“These activists seem sincere, and clearly they feel like less intrusive tactics aren’t getting the job done,” ........ what right do activists have to destroy things they don’t own and didn’t build to get their message across? Or to lay in the middle of the street because they can’t reverse the industrial revolution? These tactics are like a guy hitting on a girl, her saying no, and him deciding to hold her down and rape her to get his message across since his “less intrusive” words weren’t getting the job done of him getting his way.
At some point people need to accept that if they don’t make a convincing argument they don’t get to throw a fit like a toddler. Plus, all of these things are actual crimes. If law enforcement won’t enforce the law, sooner or later, everyday people tired of the 💩 will do it for them, and that’s when things get really ugly.
Destroying artwork, dumping milk out in grocery stores, and blocking highways doesn’t work to accomplish anything aside from showing the world these grown babies have parents that never required them to grow the hell up.
What's wrong with these people, didn't they hear old Joe is all out for protecting our climate? However, what is confusing is his throwing money, millions and millions of dollars at Ukraine, escalating the war, extending the war, and taking the chance of creating a nuclear holocaust that will destroy all life on this planet. Better they should march against that.
No matter your beliefs climate change is a reality, and presents a threat to all life forms on this planet. That being said the tactics employed by these activists too often evoke anger in others, and their good intentions become very counter productive. When I went to college climate change wasn't up for discussion and neither was it part of the curriculum in HS or JHS and that denial took place through the last century even though it is recognized as the century of the environment and evokes names like Rachel Carlson, and her book, Silent Spring. As a result you have generations of people who are ill informed and are climate change deniers. I wish the educational system had made a greater effort to inform students on this issue, since these mass protests, even on a global level, turn people away. It also has to be understood that changes that will alter our present course will take time. Joe Biden's approach is untimely.
You inadvertently undermined your own point and made the "climate change deniers" point for them. Rachel Carson was wrong, and did more harm than good, but her book evoked an emotional response and thus spawned a movement. Emotional belief without facts is religion. Another example is the environmentalists that protest nuclear power and force nuclear plants to shut down to make way for solar panels and wind. Solar and wind require fossil fuel generation as a backup. Nuclear does not. Thus, the push for solar and wind extend the human need to burn fossil fuels into perpetuity. Nevermind the environmental damage caused by solar panels thenselves.
Carson did more damage than any other single individual concerned with the "environment." The message is always the same. "There's an emergency. Only we, the enlightened, care." It seems bird eggs had thinner shells if the female had eaten mosquitoes killed by DDT. So, DDT was banned. Hooray!
Except the price paid was in more mosquitoes, biting more children, transmitting more malaria, and we can measure the price paid in 500,000 additional unneeded deaths of children every year. But the children are small and brown and out of sight, so in this (and other cases) "we care" about the wrong thing, and others pay the price.
Carson, David Brower, Farley Mowat, Greta, the list goes on. This has been a tactic of the environment left for ages; the need to lie for the "greater good." And each time it comes back and bites them in the ass.
You're just plain wrong on this, Bill. I don't know where you're getting your information, but it certainly wasn't the book Silent Spring.
DDT is banned in the US, but it is not banned for pest control globally. The UN, which only got involved with establishing a worldwide standard in 2004, made a specific exemption for pest vector control.
From the Wiki on DDT:
"The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which took effect in 2004, put a global ban on several persistent organic pollutants, and restricted DDT use to vector control. The convention was ratified by more than 170 countries. Recognizing that total elimination in many malaria-prone countries is currently unfeasible absent affordable/effective alternatives, the convention exempts public health use within World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines from the ban.[62] Resolution 60.18 of the World Health Assembly commits WHO to the Stockholm Convention's aim of reducing and ultimately eliminating DDT.[63] Malaria Foundation International states, "The outcome of the treaty is arguably better than the status quo going into the negotiations. For the first time, there is now an insecticide which is restricted to vector control only, meaning that the selection of resistant mosquitoes will be slower than before."[64]
Despite the worldwide ban, agricultural use continued in India,[65] North Korea, and possibly elsewhere.[20] As of 2013, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 tons of DDT were produced for disease vector control, including 2,786 tons in India.[66] DDT is applied to the inside walls of homes to kill or repel mosquitoes. This intervention, called indoor residual spraying (IRS), greatly reduces environmental damage. It also reduces the incidence of DDT resistance.[67] ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
A passage that alludes to another thing that Rachel Carson- a trained aquatic biologist- got right: insects evolve to develop resistance to chemical pesticides, and the more frequently they're used, the more intractable of a problem that resistance tends to get.
I do what I can to avoid Wiki (fill in the blank). It's largely a popularity-based source. I do go to the citations and references and often find something useful that way.
People get Rachel Carson wrong. Carson did not advocate for a total ban on DDT- most certainly not as a means of addressing public health problems like malaria mosquitos!
From the Wiki entry for Rachel Carson, including reference to a direct quote by her:
"...In regards to the pesticide DDT, Carson never actually called for an outright ban. Part of the argument she made in Silent Spring was that even if DDT and other insecticides had no environmental side effects, their indiscriminate overuse was counter-productive because it would create insect resistance to the pesticide(s), making the pesticides useless in eliminating the target insect populations:
No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease by controlling insect vectors of infection. However, it has heard little of the other side of the story—the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting.[63]
Carson further noted that "Malaria programmes are threatened by resistance among mosquitoes"[64] and emphasized the advice given by the director of Holland's Plant Protection Service: "Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity' ... Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible."[65]..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
Have you read Carson's book Silent Spring? I have. It called attention to how casually chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides were being used for inappropriate purposes like massive aerial spraying of woodlands in attempts to stop invasive pests like gypsy moths, and use of mass quantities in efforts to eradicate fire ants. A fool's errand.
Rachel Carson also pointed out that there was often complete disregard for the amounts used, neglect about precautions for workers, and no attention given to limiting the use of pesticides during inappropriate weather conditions and seasons. She was in the forefront of arguing in favor of biological alternatives to kill insect pests, and those alternatives have often proved much more effective at controlling insect pest outbreaks than chemical sprays. Examples of the superiority of biological control measures over chemical pesticides include the present-day efforts to control the gypsy moth and the fire ant. And the boll weevil, whose infestations once made cotton agriculture one of the heaviest pesticide users, is now on the verge of being eradicated from the US on the basis of ecological researches into the requirements of its life cycle. There's still some pesticide use, but it's been incorporated into a larger strategy that centers on getting rid of all cotton plants after harvesting, which deprives the boll weevil of the habitat it requires to thrive and reproduce. https://www.stltoday.com/boll-weevil-eradication-closes-in-on-success/article_70c67ccf-cae1-5238-8af4-49e4645a4dfb.html
David MacKay's final interview before cancer got him. He makes your point that if you believe in anthropogenic global warming (I don't; he does; doesn't matter here.) you must still be rational in how you address it.
And never mind the damage done by nuclear power plants. Go talk to people who live near them. I talked to people in Braidwood, IL . I did and the picture is ugly
Yes, I am amazed that those who advocate for nuclear power are delusional in not realizing that they are NUCLEAR. We are concerned about nuclear war but we're not concerned about placing a nuclear facility in our neighborhoods?
I can remember when they were trying to dispose of spent nuclear waste in the 1970s and they couldn't find anywhere safe to put it! Every community said, "Not in my back yard!" Finally they put it into the oceans in (presumably) safe containers. Of course the ocean species didn't get a voice.
You do understand that there is a big difference between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, no? Nuclear weapons depend on detonation. Nuclear power depends on the natural radioactive decay of Uranium and the heat that generates in order to boil water and turn it into steam. That steam is then sent through turbines to generate electricity. In a natural gas or coal powered plant you burn the fuel to generate steam that then is sent through turbines. It's the same basic principal in both cases. You boil water and create electricity.
There's no risk of a detonation. There is risk of overboiling water and superheating it to the point that it blows out, but it's a tiny risk. Again, this is the steam blowing up the plant, not the nuclear fuel. There's no mushroom cloud. There's no fallout. The only real risk is to any cleanup crews that have to go in and clean up the mess. Nuclear power is safe. And yes, I would welcome a nuclear power plant in my backyard over miles and miles and miles of wind turbines or solar panel fields it would take to generate the same amount of electricity.
Just as an aside.... when I was in college in the early 70s, the big bogeyman climate change was that the next Ice Age was on its way. So fifty years later, the climate change is the “ polar” opposite? So the Ice Age thing was miscalculated?
I can tell that you were never really informed about climate change based on your commentary here, since teachers were no very informative on this subject back then. In the 70's it was barely discussed if referenced if at all. By the way some fifty years later a lot of information has been accumulated to substantiate the reality of climate change. I do think Joe's ways of going about it really sucks.
When you assume.... actually I believe it was on the cover of Time or Newsweek Magazine which back then were highly respected news magazines. Fifty years later is actually not a lot of information as either was the fifty years of information on which the climate scientists at that time based their reality of cooling temperatures and expanding polar caps. But yes, I was a 21 year old college kid who didn’t take that threat too seriously and seeing as the science then didn’t pan out, I dismissed the predicted frigid temps. Fifty years of climate study is like the earth blinking once. The big difference between then and now is that “climate change” has become a very lucrative emotionally fueled industry.
No Martha, not true. I wish it were, but it's not. Much more evidence has accumulated since the 70''s. Temperatures are warming around the globe. When the industrial revolution came about they were concerned about the effects of carbon dioxide on the environment, so it's not even a recent concern. I still feel there is so much denial because people were not educated in their science classrooms on this issue, then you have the oil companies implementing campaigns of denial, as did the cigarette companies when they tied smoking to cancer. Lots of lies. Personally I think Biden's agenda in this area should have been put off, since it's a time when many are feeling vulnerable after dealing with a pandemic. not to mention the lying the democrats pushed when it came to Trump. I also don't approve of the way people go about expressing their concern over this issue which turns people off. That purple haired brat with the can of tomato juice really made me angry. We have to do something, but changes don't happen overnight, and require decades to implement.
