Jan 202020
 


Edvard Munch Ashes 1894

 

I have a lot of sympathy for young(er) people who are upset about what has happened, and still is happening, to the planet they were born on, during their lifetime and that of the generations before them. I have less sympathy for the “climate movement” even if those same young people thinnk it represents them, because it has grown too big and too diverse, and has come to rely (for no reason) too much on hype and exaggeration. Don’t feed your opponent or enemy.

The movement also has too little attention for what younger people themselves contribute to the descent into chaos. If you don’t start with yourself, how are you ever going to tell others what to do? How many phones and gadgets and cars do you have? Do your clothes also say Made in China? Personal question.

Naming one’s movement “Extinction Rebellion” strikes me as odd, because the movement appears to be, from what I can see, based almost exclusively on the deleterious effects of carbon emissions, though these have -at least so far- played just a small part in the actual extinction of -far too many- species, much less than the use of chemicals, the loss of forest, and land use in general, just to name some examples.

I have a lot of sympathy for Greta Thunberg, and I’m sure she means very well. But I have no sympathy for the PR people that she allows to surround her, and who make millions of dollars off of her name and appearances. Nor do I think Greta had grasped at age 16 the full complexity of the systems that have led to what she protests against. Very few adults have either, so that’s hardly her fault.

I still think, just like I said a year ago when she was first unloaded upon the Davos conference by those same PR people, that not only is there nothing for her there, but her time would be better spent trying to educate herself about that “full complexity”. Because today, it all appears to me to be too much about what she does not want, rather than about what she does, and to a large extent that’s because she simply doesn’t know. Protesting for something is harder than protesting against it.

 

Because of all these things, the climate movement is actively though unwittingly helping the rich, who got rich through their use of fossil fuels, to get richer still off of society’s adaptation to a world in which fossil fuels play a smaller role.

Yes, there are enormous amounts of irony involved in this. People like the idea of a green economy. They like the sound of it. But if you would ask them what it means in practice, they would picture something very close to the present economic system, just green, i.e. powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels.

And that is nonsense. In the same way that “fossil free” living is utter nonsense, but nevertheless it’s terms like that which are most prominent in headlines. Carbon neutral, carbon free, fossil free, those terms all describe fantasies; they are terms straight out of a PR campaign book. There’s even carbon negative. But who among the activists understand what this means? You got to be careful guys, because the way this is going, you will all end up being accomplices of the very people you should be protesting.

 

Here’s what going to happen (and already has), Greta and all of you Greta fans.

You’re getting to Davos and meet with all these rich people, and they all already have their plans ready. They’re going to tell you that they agree with just about everything you have to say. But they do and they don’t at the same time.

The fossil fuel industry, along with carmakers, governments et al, have solved the riddle: what appeared at first to be a huge threat to them, now turns out to be their next golden goose: they’re going to get paid more to move away from fossil fuels and emissions than they previously did to produce them. Pretty smart, right?

Only you will find out not even that is true. Do you know what an electric car produces in pollution, in CO2 emissions? I read the other day that an electric car has to drive 30,000-50,000 km a year over its “lifetime” to pollute less than a petrol one. Details are not terribly important there, it sounds kind of right. Unless you’re in Poland or certain parts of Germany or Eastern Europe, than it’s much higher still. Brown coal.

How did the rich and the worst polluters do it? How did they solve the riddle? By promoting Greta and the entire climate movement, with the help of the media they own, and then steering their priorities to be in line with their own. Piece of cake for them. They have been among the most powerful forces in western society forever, and it wasn’t too hard for them to figure this one out.

And that’s why these days, and increasingly as Davos has started (timing is everything), climate is a well advertized topic, and why the likes of BlackRock and Microsoft -and many others- just days ago announced that they will “go green”, divest out of fossil fuels etc.

 

They do this because they see a profit to be made. So don’t flatter yourselves, it has nothing to do with you. Or rather, it does, but not the way you thought and wanted. Your worst adversaries are using you for their promotion and advertizing platforms. The more banners you fly, the more words Greta utters, the more governments will make trillion dollar promises, ane the more Big Oil will make profits. Like this one today (just one example in fat growing long row):

UN Decarbonisation Target For Shipping To Cost Over $1 Trillion

At least $1 trillion of investment in new fuel technology is needed to enable the shipping industry to meet U.N. targets for cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, a study published on Monday showed. The global shipping fleet, which accounts for 2.2% of the world’s CO2 emissions, is under pressure to reduce those emissions and other pollution. About 90% of world trade is transported by sea.

