon capture, golf, cars rice apples cars again also airships, tactics of debate, housing, hybrid utilization, biomass and much more. I've posted a lot of commentary and criticism most of which doesn't rate a comment by anyone; no surprise there. I promise that in my 548 posts to date (I counted) I've never once used the phrase "the end is nigh."

Your search engine yields 13 results for the word "sheeple." This one is mine and it's a rant, it even says "rant warning." Here are 1, 2, 3 posted by some David Roberts guy. Twice in defense of some enviro's association with greenwashing. My single use of the word is in response to DR's use in thread #2. Sadly, I frequently refer to "sheep" as grazing animals known for mowing lawns and yeah once I used "sheep" to describe the "fleecing" of gamblers in Vegas. Harsh criticism that and beyond the pale.

I frequently post that nasty link to the Google search: ["faster than expected" warming]. Just the headings on that search will give you the willies and a news alert on that string is worse. Repeated posting of links isn't banned on your site last I checked. Please inform Greyfalcon if they are. It's grim reading but I only post the link to the search. Luckily nothing bad happens like that right?

My entire life I've belonged to that crazy club that voluntarily moved towards a green ethic. Bookstores have whole sections of lushly photographed adobe, cob and straw bale houses but still the majority live in CO2 spewing urban or suburban tract housing.

We have the solutions to global warming that would allow us to lead comfortable lives at far less energy input in human labor, fuels, biomass and minerals than the current economic standard but simply desiring change is useless without the resources to change. People want these solutions just like they want universal health care but "something" presents a barrier. That barrier is economic inequality. People with limited economic choices just can't buy land and put a net-zero house on it. They can't afford houses at all when housing prices are run up by speculators and insane mortgages. It's been a bit of a problem recently.

So yeah, I'm bitter towards the comfortable class. Thank god I'm alone, right? It makes it easy to dismiss people like me as jealous cranks. Then those Brown grads can relax at their $200 lunches where they discuss profit opportunities in cap-and-trade schemes and the "BLUE" labeling of disposable consumer goods. They can cash those fat checks and move on. Hey go for it; it's not like lives are at stake or something.

1 comment:

bucky said...

so why don't any of your links show up at Grist?