Fran, May I respectfully ask that you read this terrific piece from Prof Richard Lindzen, of MIT (my Alma Mater). See if it changes your mind, or at least your certitude. Best, Tom
Interesting article, but it has been said, no PREACHED, that SCIENCE has come to a consensus that no one dare question.
II. SCIENCE DEMONSTRATES THERE IS NO CLIMATE-RELATED RISK CAUSED BY FOSSIL FUELS AND CO2, AND THEREFORE NO RELIABLE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE SUPPORTING THE PROPOSED RULE
We are a part of the complex system and cannot help but affect it. Can you list the 100 most powerful actors in the system? How does a negligible contribution of a relatively inefficient greenhouse gas rank as the most significant and powerful actor? I don't deny climate change; instead, I am a skeptic. All scientists are.
Bill if you are really interested in this subject there are many sources available. Whether you believe it or not does not change the reality that climate change is happening and the environment on a world wide level is being affected in a negative way. The US, and China, especially China, since it produces carbon emissions almost three times greater then ours, but all industrial country's need to implement change. The overall temperature in the world has gone up almost 2 degrees in a little more then a hundred years, oceans are warming, glaciers are melting. research it. I am not ignorant of the natural world, the environment and all that. It was my major in school, taught it, teach it. No one is telling you not to hop on a plane, turn off your lights or dump your car for one that works on electricity. I think it's absurd that Biden in the midst of political turmoil, a pandemic, and rising costs, etc, decided to deal with climate change by shutting down the Keystone pipeline, then implement a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands while a quarter of our oil and gas is gotten that way. All that has cost elevated gas prices and I've listened to people cursing him out at the pump. Then talk about electric cars at 60 thousand a pop. It's like telling a fat lady who just lost her husband that she has to immediately go on a diet and cut back on the wine she enjoys with her evening meal. It feels like he wants to sabotage the movement . It takes time to bring the kind of change we need, as well as educating people on this issue. I also don't approve of purple haired brats throwing tomato soup at my beloved van Gogh painting, or what many did during the the global climate change week, since it turns people off of the message.
Fran, I'm with you until you make a leap of faith similar to that entailed by religion, from temperatures are rising (no skepticism here on that point) to carbon being at fault. You provide no proof; I've read a good sample of the scientific papers, understand them, and most are pure rubbish. The IPCC is a political, not scientific, body.
The world's top experts in glaciers are in (surprise) Iceland, not New York. They agree that the glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere are shrinking. They point out that those in the southern hemisphere are growing by an equal amount, and the global mass of glaciers is stable.
Follow the money. There are infinite funds available to study the problem of carbon emissions and climate change. As soon as a scientist concludes that there is no significant problem, then there's no follow-on study to be performed, and the scientist must perforce find another crisis.
Don't just look at the past 200 (or even 20 hundred) years. Talk to geologists. The greatest rise in global temperatures took place millions of years before humans existed and amounted to about 18 degrees Fahrenheit in a ten-year period, evidently due to a rupture in an undersea cavity containing methane, a genuinely powerful greenhouse gas. Look at historical records; the earth swings from warm to cool on multiple interlocked cycles. We are currently in an abnormal warm period and have been since the Little Ice Age.
Of course there are many natural causes which elevate the global temperature like volcanic eruptions, sunlight variations, etc, but when they talk about climate change they are not talking about earth’s climate change due to natural causes, not related to human activity, and have been with us forever, and will be , but their influence is small, or they occur too slowly to explain the the very rapid elevations that are seen today over a very short period of time. Your background isn't in science otherwise you wouldn't be using this time worn explanation of why climate change isn't so. I am not trying to indoctrinate you just presenting the common consensus among scientists in this field. You are wasting your time in trying to make me believe climate change just ain't so. Science is my background.
I have a simple question for you Fran - how much of the last 200 years of climate change was completely natural versus how much was anthropogenic? Surely you've read enough to know this, right? Otherwise, how can you claim any factual basis for your concern?
Listen curmudgeon, good name for you by the way. since you fail to intimidate me with your lack of charm, and my background is in science, answer your own question and I'll correct any wrong thinking on your part. How's that?
In retrospect, I'm fairly satisfied with most of my American public school education, although admittedly that was 50 years ago. Despite the fact that my early record of superior academic achievement went into a nosedive once I entered 7th grade, and didn't really recover until I was over 30, as a "returning" college student.
I think there are a lot of ways the system could be improved- I'm a longtime John Taylor Gatto fan. And it's undeniable that the public school system has propagandistic aspects; notwithstanding all the bird being whipped over "cancellation" these days as if it were a brand-new thing, it's always been the case that any public school teacher who dares voice pointed objections about ongoing US military interventions or skeptical questions about US foreign policy in their classroom is risking their job security.
fwiw, in 1973, one of my classmates in my public high school (suburban middle-class school district) married one of my high school teachers. iirc, she was impregnated by him in her senior year. It didn't even rate as gossip, just something that happened.
Thinking about it, I'll admit to some idle curiosity about how that worked out for both of them. But I refuse to consider a relationship like that to be deviant or perverted, per se.
Exactly. Someone trying to get to work or having some type of emergency is going to get very violent with these adolescents. Or some driver totally loses it and plows right through them.
You have a right to peaceful protest. You do not have a right to block highways or damage property.
Zero sympathy for these so called protesters. They are narcissistic people saying “ look at me”.
Agree. I tend to think violence and destruction rarely, if ever, actually works over any medium to long time frame. Blocking roads can work, with a sympathetic cause and when well organized, in a meaningful to the actual cause location, and when the protesters remain peaceful. It almost never works when the protesters are acting like bratty children randomly throwing themselves down on random highways causing great frustration to passing motorist that are reminded the brat in the road would like to outlaw the job the passerby’s are driving to in order too feed their family along with their mode of getting to said job.
There are important differences between truckers, who contribute important labor/ services to society, engaging in civil disobedience for the right not to be forced to be injected with a potentially dangerous experimental drug they don’t want to be injected with, and woke doomsday cult climate zealots flinging themselves down on highways, or throwing soup at priceless artwork, demanding the implementation of pro-scarcity policies meant to intentionally starve, freeze, and impoverish hundreds of millions of innocent human beings.
The truckers were seeking reasonable personal freedoms/ civil liberties while the climate zealots are seeking to destroy the lives of complete strangers via demands that aren’t well articulated, can’t ever be met, and arise from the religious worship of faulty climate models that claim to predict temperatures for the next 100-1,000 years yet can’t replicate already observed temperatures over any 10 year time period.
Well articulated and reasonable demands are a key component of successful civil rights movements involving civil disobedience. The reasonableness of the demands under scrutiny is crucial to gaining lasting public support that changes hearts and minds, including mine.
The idea that methods alone should somehow dictate the success or public support of any movement is intellectually lazy, and in the case of actions intended for public nuisance or disruption, has been frequently disproven as a theory. Most attempts to gain attention via self-proclaimed “civil disobedience” for a “cause” ends in a jail sentence and not much else. I am now, and have always, supported equal treatment under the law - something the Canadian truckers were not given in comparison to woke Canadian protesters.
The doomsday climate cult might gain attention from these stunts, but public support will continue to be fleeting at best. Reality gets in the way - A slightly warmer Earth is a greener Earth where more food grows, CO2 is plant food, deaths from weather continue to drop dramatically globally, storm frequency has and severe weather has been mostly declining in recent decades, the oceans have actually risen only 7.4 inch since 1900 (in total - less than a foot - most of the Netherlands is and has been 12-21 feet below sea level). Under scrutiny it doesn’t make much sense to destroy people and the environment now so the “climate” can’t do it down the road. 🤷♀️
As far as the “Earth” goes, it’ll be just fine even if it gets really really warm, and again, most people know this. Many learned in elementary school that during much of the reign of the dinosaurs the Earth was much warmer, both CO2 levels and oxygen levels were much higher, oceans hundreds of meters above where that are today - and life was thriving.
Without the protestor demands withstanding scrutiny, these stunts come across as annoying acts by entitled brats who have too much free time and are spending that free time trying to bully strangers. Unlike the truckers, the followers of these doomsday “climate” cults aren’t going to gain popular support because their demands can’t withstand genuine scrutiny or actual outcomes. There is a reason its Michael Shellenberger who has the largest Substack on the climate and is quietly gaining popularity.
I assume you supported Truckers' Protest, they used the same tactics. What right did they have? Traffic jamming, even bridge jamming and somehow everyone was cheering.
The Truckers had a sympathetic cause and, under the Canadian Charter rights, a legal right to protest as they did.
The civil rights movement and suffrage were also peaceful protests (on the side of the protesters). The protesters in these cases could articulate what they wanted and gained popular support as a result of well-articulated reasonable demands that demanded nothing of others beyond equal treatment under the law as human beings. The protestors were entirely peaceful and, like the Canadian truckers, didn’t destroy things or demand others give up their lives and futures to accommodate their demands that centered around personal freedoms and equal rights.
The climate alarmists can’t articulate anything that will gain support. Their demands range from forced starvation of billions to forced abortions (which is what government population management is). The climate alarmists contribute nothing. They can’t articulate anything beyond nonsense dystopian babble. They have no idea what they are talking about. They offer zero solutions besides pushing crap to kill and impoverish a lot a people.
Anyone can claim they are engaging in civil disobedience. A car jacker can claim they are trying to combat wealth inequality. If anyone is going to block a highway in the name of a cause they darn well better have a sympathetic cause that gains popular support because civil disobedience that fails to garner sympathy is just plain old breaking the law. The climate alarmists are spoiled brats plain old breaking the law and it doesn’t begin to help their supposed cause.
