The Death of the Environmental Movement

Ah, well, I've often mused that virtue is a luxury item.

As we get more hyped every day about global warming, and as more and more money gets dumped into the propaganda machine, there seems to be to be one obvious and glaring omission from the discussion. . .the omission?

First, preface the issue.

A) Global warming is unquestionably happening, and human activity is unquestionably the major cause of it.

B) The tremendous resistance to meaningful change at this--too late moment--will accelerate us into the higher quintiles of the probability curve of events. The devastating 2-3 degrees C by mid century becomes more likely every moment at we drag our feet and propose one stupid green "solution" after another.

C) Of the carbon fuels we now use--we use the CLEANEST of the lot. For example, the lowest emmission vehicles now available, with conventional gas engines, run on high end formulated fuels in California, actually create less greenhouse gasses than the hybrids do. As fuel prices increase due to consumption pressure and depletion, the pressure to use the remaining dirtier fuels will increase. As we run out of Natural Gas, we'll move to coal. Unfortunately, there's a lot of coal.


Ok, now for my version of the inconvenient truth.


If we want to talk about concepts like "carbon footprint" and sustainability, we make a tacit assumption that every living creature, humans included, have a "birthright" to a piece of the ecological pie. That by the pure fact of existing, one is entitled to a certain amount of resources to exist. That's a sensible assumption, and the alternative--that some people are not entitled to anything at all, is hard to defend. Now, the question becomes: what is fair? That as well is easy to determine. If we assume that a given amount of sunlight falls on the earth, and that human beings have the technology at this moment to claim a given percent of that amount, it's simply a matter of dividing by the global population to determine the number that is "fair" to use. Well, whatever that number is, it isn't much. . .

Here's another metric, and one more candy coated than the first, as it doesn't assume sustainability and relies on depletion--global GDP. While one can cook the books one way or another, one's fair share of global GDP is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3500 dollars year. That's your fair share. Making more than that? Nice for you, but it demands that half the world population life on much less than that amount, in desperate squalor, and that we import the goods of the land they live on for our own use.

So, again, my inconvenient truth. . .

So, we in the developing world, having killed the "golden goose," having used the best resources in the world for our own pleasure, and now, becoming aware that we've wrecked the planet in our doing so--are we really going to now demand that the rest of the world REMAIN in poverty for all time as so to not FURTHER destroy the global environment? Carbon footprint be damned, those people want clean water, and that needs infrastructure, and electricity, and they're going to build coal fired plants the second they can get to it. . .and we're going to tell them no?

I don't see very many ecologists living on that global level of scale--what does Sierra Club boss make again? You couldn't design anybody more suited to make the ecological cause look stupid and hypocritical.

It's easy to cuss at assholes of the likes of John Travolta, who likes to play environmentalist--who also owns a hybrid(and a couple dozen other vehicles) and lecture us in his semi-narcoleptic manner--while he parks his private fucking 737 in his front yard. . .the hubris of these people is scarce to be believed. BUT, I must say, surely much of the world views all Americans is the manner I might view the elite eco-rich. And surely, having tamped them full of propaganda of the American good life they want a piece of that pie too. . .and they'll have it, by god. . .

We're really screwed.