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There is an influential school of thought that says if someone knows the truth, they will accept it. The environmental and social justice movement largely subscribes to this, and thus the tremendous focus on events that raise awareness, from candlelight vigils to An Inconvenient Truth. How’s that working out?
Capitalist theory clearly breaks down when it comes to the climate crisis – or many other forms of pollution.
Most of the ‘climate realists’ I have spoken with, whether in an interview on our (now retired) radio show or in casual conversation, went through some sort of journey to get the point where they accept climate reality; it often wasn’t easy. My case is no different; I did not always accept reality, but now understand why Gandhi once said “Truth is God.”
On a fairly regular basis, I get people saying I’m a kook, an extremist, nuts, and recently an eco-fascist, all because of my writings on climate change. I prefer to think of myself as well-grounded in reality. Why the disconnect?
Some time ago, we interviewed James Howard Kunstler on our now-defunct radio show about climate change, Breakin Ice, and he despaired that the morons in the United States were making sensible action – such as self-preservation – impossible.
The Great Global Warming Inquisition: Where Scientists are Galileo and the Church is Market Fundamentalism. Four hundred years ago, the Catholic Church found Galileo Galilei “vehemently suspect of heresy” and sentenced him to house arrest for the remainder of his life.
Dear Politicians and Zealots: I am not a Conservative. Or a Liberal. Or a Libertarian, or a Socialist. I am a Realist – I Want What Works and is Fair. Most of us don’t fit into your convenient categories.
Every person I know who has faced the reality of our climate crisis battles with feelings of despair, some or all of the time. When you pull the pieces together and take what the scientists are saying and combine it with our foreseeable political reality, it is hard not to believe we are doomed.
Most economies today are growth economies, meaning they require continuous growth or there is a recession, companies go bankrupt, jobs are lost, and so forth. This is unnecessary, unsustainable, and very unstable, as we are increasingly discovering.
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There live among us people with a very different and very dangerous morality: they are Predators. They see people as divided into Predators and Prey, and their morality may be summed up as Might Makes Right.
We must change our ways or join the dinosaurs, with the added shame of having known what we were doing – and doing it anyway. We are the meteor, and we are about to flame out.
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A scorpion and a frog meet on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asks the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asks, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” The scorpion says, “Because if I do, I will die too.”
The frog is satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stings the frog. The frog feels the onset of paralysis and starts to sink, knowing they both will drown, but has just enough time to gasp “Why?”
Replies the scorpion: “Its my nature…”
Whether we like it or not, that is a fact. Those with power determine the rights of everyone else. Only when the people rise up en masse – showing those in high positions where the ultimate power really lies – do the powerful cede us some ‘rights.’ That has been the history of every progressive movement, from women’s suffrage to the labour movement to today’s environmental and social justice movement.