Do you honestly believe it’s moral or realistic to assert those engaging in attention seeking criminal antics are the ones who get to decide if society see them as engaging in “righteous civil disobedience” regardless of the facts or objective reality?
As you well know, I am one single person and I alone cannot possibly decide what causes do and do not gain material support from the general public. On a personal level, we should differentiate hooligans from the righteous on the basis of our support, or lack there of, for the “cause” being promoted via illegal antics that often come at a very real cost to others that have nothing to do with the situation.
Blocking traffic includes blocking emergency vehicles like ambulances- and also drivers handling personal emergencies, at which point it's no longer fun and games. Not a tactic I endorse.
Ethical civil disobedience always reckons with the liability of penalties as a consequence of breaking the law. All too many young activists nowadays have been lulled into some cloud-castle fantasy that "civil disobedience" is a foolproof legal defense, and that any activism taken in the course of "redress of grievances" is indemnified against criminal charges!
This false impression has been encouraged by the tactical response of many locales where mass demonstrations have taken place- to dismiss all charges against demonstrators as long as their offenses are limited to "trespassing" or "obstructing traffic". The local courts in cases like those aren't dismissing the charges because the arrests were invalid, they're doing it for their own convenience.
While I can't stand Marcuse's ideas about "repressive tolerance" as a catch-all social explanation, I have to concede that the concept isn't entirely invalid: in any situation where it's taken for granted in advance all around that practically all of the arrested demonstrators are simply going to be detained for a few hours before being set free with no charges, the demonstrators are merely pretending to engage in acts of civil disobedience, and the police are merely pretending to arrest them.
I know I heard from one trucker in an interview and he said they were being very careful to keep roads open for emergency services. I think they went too far with the honking initially but they stopped that too.
Ironically, Capital Beltway traffic is already so prone to unscheduled slowdowns (and others you can practically set your watch by) that the trucker's "slowdown" protest hardly registered as an obstacle. A fact that also calls into question the "tactic" of pedestrians blocking a highway for the purpose of protesting climate change, something something...what's the specific target- petro-powered vehicles? the disinclination of commuters to use Metro, which is only a hybrid solution anyway, given that it usually still requires an auto commute?
Exactly how "effective" is blocking the freeway as a tactic to protest personal auto use, given that the drivers who receive notice about the obstacle will simply re-route off of an exit to the network of surface streets, often requiring a greater travel distance than the usual routine?
So why do it, then? To post videos on Instagram?
Any time someone wants to pursue a plan of political activism, the first thing to do is to be clear about goals, and the be clear about tangible benefits resulting from the action other than to the personal egos of the activists. Which starts by being real about it, that there are status bennies (or at least the promise of them) for the individual personal ego of the activists. Activists put themselves onstage, in the role of "hero of the people." So admit that upfront, because it's required for clarity. Because there has to be more to it than that, hmm? There had better be.
The next thing to do is to take personal ego out of the picture, and consider the benefits of a project for everyone else. Be clear about messaging. An example of an unclear idea is implicitly blaming everyone driving a car on the freeway (who doesn't own an electric vehicle.) That is not the place to start.
Have the protesters ever considered mounting a lobbying effort to have a sufficiently adequate fleet of circulating LNG or EV-powered light buses and vans offering door to door commuter service to Metro, with subscriber-based door to door service on subscriber phone request in daylight non-peak hours? Door to door dispatch service available, room for cargo like groceries and shopping, with driver assistance. Subscriber model, like $100-$200 a year, less for senior citizens. (Leave taxicabs, Uber, and Lyft for the night shift.) That idea has been around for at least 40 years, but no one could figure out how to make it work back in the 1980s, so it was forgotten about. Now we're well into the portable phone era, the LNG/EV-powered fleet era, and also the era when the benefits of lowering auto traffic per se can plainly be viewed as a worthwhile public investment. Consult with some traffic engineers and professional drivers, and figure it out. Makes a lot more sense than any damn UAV fantasy game.
I guarantee, if anyone- I don't care who- could clearly map out how a diversified public transit option using light buses and vans offering last-mile & cargo service could relieve a sizeable percentage of the auto traffic currently on the road in traffic-choked cities and suburbs, the locals would go for it whether it's Washington DC or Houston.
Even if they're already regular riders, practically any suburban commuter is disconcerted by the requirement to either drive and park or walk-wait-ride-transfer on a pre-scheduled fixed route before boarding at a metro station. And lugging something larger than a backpack or briefcase is something between difficult and impossible.
If they could get door-to-station service, or door-to-door to/from a market or mall, they'd go for it.
There's entirely too much rote formulaic emphasis in the pop media on "Americans love affair with their cars" as an explanation for the failures of public transit. There are a lot of cities where the automobile option isn't about love, it's just a flat necessity, and a hated one. And it's entirely possible to love the freedom of a personal automobile and still prefer public transit, because the "freedom" of a job commute that requires 3 hours a day harnessed to 2 tons of gadgets that you're required to drive is really dubious.
(I wonder how much traffic would benefit from an overall 20% reduction in vehicle use, or by a 30% reduction at rush hour. How many hours of life would become less tedious, for everyone involved?)
Public transit needs to be as close to door to door as possible, and it also needs to allow safe storage for cargo- because that's a big reason for people to go out. For groceries, if nothing else. But grocery shopping doesn't work very well, bus-stop to bus-stop. But that's the limit of public transit service. So the primary impediments to increasing public transit ridership are practical, not about American individualist love affairs with their cars.
my point is I support civil disobedience, but one has to accept the consequences whether that is being arrested and charged or dealing with a desperate motorist trying to get to his pregnant wife.
they seem to think that the “rightness” of their actions invalidate any prosecution, which, in turn, invalidates the purpose of civil disobedience.
Being in a prison cell does nothing unless you can flood the prisons. Even then it's out of sight, out of mind. But usually a cause which can summon that kind of support can more easily go into the streets and annoy people enough just by demonstrating.
The painting was protected not exactly by glass, but more like a glaze, which an art restorer friend tells me can be made of various substances (including glass), and though designed to protect against abrasion isn’t exactly tested for soup toss. It worked out okay, this time, but these dopes couldn’t have been sure of that and can’t be going forward. Secondly, they choice an “iconic painting” for a reason. They didn’t throw soup on a statue to Ada Walter or on an indigenous graveyard. They picked a painting because they imagine it a meaningless bourgeois affectation, thinking about its price-tag in dollars as opposed to its actual worth, which they obviously don’t understand or recognize. That’s why this episode is worrisome, because it fits the pattern of people in the social media age being blind to the value of anything except as symbols within a certain political framework, of the Iliad or Beethoven's 9th being useless except as means of perpetuating the decadent before-times. Attacking art is symbolic.
One person's priceless symbol pointing to the indescribable eternal is another's idol to a false god. Who among us has the singular truth? No one. We are all blind men, each holding a small poece of the elephant, declaring that we know its truth. And this is why we must not destroy art, but contemplate it, for each moment betweenart and a unique perceiver is a moment of *creation* - and bring opportunity for a changed perception and thus changed action. Shutdown of highways used by many for living their lives as best as they can in the moment and destruction of globally known art are the two sides of the same anti-creative, anti-life coin. Climate activists begin to communicate themselves to be anti-creative- which is only a hair's breadth away from anti-Creator. It is tragic that they cannot see this. I believe THIS is one primary failure of how we've been educating our young ones: in the misapprehension of the power we humans have over Creation. The sad irony of hearing Indigenous peoples invoked here is not lost on me.
Who exactly are they saving the world FOR? Certainly not the people in the blocked cars, or anyone who values artistic genius and wishes to see it preserved, or anyone ( my guess) who doesn’t sign up to their vague, self-righteous manifesto. And I think that all of them have been emboldened by the fact that there were no consequences for burning a police station to the ground or pulling down statues of historical significance. Will these people be prosecuted? I doubt it.
As a theatre artist, I can attest to what you’re saying. Plays today have become proxies for ideological battle: what gets produced, what doesn’t, who gets to tell what stories, who doesn’t. The intrinsic worth of a work of theatrical literature as a testament to the ever developing and ongoing discovery of human nature is now a thing of the past, and now they only serve as flashpoints for cancellations and culture war bomb-throwing. Look no dither than this:
Well, you read The Fountainhead, didn't you? Minus the bodice-ripping parts, the book can be summed up as an exposition on the right of a creator to do as he pleases with their works, and the abhorrence of having their individual creativity interfered with in any way by meddlers and critics. It's a fictional set piece in bold outline; Ayn Rand was allergic to nuance. But it's a mostly valid work. (Whereas Atlas Shrugged, John Galt etc. and the rest of it, that's just solipsism for wannabe Nietszchean Superboys.)
My take: anyone can throw a pail of soup. That act isn't elevated just because it's accompanied by a statement of elevated intent.
Or American Statues in 2020. For what? Of course, sooner or later, one of these lunatics is going to get Wile E. Coyote’d on I-95, and become another hero of the left.
Reminds me. I've been wanting to order a pair of ACME rocket powered roller skates. The user reviews are nearly 4.5 stars. Free delivery with Amazon Prime.
Granted, the highway was closed at night, but that happened more than two years ago and, while the protestor did become a hero of the left to some degree, it seems to have been lost in the shuffle in the "I support the current thing" mindset that runs rampant.
Not trying to be dismissive of what happened to the protestor, just observing that what happened has been forgotten by many.
I don't mind a bit of civil disobedience now and then. As a newspaper reporter long ago, I and my dog were told to leave the Boston Commons or face charges during a rowdy anti-war protest.
The mounted police officer and I had a heated conversation, which ended when I gave him two choices. Arrest me and my dog, in which case he'll likely be bitten by my German Shepard, and I'll become a hero for all the press, as I compose my account of police brutality for the my editors back in Bangor, Maine.