A trillion euros for 2.2% of CO2 emissions. We can all do the math here, right?! And yes, Greta and her fellow schoolkids contributed a lot to that amount by seeking publicity, but also by being promoted by other interests. Only to become part of a giant publicity machine.

You see, Greta, the message the rich get is not that they must listen to you, it’s that others do listen who control a lot of money, individuals, governments, and so there will be money to be made if they just promote your ideas enough. You’ve been co-opted and pre-empted, so to speak. And what are you going to do now? You’re in cahoots, whether you like it or not, with the likes of Exxon, Shell, and Mercedes.

The oil companies have long rebranded themselves as energy companies (this started when BP’s logo turned green years ago) and invested billions in solar and wind turbines. The carmakers are betting big on electric vehicles. And this is supposed to achieve your goal of carbon neutrality? Let’s get real, shall we?

You’re way out of your league. You’re up against people who represent decades if not centuries-old interests, as well as -aspiring- politicians in every Parliament and even city counsel who know full well their careers will be nipped in the bud if they don’t go along with those interests. And then there’s 10,000 Middle East sheiks.

 

Davos is not your stage, Greta, and it’s not the stage for the people who believe in you. You’re betraying them by going there, because you have no control over the stage. Still, the other side really want you to think it is, the oil companies do, US and EU governments do, Mercedes and Toyota and Ford, do. Because you are their meal ticket.

They want you to believe that the problem that keeps you up at night can be solved with electric cars and solar panels and wind turbines. Because they have invested heavily in companies that produce all of those.

And now there’s a trillion here and a trillion there, because people listen to you. No government, no chosen official or appointed civil servant at any level, can anymore be forgiven for not budgeting heavily for climate change effects, even if they are ignorant about what those are.

 

The entire climate change issue is about energy, not about a duscussion of sources of energy. And as I argued late last year in Energy vs DNA and Energy vs Waste, mankind, like any other organism, is driven to use all surplus energy at its disposal as fast as it can. If only so other organisms can’t benefit from it, or even other humans.

And all energy use produces waste, not just fossil fuels. I suggest you read those. In the meantime, Greta, go home, enjoy the snow and the northern lights on your skin, have the youth you’re supposed to have, share your views with your friends, study study study and keep things in perspective. Your fans are not in Davos, but you are; that’s an ego-trip that will backfire on you because you’re being played for a fool.

Also, dump the PR teams; you’re bigger than that.

 

 

The Automatic Earth CAN explain energy. Keep up with us, support us on Paypal and Patreon.

 

Home Forums Go Home Greta

Viewing 16 posts - 1 through 16 (of 16 total)
  • Author
    Posts
  • #52835

    Edvard Munch Ashes 1894   I have a lot of sympathy for young(er) people who are upset about what has happened, and still is happening, to the pla
    [See the full post at: Go Home Greta]

    #52836
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Imo, the best thing you can do, Raul, is ignore the Thunberg phenomenon other than to note it as a signal that the kids are genuinely scared. Of course, anything allowed to make major media rounds will be co-opted by the moguls directing said media. Critiquiqing this infoscam only empowers it.

    Greta has to work out her issues in her way, with or without a major media campaign behind her.

    It’s not as if the media would allow genuine discussion of global energy/climate/environment issues of true merit. Even putting aside the rich bastards behind all this, the amount of cognitive dissonance alone will prevent humanity from facing up to the consequences of its collective action.

    Your advice to Greta to go home and have a good time would, I am quite certain, only cause her even greater emotional discomfort than she already is experiencing. She has to follow her conscience, and it is obviously telling her to use her platform as best she can.

    I applaud her determination and admire her for trying although I know she has even less chance of success than Jay Hanson did meeting with Congressional energy committees 20 years ago.

    At least she hasn’t killed herself or a bunch of aging Boomers, something we’ll see younguns doing as times grow manifestly dire.

