Can’t a guy get a sunburn in peace?
Brendan O’Neill’s empty formulaic “Look at the lefties making a big fuss about climate change which everyone knows isn’t a thing” piece:
Is anyone else tiring of all this green hysteria over the heatwave? There is something medieval about it. There is something creepily pre-modern in the idea that sinful mankind has brought heat and fire and floods upon himself with his wicked, hubristic behaviour. What next – plagues of locusts as a punishment for our failure to recycle?
Cute, but beside the point. Literary criticism isn’t the right tool for doing away with global warming. It really doesn’t matter whether or not Brendan O’Neill is bored by talk of climate change, what matters is that it’s happening and there is a great deal of research that shows how it’s happening. It’s not something people just kick back in their chairs and say, it’s what climate scientists discover by digging up core samples and measuring the Colorado River (when they can find it) and comparing weather statistics. It’s not a story. The permafrost isn’t thawing to annoy Brendan O’Neill, it’s just thawing.
The unhinged eco-dread over the heatwave exposes how millenarian environmentalism has become. Climate-change activism is less and less about coming up with practical solutions to the problem of pollution and more about demonising mankind as a plague on a planet, a pox on Mother Earth.
It’s not just about “pollution” ffs, and there are no “practical solutions” that will just make climate change disappear. Tipping points can’t be untipped.
To my mind, there could be no better proof that climate-change activism has become an End of Days cult than the fact that its chief ideologues are now even incapable of enjoying hot weather.
Oh ffs. He’s not really this thick, it’s an act, but it’s such a stupid act.
Though given the opportunity, I could see why it might.
Mr. O’Neill. There are a whole lot of extinct and endangered species, genera, and biomes who would like to have a word with you.
Literary criticism isn’t the right tool for doing away with global warming.
The irony I find striking here is that the people who make this sort of “literary” analysis of climate change are some of the same people who criticize the woke for analyses that are fundamentally literary.
Les sigh. Sometimes I wish people would just be consistent. Forget right and wrong. Just give me consistency. At least then I’d be able to make some sense of things.
The last Homo sapiens will be denying climate change with its dying breath while succumbing to its effects, and feel infinitely smug, condescending, and self-righteous doing so.
If at first you don’t succeed:
This galah sees a certain similarity between the mediaeval expectation that Christ was about to return (after all the signs were all there!) and modern science-based concern about AGW, for which likewise much empirical evidence is in place.
But in the European Middle Ages, the Christian priesthood to a very large extent determined what the population overall was permitted to think and believe, and they self-servingly ensured that the best information available to all and sundry was their own Holy Scripture. It was only when the invention of the telescope permitted independent minds to think deeply about what was revealed, that that Scriptural monopoly was broken. There was a new Revelation.
And the rest is history; which probably passeth all understanding in the case of this clown.
I see three things going on here:
One part is just sticking his thumb in the liberals’ eye. This is a big part of why we got Trump in the US and you got Brexit in England. There’s no real calculation among these followers, just spite. I thought of them as the “South Park Republicans,” people who wanted to be offensive, cuss, and make fun of people, and resented Mommy and Daddy for telling them it wasn’t nice. There is no end to their rhetoric: it can always be made more hyperbolic, more ridiculous, and the mob will scream all the louder. Nor is there any need for consistency among the verses, as long as the refrain remains “F the Liberals!”
Another part is the way in which the left makes a kind of religion about every putatively correct belief. We all deal with this in the case of gender ideology. Witches to be burned, starting with JKR. The left also has its mobs of dumb followers who just repeat whatever cant they’re told to. Black Lives Matter! Trans Women Are Women!
In the case of climate change, we have some folks on the left who are very much “Ready, Fire, Aim!” In my area, where most heating is provided by natural gas if not oil, there’s a town that’s working to outlaw installation of natural gas heating and cooking in new building. Everybody is supposed to use electric heat pumps. But the state as a whole gets the vast majority of its electricity from gas, which is half as efficient when burned to produce electricity as it is when burned to produce heat. Virtue-signalling about dubious improvements (the recycling bin in my town really just gets dumped in with the trash at the other end of the ride) does not improve anything, and inflames the opposing mob more.
I agree that the evidence supports the idea that coal burning should flat out stop. But the left also got nuclear power dismantled in Germany, which is what put Germany in the bind it’s in today, beholden to Russia for natural gas and burning far too much coal. Germany tore down nuclear plants and built coal plants, and that was not really an improvement. Let’s get the policy right before we enact it.