The war our government started in Vietnam was the tail end of our stop the commies efforts. As usual we made more enemies than friends back then. Come to think of it, our goverment continues to make more enemies than friends.
What I observed in that video was a group of people who have not carefully read all the research papers and reports by the UN, and yes I have read all of the recent reports from the UN as well as studies by scientists whose agree the global climate is gradually warming.
Instead they believe headlines and sensational news reports that attribute nearly every tornado or hurricane to be caused by the villains responsible for "climate change."
If there is any need for silly protests, the paucity of their cause will soon enough be exposed. I learned long ago that good intentions are no excuse for stupid actions.
As usual, Matt, thanks for providing coverage of this recent escalation by the doom within (pick a time frame) crowd.
“ in which case he'll likely be bitten by my German Shepard, and I'll become a hero for all the press”
In reality, you would be arrested, and your dog would have been held for an undetermined amount of time to be tested, or the dog would have been shot on the spot.
I know of no “heros” who are willing to have their dog killed for the owner’s beliefs.
Took the words out of my mouth. His dog would have been euthanized if not shot. I suspect this story if it happened has been embellished. Risking the life of your dog for some political stunt is no act of bravery.
Admittedly, Jan, I was a pig headed young man. My older self gets the shakes when I recall my younger follies.
The reality of that conflict was that I was far away from the rowdy crowd, and had a reporter's notebook and pencil in my hand. Most members of Boston's finest did not want to waste time after their shift filling out paper work. And the mounted officer calmed down about the same time as I came to my senses.
He admitted he had not carefully listened when I told him what I was doing.
I think you have created the figure of the social media addled humorless activist bent on destroying everything…a figure who refuses to see the value in anything beyond its instrumentality. I just don’t think this figure exists. It reminds me of the internet folks that rail against “cultural marxists.” Who are they talking about? What are they talking about?
You’ve painted these two activists as the progenitors of a terrorist group in a dystopian novel.
Get a hold of yourself. These activists are not the people on this planet that make life so miserable. You know exactly who those people are - you’ve written about many of them.
All I’m saying is that the reaction to these two activists is pretty extreme and misplaced.
The idea that there is some social movement interested in destroying so called western values, that this is corrupting the youth, etc is suspect.
I believe that this intense response to these two activists is actually about something else…I don’t know what exactly but the response is way out of proportion.
Matt, most of the world’s paintings are in vaults, unseen and protected as investments. Sure, these works aren’t destroyed but no one gets to see them either.
If your gripe is that these “dopes” spit on the value of art for civilization, etc, then what about these wealthy art collectors that hide it all away?
As for the comment that maybe if an oil executive saw the sunflowers painting he might be moved to stop spoiling the earth?
You have to be joking. An oil executive who inherited both an oil company and a private equity fund sits as the chair of the board for the National Gallery of Australia.
I imagine you will find many board members of many museums owning oil companies and totally unmoved by any of the art and beauty they control.
That being said, destroying art is dumb.
What’s more effective is sabotaging pipeline construction like they did in North Dakota.
Sorry to say but the fetish for “conversation” has got us nowhere on this issue.
That's because a conversation implies two sides. Radical environmentalists want to harangue us and then impose their vision. Not having convinced anyone to go along with it.
Harangued by environmentalists. Maybe it’s the company you keep.
I love the “two sides” comment. What are the two sides anyway?
Perhaps one side is unaccountable transnational mega corporations that only want money and they will destroy and kill whoever to get it. Perhaps the other side then is the whiny brats who KEEP RUINING EVERYTHING.
Or maybe…One side wants to drive around, build stuff, move to Mars, eat cheeseburgers and the other side wants everyone to be sad!
One side is down to fuck, the other side wants to have a conversation about consent.
There was nothing avant garde (new or unusual) about their actions. It is the same tired whining from the same pampered brats who decry civilization at every turn. Avant garde would have been advocating for a massive push to build nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation. "Renewables" are too expensive and too intermittent to ever be baseload power.
Try asking the genius protestors what the solutions are and you often found they never got that far into the subject. These are rich bored despicable dilettantes who have never worked a day in their lives. One day they will wake up and realize they are the bad guys in this cowboy movie
You're right, which makes the buzzword "woke" a semantic misnomer and another linguistic fraud perpetrated by Big Media and the Media/Marxist Industrial complex.
Since they will never, as you observed, wake up - by definition they can never be woke (or at least what the word woke should mean).
Thank you PeteRR for injecting some science to the discussion. The protestors, which looked like a bunch of smug 60’s retreads and wannabes, lacked any such practical insights and probably couldn’t bluff their way through a basic climate science exam. Since China is by far the greatest emitter of CO2, why aren’t they protesting in front of the Chinese embassy?
It has to be said that if China wasn't supplying so much of the consumer goods market in this country, and worldwide- about 1/4 of everything is made in China now- they wouldn't be nearly the carbon emitter they are presently. The PRC is also of course in the forefront of R&D of advanced nuclear plant designs, as well as solar panel production. The Biden administration has taken steps to fund domestic efforts to research Gen III and Iv nuclear plants and to ramp up solar panel production, because it is not a good idea to allow China to achieve a monopoly over such crucially needed technologies.
I think climate activists need to outgrow their tactical ineptitude. But I'll take them over climate heating deniers, who are basically running interference for the pollutocrats of lobbying organizations like the API, using the tactics of Roger Stone ("there's no need for logical consistency, as long as it makes the opposition look bad.")
Betcha they both had pricey iPhones made by asian slaves, with materials mined from the third world.
If these dipshits want to go back to the 19th century (but without horses or burning wood), let em find out how that plays out. But the wiser among us already know what that end game looks like, and therefore won't go along with it. The goal of this shit is to depopulate the planet, which these useless idiots won't figure out until they're next on the kill-conveyor.
It is now cheaper to build renewables than to run current power plants. Intermittency will be regulated through grid-level battery systems. If your information is over 6 months old, it's wrong. That's how fast this industry is moving.
You have no idea what the heck you are talking about. Did you also materialize a billion child slaves in Africa to make the minerals for this endeavor magically appear?
"Tesla’s world’s largest battery is moving ahead with expansion: Tesla is switching to lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells for its utility-scale Megapack energy storage product"
There are no grid-level battery systems and due to raw material constraints, there won't be for a long time.
On top of which no battery system can overcome a regional lack of wind. Summer of 2021 all of Western Europe experienced a weeks long lull, putting those countries into an energy deficit that we still haven't emerged from.
Civilization requires on-call energy generation. Not just whatever Mother Nature is willing to provide. In 2021 the UK received just 18% of the nameplate power from all of it's wind and solar generation. 358 gigawatts of potential power and 50.5 gigs of actual power.
If there was a way to embed an image, I would provide it.
A system of batteries to power an entire regional grid for weeks.
Last summer if France hadn't had dispatchable energy from their nuke plant fleet, it would have been catastrophe in the UK, Spain, etc. What did happen was horrible enough.
That's less than 10% of the homes in just that area, for optimistically 10 hours. What will it cost? Who's paying for it? Will it drive up electricity prices?
Only if you factor in the government putting their heavy thumb on the scales of energy production. 'Renewable' energy is allowed to game the system, being paid for all power produced, even when not needed, and generating renewable credits at the same time. The dirty secret which has become more well known recently is that 'renewable' energy cannot provide the needed base load for modern society.
The EUs 'renewable energy' facade was shown to rely entirely on Russian gas.
“These activists seem sincere, and clearly they feel like less intrusive tactics aren’t getting the job done,” ........ what right do activists have to destroy things they don’t own and didn’t build to get their message across? Or to lay in the middle of the street because they can’t reverse the industrial revolution? These tactics are like a guy hitting on a girl, her saying no, and him deciding to hold her down and rape her to get his message across since his “less intrusive” words weren’t getting the job done of him getting his way.
At some point people need to accept that if they don’t make a convincing argument they don’t get to throw a fit like a toddler. Plus, all of these things are actual crimes. If law enforcement won’t enforce the law, sooner or later, everyday people tired of the 💩 will do it for them, and that’s when things get really ugly.
Destroying artwork, dumping milk out in grocery stores, and blocking highways doesn’t work to accomplish anything aside from showing the world these grown babies have parents that never required them to grow the hell up.
What's wrong with these people, didn't they hear old Joe is all out for protecting our climate? However, what is confusing is his throwing money, millions and millions of dollars at Ukraine, escalating the war, extending the war, and taking the chance of creating a nuclear holocaust that will destroy all life on this planet. Better they should march against that.
No matter your beliefs climate change is a reality, and presents a threat to all life forms on this planet. That being said the tactics employed by these activists too often evoke anger in others, and their good intentions become very counter productive. When I went to college climate change wasn't up for discussion and neither was it part of the curriculum in HS or JHS and that denial took place through the last century even though it is recognized as the century of the environment and evokes names like Rachel Carlson, and her book, Silent Spring. As a result you have generations of people who are ill informed and are climate change deniers. I wish the educational system had made a greater effort to inform students on this issue, since these mass protests, even on a global level, turn people away. It also has to be understood that changes that will alter our present course will take time. Joe Biden's approach is untimely.
You inadvertently undermined your own point and made the "climate change deniers" point for them. Rachel Carson was wrong, and did more harm than good, but her book evoked an emotional response and thus spawned a movement. Emotional belief without facts is religion. Another example is the environmentalists that protest nuclear power and force nuclear plants to shut down to make way for solar panels and wind. Solar and wind require fossil fuel generation as a backup. Nuclear does not. Thus, the push for solar and wind extend the human need to burn fossil fuels into perpetuity. Nevermind the environmental damage caused by solar panels thenselves.
Carson did more damage than any other single individual concerned with the "environment." The message is always the same. "There's an emergency. Only we, the enlightened, care." It seems bird eggs had thinner shells if the female had eaten mosquitoes killed by DDT. So, DDT was banned. Hooray!
