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8 comments on The Bullroarer - Thursday 16th April 2009
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8 comments on The Bullroarer - Thursday 16th April 2009
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GAIA Host Collective
The problem is, if you ignore them, and don't respond to/challenge them, TPTB assume they are right, because there is no opposition to their poorly founded statements, and we end up with pieces of junk like the CPRS.
Unfortunately, if you do challenge them, they drag out the same old lies/untruths/misinterpretations/bad science, refuse to listen/alter tack without acknowledging error, and raise your blood pressure. Lose-lose.
You missed half of what I said.
Ignore them and keep sorting stuff out. That second part's as important as the first.
There's this strange idea amongst a lot of people that we have to wait for a Great Leader to come and sort everything out. We don't. We can just go ahead and do it.
For example, as I discovered when I looked into Cuba's experience with declining fossil fuel supply, the government tried very hard to keep on with Business As Usual, keeping everyone on the communal farms, as much artificial fertiliser as possible, and so on.
The people would rather eat than follow ideology, though, and so they started their own gardens, started digging up parks and unused lots, and so on. The government responded by tearing up their gardens. "Back to the communal farms!" they cried. But then starvation threatened, and Castro, not being a moron like Mugabe, realised that in a dictatorship you have to do at least two things: pay the army and feed the people. He couldn't feed the people with his stupid outdated system, so he let them feed themselves.
Later the Cuba government helped, and claimed it was their idea all along.
I don't expect our own government to be much smarter. As we do things which reduce fossil fuel consumption I expect them to first oppose us, then get out of our way, then help us and claim it was their idea all along.
At the moment they oppose us. We have to ignore that and do the right things anyway.
No, no, I didn't miss it, it's just a difference of scale. At a personal level, you, I, and anyone else can make changes for the better. Use PT/walk/ride a bike instead of getting in a car, build a more sustainable house instead of a McMansion, recycle, start a garden, hassle your elected representatives, whatever. Given enough time, and the right conditions (ie, not the 'Morning in America' economic 'SuperCycles' the world has had for the last decade or so), personal actions may even catch on (at least four people at my work ride their bicycles now).
But if we want to make a large impact, for example, get people out of their cars and onto PT, we can't do that on our own. We need either Private financing, or Government (of one level or another) intervention. Usually both, as PT often isn't viable without subsidies (same could be said for private transport, but nobody ever counts the invisable subsidies there).
Either way, we have to convince people that the current ways aren't the best. It's no good just telling them, or they'll just jack up about it.
Even a Mediocre Leader would be a step up from the Greenwashing mobs we have now.
If we're to make the big changes, and move to a more sustainable future, we need to do it now, before Oil starts running short, and I just don't see how that can be accomplished without direct intervention. Once prices start heading into the stratosphere, there'll be more than enough pressure to 'do something' (and usually TPTB will try all the wrong things first), but by then it'll be too late to move without a long period of instability.
So I argue with the Deniers. On a personal level, their opinion doesn't matter to me. Whether they think Oil is Abiotic to the tune of 90mbpd, whether they think Global Cooling is the reality, whether they think Coal Fly Ash makes a great toothpaste, doesn't, on an individual level, matter a damn. But on a wider perspective, their ranting, raving, misquotes, deliberate obstufaction, and willfull ignorance (withness the story in today's Bullroarer by some apparent mental defective who thinks a NBN can only be powered by coal-fired electrons) skews the 'debate', and TPTB see it as an opportunity to put off the hard, necessary decisions until the next electoral cycle.