A third thing going on here, which we can’t discount, is the differential burden of higher fossil fuel taxes. In my family, we are firmly in the zoomocracy. Nobody in my house has to go to an office very often, and we use cars only for out of town travel and shopping trips for large things. I live in a nice part of a nice city, and my kids can ride their bikes to school, camp, college, everything. I can go two weeks without getting in a car. Does this make me virtuous? No. I’ve got a contractor coming today to see about fixing a bathroom that has some problems. Will he ride his bicycle here? No. Will any one of the guys working for him not drive here if he takes the job? No; they’ll commute, by car, from even farther away, because it’s very expensive to live in my city. This means that the cost of gas falls most heavily on them, not on me. This is the reason the gilets jaunes got all rowdy in France.
Ritualistic blaming of the wealthy does nothing to solve global warming; they can laugh it off, or buy a tropical forest and claim absolution for their yachts. Meanwhile, the people who actually have to go to jobs – who can’t do their jobs from the other side of the internet – pay at the pump. And if their jobs happen to be mining coal, then they’ll pay twice. Global warming is a problem, and we have to respond to it, but it is politically – and morally – idiotic to put the heaviest burden on the working poor. We have to solve social problems at the same time we solve environmental problems. The working poor must be lifted up by our policy solutions to global warming, or they will be self-defeating.
And, yes, that puts us in a terrible position, because we have other political factions who don’t give a damn about either problem, and are counting on us to screw up one or both.
[…] a comment by Papito on Can’t a guy get a sunburn in […]
Papito: Your ‘third thing’ in your comment.
This is very relevant.
“What does a just transition Look Like?”
https://open.spotify.com/episode/754rgcCMyIV7F3eJspWCCB
“Study finds ‘very concerning’ 74% increase in deaths associated with extreme heat brought on by the climate crisis”
Geesh, you nervous Nellies, whatsamatta you? Can’t even enjoy a nice hot day, can you? Next yer gonna be screeching about how water is “dangerous” because people drown in floods. Can’t you just lighten up? Enjoy a nice cool draught of water on a summer’s day, you fuckin’ snowflakes!
After reading this one this morning, I swear I’ve had “Mad Dogs And Englishmen” running through my head all day.
Highly appropriate.
That may not be briliiant for the present, but it makes sense for the future. The goal is to change over electricity generation to less carbon-emittng sources and as that happens (however it happens) the process of retrofitting buildings and homes that are heated by gas would be very expensive, and heat pumps combine cooling and heating units so that you don’t have a separate A/C from your furnace. Also, heat pumps provide options such as using geothermal sources and they reduce humidity. So there is a reduction in electrical demand. I think it would probably take an energy economist to determine which is more efficient and reduces the carbon load, a single power plant at scale that services thousands of electrically heated homes, or thousands of gas heated/electrically cooled homes.
Not to dump on your comment, but I don’t think this is virtue signalling.
What IS virtue signaling is Evs. Look at the carbon load/embedded energy in these batteries.
I’d appreciate a source for that, and even if that’s true, it’s emerging technology. Batteries are being made of more environmentally friendly materials and will be introduced. Reducing emissions at the point of the tailpipe is a key to reducing global warming. Are you going to tell me that my hybrid is more of a carbon load issue than Big Joe’s Cummins diesel?
What people forget about is how much energy goes into turning the various carbon sources such as gasoline into usable fuel. To offset carbon costs, we don’t need to produce as much energy as we consume now since we’ll be able to reduce the energy load of producing carbon fuels.
Mike, it won’t be virtue signaling in the future, when our state doesn’t burn natural gas for its electricity. Until then, it’s another instance of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ Burning more gas elsewhere is considered better than burning less gas where I can see it.
I assume that future is also one in which electric heat pumps won’t become significantly less efficient under sub-freezing temperatures. Right now, if you want to install most heat pumps in my state, you typically get a backup heating source. They switch to “emergency heat,” and fire up the secondary heat source, when it gets below freezing. Some of them are made to be installed together with an additional natural gas furnace, and some of them include electric resistance coils for emergency heat.
Companies like to brag that their machines can deliver heat below zero – Mitsubishi claims -13F. But it will work at less than a third the efficiency it does when it’s warmer. And it may be supplementing with “emergency heat,” or be so large it runs erratically during shoulder season.
Under theoretical conditions – brand new house, roughly a cube, tightly insulated, with units mounted several feet above the ground – the heat pump can adequately heat a house here. Yay. Median age of housing stock in my state? Over 50 years. My house? Almost 100. And 100 years ago, houses here were designed for maximum ventilation, not maximum insulation.
Also, in the winter, we want to add humidity to our houses, not remove it. My gas-fired steam heat does a great job with that.