Except the price paid was in more mosquitoes, biting more children, transmitting more malaria, and we can measure the price paid in 500,000 additional unneeded deaths of children every year. But the children are small and brown and out of sight, so in this (and other cases) "we care" about the wrong thing, and others pay the price.
Carson, David Brower, Farley Mowat, Greta, the list goes on. This has been a tactic of the environment left for ages; the need to lie for the "greater good." And each time it comes back and bites them in the ass.
that's the Dunce version of the story, Swagman. It's a Right-wing Ideological Fable.
You're just plain wrong on this, Bill. I don't know where you're getting your information, but it certainly wasn't the book Silent Spring.
DDT is banned in the US, but it is not banned for pest control globally. The UN, which only got involved with establishing a worldwide standard in 2004, made a specific exemption for pest vector control.
From the Wiki on DDT:
"The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which took effect in 2004, put a global ban on several persistent organic pollutants, and restricted DDT use to vector control. The convention was ratified by more than 170 countries. Recognizing that total elimination in many malaria-prone countries is currently unfeasible absent affordable/effective alternatives, the convention exempts public health use within World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines from the ban.[62] Resolution 60.18 of the World Health Assembly commits WHO to the Stockholm Convention's aim of reducing and ultimately eliminating DDT.[63] Malaria Foundation International states, "The outcome of the treaty is arguably better than the status quo going into the negotiations. For the first time, there is now an insecticide which is restricted to vector control only, meaning that the selection of resistant mosquitoes will be slower than before."[64]
Despite the worldwide ban, agricultural use continued in India,[65] North Korea, and possibly elsewhere.[20] As of 2013, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 tons of DDT were produced for disease vector control, including 2,786 tons in India.[66] DDT is applied to the inside walls of homes to kill or repel mosquitoes. This intervention, called indoor residual spraying (IRS), greatly reduces environmental damage. It also reduces the incidence of DDT resistance.[67] ..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
A passage that alludes to another thing that Rachel Carson- a trained aquatic biologist- got right: insects evolve to develop resistance to chemical pesticides, and the more frequently they're used, the more intractable of a problem that resistance tends to get.
I do what I can to avoid Wiki (fill in the blank). It's largely a popularity-based source. I do go to the citations and references and often find something useful that way.
To crickets from the critics. It’s funny they love to spout opinions but when presented with facts they are silent.
Heart not working. Comment liked.
People get Rachel Carson wrong. Carson did not advocate for a total ban on DDT- most certainly not as a means of addressing public health problems like malaria mosquitos!
From the Wiki entry for Rachel Carson, including reference to a direct quote by her:
"...In regards to the pesticide DDT, Carson never actually called for an outright ban. Part of the argument she made in Silent Spring was that even if DDT and other insecticides had no environmental side effects, their indiscriminate overuse was counter-productive because it would create insect resistance to the pesticide(s), making the pesticides useless in eliminating the target insect populations:
No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease by controlling insect vectors of infection. However, it has heard little of the other side of the story—the defeats, the short-lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts. Even worse, we may have destroyed our very means of fighting.[63]
Carson further noted that "Malaria programmes are threatened by resistance among mosquitoes"[64] and emphasized the advice given by the director of Holland's Plant Protection Service: "Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity' ... Pressure on the pest population should always be as slight as possible."[65]..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
Have you read Carson's book Silent Spring? I have. It called attention to how casually chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides were being used for inappropriate purposes like massive aerial spraying of woodlands in attempts to stop invasive pests like gypsy moths, and use of mass quantities in efforts to eradicate fire ants. A fool's errand.
Rachel Carson also pointed out that there was often complete disregard for the amounts used, neglect about precautions for workers, and no attention given to limiting the use of pesticides during inappropriate weather conditions and seasons. She was in the forefront of arguing in favor of biological alternatives to kill insect pests, and those alternatives have often proved much more effective at controlling insect pest outbreaks than chemical sprays. Examples of the superiority of biological control measures over chemical pesticides include the present-day efforts to control the gypsy moth and the fire ant. And the boll weevil, whose infestations once made cotton agriculture one of the heaviest pesticide users, is now on the verge of being eradicated from the US on the basis of ecological researches into the requirements of its life cycle. There's still some pesticide use, but it's been incorporated into a larger strategy that centers on getting rid of all cotton plants after harvesting, which deprives the boll weevil of the habitat it requires to thrive and reproduce. https://www.stltoday.com/boll-weevil-eradication-closes-in-on-success/article_70c67ccf-cae1-5238-8af4-49e4645a4dfb.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCyidsxIDtQ
David MacKay's final interview before cancer got him. He makes your point that if you believe in anthropogenic global warming (I don't; he does; doesn't matter here.) you must still be rational in how you address it.
And never mind the damage done by nuclear power plants. Go talk to people who live near them. I talked to people in Braidwood, IL . I did and the picture is ugly
What damage? High paying jobs?
Several nukes in the Toronto area
No damage
I got a relative that works at Braidwood. I'm not being antagonstic, but do you have sources or did you publish your findings?
Yes, I am amazed that those who advocate for nuclear power are delusional in not realizing that they are NUCLEAR. We are concerned about nuclear war but we're not concerned about placing a nuclear facility in our neighborhoods?
I can remember when they were trying to dispose of spent nuclear waste in the 1970s and they couldn't find anywhere safe to put it! Every community said, "Not in my back yard!" Finally they put it into the oceans in (presumably) safe containers. Of course the ocean species didn't get a voice.
If you think in terms of 1970 then everything is bad.
Of course now they have reactors that can take that old waste and extract all the rest of the energy and then you end up with almost nothing.
Read up on it.
Nuclear is the only future on offer if you believe we need to stop burning fossil fuels
You do understand that there is a big difference between nuclear weapons and nuclear power, no? Nuclear weapons depend on detonation. Nuclear power depends on the natural radioactive decay of Uranium and the heat that generates in order to boil water and turn it into steam. That steam is then sent through turbines to generate electricity. In a natural gas or coal powered plant you burn the fuel to generate steam that then is sent through turbines. It's the same basic principal in both cases. You boil water and create electricity.
There's no risk of a detonation. There is risk of overboiling water and superheating it to the point that it blows out, but it's a tiny risk. Again, this is the steam blowing up the plant, not the nuclear fuel. There's no mushroom cloud. There's no fallout. The only real risk is to any cleanup crews that have to go in and clean up the mess. Nuclear power is safe. And yes, I would welcome a nuclear power plant in my backyard over miles and miles and miles of wind turbines or solar panel fields it would take to generate the same amount of electricity.
Would you rather live next to a nuclear power plant or a coal fired power plant?
Just as an aside.... when I was in college in the early 70s, the big bogeyman climate change was that the next Ice Age was on its way. So fifty years later, the climate change is the “ polar” opposite? So the Ice Age thing was miscalculated?
I can tell that you were never really informed about climate change based on your commentary here, since teachers were no very informative on this subject back then. In the 70's it was barely discussed if referenced if at all. By the way some fifty years later a lot of information has been accumulated to substantiate the reality of climate change. I do think Joe's ways of going about it really sucks.
When you assume.... actually I believe it was on the cover of Time or Newsweek Magazine which back then were highly respected news magazines. Fifty years later is actually not a lot of information as either was the fifty years of information on which the climate scientists at that time based their reality of cooling temperatures and expanding polar caps. But yes, I was a 21 year old college kid who didn’t take that threat too seriously and seeing as the science then didn’t pan out, I dismissed the predicted frigid temps. Fifty years of climate study is like the earth blinking once. The big difference between then and now is that “climate change” has become a very lucrative emotionally fueled industry.
No Martha, not true. I wish it were, but it's not. Much more evidence has accumulated since the 70''s. Temperatures are warming around the globe. When the industrial revolution came about they were concerned about the effects of carbon dioxide on the environment, so it's not even a recent concern. I still feel there is so much denial because people were not educated in their science classrooms on this issue, then you have the oil companies implementing campaigns of denial, as did the cigarette companies when they tied smoking to cancer. Lots of lies. Personally I think Biden's agenda in this area should have been put off, since it's a time when many are feeling vulnerable after dealing with a pandemic. not to mention the lying the democrats pushed when it came to Trump. I also don't approve of the way people go about expressing their concern over this issue which turns people off. That purple haired brat with the can of tomato juice really made me angry. We have to do something, but changes don't happen overnight, and require decades to implement.
Fran, May I respectfully ask that you read this terrific piece from Prof Richard Lindzen, of MIT (my Alma Mater). See if it changes your mind, or at least your certitude. Best, Tom
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Happer-Lindzen-SEC-6-17-22.pdf
Interesting article, but it has been said, no PREACHED, that SCIENCE has come to a consensus that no one dare question.
II. SCIENCE DEMONSTRATES THERE IS NO CLIMATE-RELATED RISK CAUSED BY FOSSIL FUELS AND CO2, AND THEREFORE NO RELIABLE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE SUPPORTING THE PROPOSED RULE
Climate change is not a danger to us and the planet, you have no proof of that whatsoever.
I am not someone who works in that field of science. You want proof read those who are.
You mean those whose views are allowed to be disseminated.
I do, thanks for your concern
The climate is a very complicated complex system. See https://billheath.substack.com/p/complex-systems?utm_source=email.
We are a part of the complex system and cannot help but affect it. Can you list the 100 most powerful actors in the system? How does a negligible contribution of a relatively inefficient greenhouse gas rank as the most significant and powerful actor? I don't deny climate change; instead, I am a skeptic. All scientists are.
Bill - great post. Like a lot of our 'problems', its more about power and control than the greater good.
Bill if you are really interested in this subject there are many sources available. Whether you believe it or not does not change the reality that climate change is happening and the environment on a world wide level is being affected in a negative way. The US, and China, especially China, since it produces carbon emissions almost three times greater then ours, but all industrial country's need to implement change. The overall temperature in the world has gone up almost 2 degrees in a little more then a hundred years, oceans are warming, glaciers are melting. research it. I am not ignorant of the natural world, the environment and all that. It was my major in school, taught it, teach it. No one is telling you not to hop on a plane, turn off your lights or dump your car for one that works on electricity. I think it's absurd that Biden in the midst of political turmoil, a pandemic, and rising costs, etc, decided to deal with climate change by shutting down the Keystone pipeline, then implement a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on federal lands while a quarter of our oil and gas is gotten that way. All that has cost elevated gas prices and I've listened to people cursing him out at the pump. Then talk about electric cars at 60 thousand a pop. It's like telling a fat lady who just lost her husband that she has to immediately go on a diet and cut back on the wine she enjoys with her evening meal. It feels like he wants to sabotage the movement . It takes time to bring the kind of change we need, as well as educating people on this issue. I also don't approve of purple haired brats throwing tomato soup at my beloved van Gogh painting, or what many did during the the global climate change week, since it turns people off of the message.
Fran, I'm with you until you make a leap of faith similar to that entailed by religion, from temperatures are rising (no skepticism here on that point) to carbon being at fault. You provide no proof; I've read a good sample of the scientific papers, understand them, and most are pure rubbish. The IPCC is a political, not scientific, body.
The world's top experts in glaciers are in (surprise) Iceland, not New York. They agree that the glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere are shrinking. They point out that those in the southern hemisphere are growing by an equal amount, and the global mass of glaciers is stable.
Follow the money. There are infinite funds available to study the problem of carbon emissions and climate change. As soon as a scientist concludes that there is no significant problem, then there's no follow-on study to be performed, and the scientist must perforce find another crisis.
Don't just look at the past 200 (or even 20 hundred) years. Talk to geologists. The greatest rise in global temperatures took place millions of years before humans existed and amounted to about 18 degrees Fahrenheit in a ten-year period, evidently due to a rupture in an undersea cavity containing methane, a genuinely powerful greenhouse gas. Look at historical records; the earth swings from warm to cool on multiple interlocked cycles. We are currently in an abnormal warm period and have been since the Little Ice Age.
Of course there are many natural causes which elevate the global temperature like volcanic eruptions, sunlight variations, etc, but when they talk about climate change they are not talking about earth’s climate change due to natural causes, not related to human activity, and have been with us forever, and will be , but their influence is small, or they occur too slowly to explain the the very rapid elevations that are seen today over a very short period of time. Your background isn't in science otherwise you wouldn't be using this time worn explanation of why climate change isn't so. I am not trying to indoctrinate you just presenting the common consensus among scientists in this field. You are wasting your time in trying to make me believe climate change just ain't so. Science is my background.
I have a simple question for you Fran - how much of the last 200 years of climate change was completely natural versus how much was anthropogenic? Surely you've read enough to know this, right? Otherwise, how can you claim any factual basis for your concern?
Listen curmudgeon, good name for you by the way. since you fail to intimidate me with your lack of charm, and my background is in science, answer your own question and I'll correct any wrong thinking on your part. How's that?
Voice of reason unheard in MSM circles.
Thanks.
I would offer that the “educational system” has already done enough damage. Ideological power hungry twats.
In retrospect, I'm fairly satisfied with most of my American public school education, although admittedly that was 50 years ago. Despite the fact that my early record of superior academic achievement went into a nosedive once I entered 7th grade, and didn't really recover until I was over 30, as a "returning" college student.
I think there are a lot of ways the system could be improved- I'm a longtime John Taylor Gatto fan. And it's undeniable that the public school system has propagandistic aspects; notwithstanding all the bird being whipped over "cancellation" these days as if it were a brand-new thing, it's always been the case that any public school teacher who dares voice pointed objections about ongoing US military interventions or skeptical questions about US foreign policy in their classroom is risking their job security.
No but drag shows or sex with students should be a risk
fwiw, in 1973, one of my classmates in my public high school (suburban middle-class school district) married one of my high school teachers. iirc, she was impregnated by him in her senior year. It didn't even rate as gossip, just something that happened.
Thinking about it, I'll admit to some idle curiosity about how that worked out for both of them. But I refuse to consider a relationship like that to be deviant or perverted, per se.
As a teacher I'm sure I can write a longer critical critique of our educational system.
believe me, so could I.
No matter your beliefs, no.
sorry, wrong. you've drawn your inference from a false assertion. GIGO.
Exactly. Someone trying to get to work or having some type of emergency is going to get very violent with these adolescents. Or some driver totally loses it and plows right through them.
You have a right to peaceful protest. You do not have a right to block highways or damage property.
Zero sympathy for these so called protesters. They are narcissistic people saying “ look at me”.
Agree. I tend to think violence and destruction rarely, if ever, actually works over any medium to long time frame. Blocking roads can work, with a sympathetic cause and when well organized, in a meaningful to the actual cause location, and when the protesters remain peaceful. It almost never works when the protesters are acting like bratty children randomly throwing themselves down on random highways causing great frustration to passing motorist that are reminded the brat in the road would like to outlaw the job the passerby’s are driving to in order too feed their family along with their mode of getting to said job.
Did you say the same about the Canadian truck brigade when they were blocking traffic?
There are important differences between truckers, who contribute important labor/ services to society, engaging in civil disobedience for the right not to be forced to be injected with a potentially dangerous experimental drug they don’t want to be injected with, and woke doomsday cult climate zealots flinging themselves down on highways, or throwing soup at priceless artwork, demanding the implementation of pro-scarcity policies meant to intentionally starve, freeze, and impoverish hundreds of millions of innocent human beings.
The truckers were seeking reasonable personal freedoms/ civil liberties while the climate zealots are seeking to destroy the lives of complete strangers via demands that aren’t well articulated, can’t ever be met, and arise from the religious worship of faulty climate models that claim to predict temperatures for the next 100-1,000 years yet can’t replicate already observed temperatures over any 10 year time period.
Well articulated and reasonable demands are a key component of successful civil rights movements involving civil disobedience. The reasonableness of the demands under scrutiny is crucial to gaining lasting public support that changes hearts and minds, including mine.
The idea that methods alone should somehow dictate the success or public support of any movement is intellectually lazy, and in the case of actions intended for public nuisance or disruption, has been frequently disproven as a theory. Most attempts to gain attention via self-proclaimed “civil disobedience” for a “cause” ends in a jail sentence and not much else. I am now, and have always, supported equal treatment under the law - something the Canadian truckers were not given in comparison to woke Canadian protesters.
The doomsday climate cult might gain attention from these stunts, but public support will continue to be fleeting at best. Reality gets in the way - A slightly warmer Earth is a greener Earth where more food grows, CO2 is plant food, deaths from weather continue to drop dramatically globally, storm frequency has and severe weather has been mostly declining in recent decades, the oceans have actually risen only 7.4 inch since 1900 (in total - less than a foot - most of the Netherlands is and has been 12-21 feet below sea level). Under scrutiny it doesn’t make much sense to destroy people and the environment now so the “climate” can’t do it down the road. 🤷♀️
As far as the “Earth” goes, it’ll be just fine even if it gets really really warm, and again, most people know this. Many learned in elementary school that during much of the reign of the dinosaurs the Earth was much warmer, both CO2 levels and oxygen levels were much higher, oceans hundreds of meters above where that are today - and life was thriving.
Without the protestor demands withstanding scrutiny, these stunts come across as annoying acts by entitled brats who have too much free time and are spending that free time trying to bully strangers. Unlike the truckers, the followers of these doomsday “climate” cults aren’t going to gain popular support because their demands can’t withstand genuine scrutiny or actual outcomes. There is a reason its Michael Shellenberger who has the largest Substack on the climate and is quietly gaining popularity.
I assume you supported Truckers' Protest, they used the same tactics. What right did they have? Traffic jamming, even bridge jamming and somehow everyone was cheering.
The Truckers had a sympathetic cause and, under the Canadian Charter rights, a legal right to protest as they did.
The civil rights movement and suffrage were also peaceful protests (on the side of the protesters). The protesters in these cases could articulate what they wanted and gained popular support as a result of well-articulated reasonable demands that demanded nothing of others beyond equal treatment under the law as human beings. The protestors were entirely peaceful and, like the Canadian truckers, didn’t destroy things or demand others give up their lives and futures to accommodate their demands that centered around personal freedoms and equal rights.
The climate alarmists can’t articulate anything that will gain support. Their demands range from forced starvation of billions to forced abortions (which is what government population management is). The climate alarmists contribute nothing. They can’t articulate anything beyond nonsense dystopian babble. They have no idea what they are talking about. They offer zero solutions besides pushing crap to kill and impoverish a lot a people.
Anyone can claim they are engaging in civil disobedience. A car jacker can claim they are trying to combat wealth inequality. If anyone is going to block a highway in the name of a cause they darn well better have a sympathetic cause that gains popular support because civil disobedience that fails to garner sympathy is just plain old breaking the law. The climate alarmists are spoiled brats plain old breaking the law and it doesn’t begin to help their supposed cause.
As usual, NCmom, you wrote my answer 🤣
Now I'll have to compose my thoughts farther down in the massive number of comments.
Guess I just slept too late.
So NCMom’s criteria for what constitutes disruptive hooliganism or righteous civil disobedience is whether she sympathizes with their cause or not…
I am rather surprised more people, NCMom included, don’t grasp the problem with this…
Do you honestly believe it’s moral or realistic to assert those engaging in attention seeking criminal antics are the ones who get to decide if society see them as engaging in “righteous civil disobedience” regardless of the facts or objective reality?
As you well know, I am one single person and I alone cannot possibly decide what causes do and do not gain material support from the general public. On a personal level, we should differentiate hooligans from the righteous on the basis of our support, or lack there of, for the “cause” being promoted via illegal antics that often come at a very real cost to others that have nothing to do with the situation.
And they’re not brats! Yeah!
both the Truckers Protest and the Climate “roadblock” Activists are forms of Civil Disobedience, which I support.
the problem tho, is when the governmental response is disproportionate to the actual crime or disobedience (in both cases, blocking traffic).
the climate protesters went to jail for the weekend, the truckers had their trucks towed and bank accounts frozen.
Blocking traffic includes blocking emergency vehicles like ambulances- and also drivers handling personal emergencies, at which point it's no longer fun and games. Not a tactic I endorse.
Ethical civil disobedience always reckons with the liability of penalties as a consequence of breaking the law. All too many young activists nowadays have been lulled into some cloud-castle fantasy that "civil disobedience" is a foolproof legal defense, and that any activism taken in the course of "redress of grievances" is indemnified against criminal charges!
This false impression has been encouraged by the tactical response of many locales where mass demonstrations have taken place- to dismiss all charges against demonstrators as long as their offenses are limited to "trespassing" or "obstructing traffic". The local courts in cases like those aren't dismissing the charges because the arrests were invalid, they're doing it for their own convenience.
While I can't stand Marcuse's ideas about "repressive tolerance" as a catch-all social explanation, I have to concede that the concept isn't entirely invalid: in any situation where it's taken for granted in advance all around that practically all of the arrested demonstrators are simply going to be detained for a few hours before being set free with no charges, the demonstrators are merely pretending to engage in acts of civil disobedience, and the police are merely pretending to arrest them.
I know I heard from one trucker in an interview and he said they were being very careful to keep roads open for emergency services. I think they went too far with the honking initially but they stopped that too.
Ironically, Capital Beltway traffic is already so prone to unscheduled slowdowns (and others you can practically set your watch by) that the trucker's "slowdown" protest hardly registered as an obstacle. A fact that also calls into question the "tactic" of pedestrians blocking a highway for the purpose of protesting climate change, something something...what's the specific target- petro-powered vehicles? the disinclination of commuters to use Metro, which is only a hybrid solution anyway, given that it usually still requires an auto commute?
Exactly how "effective" is blocking the freeway as a tactic to protest personal auto use, given that the drivers who receive notice about the obstacle will simply re-route off of an exit to the network of surface streets, often requiring a greater travel distance than the usual routine?
So why do it, then? To post videos on Instagram?
Any time someone wants to pursue a plan of political activism, the first thing to do is to be clear about goals, and the be clear about tangible benefits resulting from the action other than to the personal egos of the activists. Which starts by being real about it, that there are status bennies (or at least the promise of them) for the individual personal ego of the activists. Activists put themselves onstage, in the role of "hero of the people." So admit that upfront, because it's required for clarity. Because there has to be more to it than that, hmm? There had better be.
The next thing to do is to take personal ego out of the picture, and consider the benefits of a project for everyone else. Be clear about messaging. An example of an unclear idea is implicitly blaming everyone driving a car on the freeway (who doesn't own an electric vehicle.) That is not the place to start.
Have the protesters ever considered mounting a lobbying effort to have a sufficiently adequate fleet of circulating LNG or EV-powered light buses and vans offering door to door commuter service to Metro, with subscriber-based door to door service on subscriber phone request in daylight non-peak hours? Door to door dispatch service available, room for cargo like groceries and shopping, with driver assistance. Subscriber model, like $100-$200 a year, less for senior citizens. (Leave taxicabs, Uber, and Lyft for the night shift.) That idea has been around for at least 40 years, but no one could figure out how to make it work back in the 1980s, so it was forgotten about. Now we're well into the portable phone era, the LNG/EV-powered fleet era, and also the era when the benefits of lowering auto traffic per se can plainly be viewed as a worthwhile public investment. Consult with some traffic engineers and professional drivers, and figure it out. Makes a lot more sense than any damn UAV fantasy game.
I guarantee, if anyone- I don't care who- could clearly map out how a diversified public transit option using light buses and vans offering last-mile & cargo service could relieve a sizeable percentage of the auto traffic currently on the road in traffic-choked cities and suburbs, the locals would go for it whether it's Washington DC or Houston.
Even if they're already regular riders, practically any suburban commuter is disconcerted by the requirement to either drive and park or walk-wait-ride-transfer on a pre-scheduled fixed route before boarding at a metro station. And lugging something larger than a backpack or briefcase is something between difficult and impossible.
If they could get door-to-station service, or door-to-door to/from a market or mall, they'd go for it.
There's entirely too much rote formulaic emphasis in the pop media on "Americans love affair with their cars" as an explanation for the failures of public transit. There are a lot of cities where the automobile option isn't about love, it's just a flat necessity, and a hated one. And it's entirely possible to love the freedom of a personal automobile and still prefer public transit, because the "freedom" of a job commute that requires 3 hours a day harnessed to 2 tons of gadgets that you're required to drive is really dubious.
(I wonder how much traffic would benefit from an overall 20% reduction in vehicle use, or by a 30% reduction at rush hour. How many hours of life would become less tedious, for everyone involved?)
Public transit needs to be as close to door to door as possible, and it also needs to allow safe storage for cargo- because that's a big reason for people to go out. For groceries, if nothing else. But grocery shopping doesn't work very well, bus-stop to bus-stop. But that's the limit of public transit service. So the primary impediments to increasing public transit ridership are practical, not about American individualist love affairs with their cars.
yes, that’s a very insightful observation.
my point is I support civil disobedience, but one has to accept the consequences whether that is being arrested and charged or dealing with a desperate motorist trying to get to his pregnant wife.
they seem to think that the “rightness” of their actions invalidate any prosecution, which, in turn, invalidates the purpose of civil disobedience.
hardly MLK or Thoreau in a prison cell.
Being in a prison cell does nothing unless you can flood the prisons. Even then it's out of sight, out of mind. But usually a cause which can summon that kind of support can more easily go into the streets and annoy people enough just by demonstrating.
No artwork was destroyed. The painting was behind a pane of glass (tho you wouldn't have learned that reading Matt's previous article about it).
It was a prank, and kind of an avant garde act of theatrical activism, using the Van Gogh as a prop in the stunt.
The painting was protected not exactly by glass, but more like a glaze, which an art restorer friend tells me can be made of various substances (including glass), and though designed to protect against abrasion isn’t exactly tested for soup toss. It worked out okay, this time, but these dopes couldn’t have been sure of that and can’t be going forward. Secondly, they choice an “iconic painting” for a reason. They didn’t throw soup on a statue to Ada Walter or on an indigenous graveyard. They picked a painting because they imagine it a meaningless bourgeois affectation, thinking about its price-tag in dollars as opposed to its actual worth, which they obviously don’t understand or recognize. That’s why this episode is worrisome, because it fits the pattern of people in the social media age being blind to the value of anything except as symbols within a certain political framework, of the Iliad or Beethoven's 9th being useless except as means of perpetuating the decadent before-times. Attacking art is symbolic.
It reminds me of the senseless destruction of the Buddhist statues at Bamiyan by the Taliban. Barbarians mindlessly adhering to a destructive faith.
YES!!
One person's priceless symbol pointing to the indescribable eternal is another's idol to a false god. Who among us has the singular truth? No one. We are all blind men, each holding a small poece of the elephant, declaring that we know its truth. And this is why we must not destroy art, but contemplate it, for each moment betweenart and a unique perceiver is a moment of *creation* - and bring opportunity for a changed perception and thus changed action. Shutdown of highways used by many for living their lives as best as they can in the moment and destruction of globally known art are the two sides of the same anti-creative, anti-life coin. Climate activists begin to communicate themselves to be anti-creative- which is only a hair's breadth away from anti-Creator. It is tragic that they cannot see this. I believe THIS is one primary failure of how we've been educating our young ones: in the misapprehension of the power we humans have over Creation. The sad irony of hearing Indigenous peoples invoked here is not lost on me.
That’s why 90% of Africa’s cultural heritage is in the museums outside of Africa. It had to be taken from them lest they destroy it.
Damn. Barbarians, huh?
And who said the white man’s burden is no longer?
This will probably betray my caveman status but I can't help wondering if they soup bombed a Jackson Pollock canvas would anyone have noticed?
:)
Depending on the soup it might have improved some of the drips…minestrone yes, pea soup no
Who exactly are they saving the world FOR? Certainly not the people in the blocked cars, or anyone who values artistic genius and wishes to see it preserved, or anyone ( my guess) who doesn’t sign up to their vague, self-righteous manifesto. And I think that all of them have been emboldened by the fact that there were no consequences for burning a police station to the ground or pulling down statues of historical significance. Will these people be prosecuted? I doubt it.
As a theatre artist, I can attest to what you’re saying. Plays today have become proxies for ideological battle: what gets produced, what doesn’t, who gets to tell what stories, who doesn’t. The intrinsic worth of a work of theatrical literature as a testament to the ever developing and ongoing discovery of human nature is now a thing of the past, and now they only serve as flashpoints for cancellations and culture war bomb-throwing. Look no dither than this:
https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/1776-star-sara-porkalob-interview-molasses-to-rum.html
I believe Mamet has things to say on this - in a book he recently released to howls from the left.
How do you measure the intrinsic value of a work of art, so you know which can be ethically destroyed?
Can I destroy my own art?
Well, you read The Fountainhead, didn't you? Minus the bodice-ripping parts, the book can be summed up as an exposition on the right of a creator to do as he pleases with their works, and the abhorrence of having their individual creativity interfered with in any way by meddlers and critics. It's a fictional set piece in bold outline; Ayn Rand was allergic to nuance. But it's a mostly valid work. (Whereas Atlas Shrugged, John Galt etc. and the rest of it, that's just solipsism for wannabe Nietszchean Superboys.)
My take: anyone can throw a pail of soup. That act isn't elevated just because it's accompanied by a statement of elevated intent.
Or American Statues in 2020. For what? Of course, sooner or later, one of these lunatics is going to get Wile E. Coyote’d on I-95, and become another hero of the left.
Reminds me. I've been wanting to order a pair of ACME rocket powered roller skates. The user reviews are nearly 4.5 stars. Free delivery with Amazon Prime.
You mean, like, the Seattle protestor who got hit on the highway?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/two-protesters-seattle-seriously-injured-when-hit-car-closed-highway-n1232907
Granted, the highway was closed at night, but that happened more than two years ago and, while the protestor did become a hero of the left to some degree, it seems to have been lost in the shuffle in the "I support the current thing" mindset that runs rampant.
Not trying to be dismissive of what happened to the protestor, just observing that what happened has been forgotten by many.
I don't mind a bit of civil disobedience now and then. As a newspaper reporter long ago, I and my dog were told to leave the Boston Commons or face charges during a rowdy anti-war protest.
The mounted police officer and I had a heated conversation, which ended when I gave him two choices. Arrest me and my dog, in which case he'll likely be bitten by my German Shepard, and I'll become a hero for all the press, as I compose my account of police brutality for the my editors back in Bangor, Maine.
The war our government started in Vietnam was the tail end of our stop the commies efforts. As usual we made more enemies than friends back then. Come to think of it, our goverment continues to make more enemies than friends.
What I observed in that video was a group of people who have not carefully read all the research papers and reports by the UN, and yes I have read all of the recent reports from the UN as well as studies by scientists whose agree the global climate is gradually warming.
Instead they believe headlines and sensational news reports that attribute nearly every tornado or hurricane to be caused by the villains responsible for "climate change."
If there is any need for silly protests, the paucity of their cause will soon enough be exposed. I learned long ago that good intentions are no excuse for stupid actions.
As usual, Matt, thanks for providing coverage of this recent escalation by the doom within (pick a time frame) crowd.
“ in which case he'll likely be bitten by my German Shepard, and I'll become a hero for all the press”
In reality, you would be arrested, and your dog would have been held for an undetermined amount of time to be tested, or the dog would have been shot on the spot.
I know of no “heros” who are willing to have their dog killed for the owner’s beliefs.
Took the words out of my mouth. His dog would have been euthanized if not shot. I suspect this story if it happened has been embellished. Risking the life of your dog for some political stunt is no act of bravery.
Admittedly, Jan, I was a pig headed young man. My older self gets the shakes when I recall my younger follies.
The reality of that conflict was that I was far away from the rowdy crowd, and had a reporter's notebook and pencil in my hand. Most members of Boston's finest did not want to waste time after their shift filling out paper work. And the mounted officer calmed down about the same time as I came to my senses.
He admitted he had not carefully listened when I told him what I was doing.
I think you have created the figure of the social media addled humorless activist bent on destroying everything…a figure who refuses to see the value in anything beyond its instrumentality. I just don’t think this figure exists. It reminds me of the internet folks that rail against “cultural marxists.” Who are they talking about? What are they talking about?
You’ve painted these two activists as the progenitors of a terrorist group in a dystopian novel.
Get a hold of yourself. These activists are not the people on this planet that make life so miserable. You know exactly who those people are - you’ve written about many of them.
For sure. The “green movement” has been, entirely captured by monopoly capital.
I agree with much of what you’ve written so just chill!
All I’m saying is that the reaction to these two activists is pretty extreme and misplaced.
The idea that there is some social movement interested in destroying so called western values, that this is corrupting the youth, etc is suspect.
I believe that this intense response to these two activists is actually about something else…I don’t know what exactly but the response is way out of proportion.
Matt, most of the world’s paintings are in vaults, unseen and protected as investments. Sure, these works aren’t destroyed but no one gets to see them either.
If your gripe is that these “dopes” spit on the value of art for civilization, etc, then what about these wealthy art collectors that hide it all away?
As for the comment that maybe if an oil executive saw the sunflowers painting he might be moved to stop spoiling the earth?
You have to be joking. An oil executive who inherited both an oil company and a private equity fund sits as the chair of the board for the National Gallery of Australia.
I imagine you will find many board members of many museums owning oil companies and totally unmoved by any of the art and beauty they control.
That being said, destroying art is dumb.
What’s more effective is sabotaging pipeline construction like they did in North Dakota.
Sorry to say but the fetish for “conversation” has got us nowhere on this issue.
That's because a conversation implies two sides. Radical environmentalists want to harangue us and then impose their vision. Not having convinced anyone to go along with it.
Bro, I don’t feel
Harangued by environmentalists. Maybe it’s the company you keep.
I love the “two sides” comment. What are the two sides anyway?
Perhaps one side is unaccountable transnational mega corporations that only want money and they will destroy and kill whoever to get it. Perhaps the other side then is the whiny brats who KEEP RUINING EVERYTHING.
Or maybe…One side wants to drive around, build stuff, move to Mars, eat cheeseburgers and the other side wants everyone to be sad!
One side is down to fuck, the other side wants to have a conversation about consent.
I don’t know…just spitballing.
There was nothing avant garde (new or unusual) about their actions. It is the same tired whining from the same pampered brats who decry civilization at every turn. Avant garde would have been advocating for a massive push to build nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuels for electricity generation. "Renewables" are too expensive and too intermittent to ever be baseload power.
Try asking the genius protestors what the solutions are and you often found they never got that far into the subject. These are rich bored despicable dilettantes who have never worked a day in their lives. One day they will wake up and realize they are the bad guys in this cowboy movie
I doubt that most of them will ever wake up. They are just too stupid.
You're right, which makes the buzzword "woke" a semantic misnomer and another linguistic fraud perpetrated by Big Media and the Media/Marxist Industrial complex.
Since they will never, as you observed, wake up - by definition they can never be woke (or at least what the word woke should mean).
Thank you PeteRR for injecting some science to the discussion. The protestors, which looked like a bunch of smug 60’s retreads and wannabes, lacked any such practical insights and probably couldn’t bluff their way through a basic climate science exam. Since China is by far the greatest emitter of CO2, why aren’t they protesting in front of the Chinese embassy?
It has to be said that if China wasn't supplying so much of the consumer goods market in this country, and worldwide- about 1/4 of everything is made in China now- they wouldn't be nearly the carbon emitter they are presently. The PRC is also of course in the forefront of R&D of advanced nuclear plant designs, as well as solar panel production. The Biden administration has taken steps to fund domestic efforts to research Gen III and Iv nuclear plants and to ramp up solar panel production, because it is not a good idea to allow China to achieve a monopoly over such crucially needed technologies.
I think climate activists need to outgrow their tactical ineptitude. But I'll take them over climate heating deniers, who are basically running interference for the pollutocrats of lobbying organizations like the API, using the tactics of Roger Stone ("there's no need for logical consistency, as long as it makes the opposition look bad.")
Great comments. All true. The subject of who “owns” the pollution as in your example is a really interesting one that deserves a lot more coverage.
Betcha they both had pricey iPhones made by asian slaves, with materials mined from the third world.
If these dipshits want to go back to the 19th century (but without horses or burning wood), let em find out how that plays out. But the wiser among us already know what that end game looks like, and therefore won't go along with it. The goal of this shit is to depopulate the planet, which these useless idiots won't figure out until they're next on the kill-conveyor.
It is now cheaper to build renewables than to run current power plants. Intermittency will be regulated through grid-level battery systems. If your information is over 6 months old, it's wrong. That's how fast this industry is moving.
You have no idea what the heck you are talking about. Did you also materialize a billion child slaves in Africa to make the minerals for this endeavor magically appear?
I hope you're referring to Cobalt mining.
"Tesla’s world’s largest battery is moving ahead with expansion: Tesla is switching to lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells for its utility-scale Megapack energy storage product"
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/tesla-shifts-battery-chemistry-for-utility-scale-storage-megawall/600315/
In case you missed it: "LFP batteries do not use cobalt, a critical mineral that can be expensive"
There are no grid-level battery systems and due to raw material constraints, there won't be for a long time.
On top of which no battery system can overcome a regional lack of wind. Summer of 2021 all of Western Europe experienced a weeks long lull, putting those countries into an energy deficit that we still haven't emerged from.
Civilization requires on-call energy generation. Not just whatever Mother Nature is willing to provide. In 2021 the UK received just 18% of the nameplate power from all of it's wind and solar generation. 358 gigawatts of potential power and 50.5 gigs of actual power.
If there was a way to embed an image, I would provide it.
Do you mean a specific country? The Hornsdale battery in southern Australia comes to mind. US tripled battery storage in 2021 - ?
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/02/grid-scale-battery-storage-in-us-tripled-in-2021/
Here's a quick list:
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/10-notable-battery-storage-projects-that-went-live-in-2021/#gref
You are correct - batteries are required for a stable baseload. Otherwise renewables can't overcome intermittency issues.
Raw material constraints are being side-stepped with new cell chemistries. There is a Megapack factory coming online this year.
Why do you say - "There are no grid-level battery systems" Do you mean grids that are 100% batteries?
A system of batteries to power an entire regional grid for weeks.
Last summer if France hadn't had dispatchable energy from their nuke plant fleet, it would have been catastrophe in the UK, Spain, etc. What did happen was horrible enough.
That's less than 10% of the homes in just that area, for optimistically 10 hours. What will it cost? Who's paying for it? Will it drive up electricity prices?
Only if you factor in the government putting their heavy thumb on the scales of energy production. 'Renewable' energy is allowed to game the system, being paid for all power produced, even when not needed, and generating renewable credits at the same time. The dirty secret which has become more well known recently is that 'renewable' energy cannot provide the needed base load for modern society.
The EUs 'renewable energy' facade was shown to rely entirely on Russian gas.