    I never cared for the song but it seems appropriate here:

    Colors of Green and Grey

    #52837
    boscohorowitz
    Participant
    #52838
    miltonics
    Participant

    She is caught up in the machine, just like the rest of us. I doubt that she will actually do anything that will actually benefit future generations. Just a tool of power…

    #52841
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    From 1999. Seems relevant here:

    Hindemith is a good friend of mine. His music is a note of faith for contemporary Teutonicism; in Hindemith we had at least one modern German composer who wasn’t lyrically disemboweled by obsessive concepts of German music’s grandiose role in Western musical history and thereby compelled to deliver the Next Big Thing.

    Serialism as a major development in classical music was tantamount to rap’s replacement of singing with yakking. Serialism well symbolizes the culminative nadir of Enlightenment/Progress’s zenith. This zenith/nadir oxymoron is my pretentious way of implying that, at the height of the Modern Age in the 20’s and 30’s, when a chicken in every pot and a metropolis for every person were hailed as the century’s birthright and gift to humankind, the living arts were extrapolating these principles to their inevitably absurd conclusions. Cubism, tone rows, antiliterature: the most brilliant talents of their respective disciplines were driven by the ethos of the time to create art that sang, spoke and displayed the approaching doom. The gloom was not only superficially evident in the results but intrinsically hardwired in their underlying methodologies: randomly selected tone sequences; vivisectionist methods of visual depiction; trivialization of semantic intention and content (whether deliberate, as Gertrude Stein, or unintentional, as James Joyce).

    This is NOT to say that all, or even most, of the art was bad. Au contraire. Even the leaders (worst perpetrators), the Picassos and Schoenbergs and Steins, produced some wonderful stuff despite using the aforementioned morbid techniques. These artists were, after all, the very best of the best. What this IS to say is that the last fin-de-siecle crowd’s attempts to go beyond and break through to the next level, while thoroughly successful, could only bring them to the logical conclusion of these attempts: they smashed through the walls to find themselves in the Postmodern Wasteland, creating works that were the artistic equivalent of cut&burn rainforests, nuclear winters, invisible corporate tyrannies: giant deformed hothouse flowers fertilized by dead children and extinct species.

    Some of these pieces were intriguing monkey puzzles and interesting anagrammatic labyrinths and any of a number of admirably clever constructs – but in their pastoral scenes the birdies didn’t twitter or flutter, although their mechanical analogs managed to cry and twitch, and in their poems the nearest Garden of Eden was in the spiral fronds of neighboring galaxies.
    <end>

    Apparently, people are willing to listen to this enough to have made it famous. MId-20th Century Euromerica was a funny place.

    Serious KindaSorta Music

    #52842
    WES
    Participant

    Greta, as Lenin said, is a “useful idiot”!

    Now about green solar panels. Adult solar panels don’t produce enough energy to produce baby solar panels! And if they somehow did manage to produce a baby solar panel, the baby would die anyway, not able to produce enough energy to live. Besides the parent solar panels would die before being able to raise their baby!

    About those green wind turbines. Adult wind turbines don’t produce enough energy to produce baby wind turbines! And if they somehow did manage to produce a baby wind turbine, the baby would be born still born! It is just as well because, by that time, the parent wind turbines would be in the local landfill anyways.

    You see, green energy takes more energy to produce, than it can ever produce! This is of course not sustainable! That is why it needs to be publically subsidized by the poor so the rich can get richer!

    Oh, yes, you are wondering about the life expectancy of green energy! Short! Actually very short!

    On a side note, last week my 23 year old son, a wind turbine technician, said all of the wind turbines were shutdown last week due to the freezing rain on the blades and towers. They can not go near them because of the risk of falling ice. I don’t expect they will be running this week either. We will have to wait for a warm sunny spell above freezing to melt the ice. It is January, when the sun never shines.

    Those green wind turbine blades do not last forever but need to be periodically replaced (7 years ?) and sent to the landfill. Same for the old green solar panels. You were born to die! Offer to the dump you go!

    It is a very good thing, for the social good, that green energy doesn’t have to produce and raise offspring!

    Greta, did I forget to tell you that you are a total idiot? Lenin was too kind.

    #52843
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Nothing like picking on the kids who have to live through the shit we left for them.

    Sure, solar/wind has been turned from a useful adjunct to a scam. It’s what we do.

    But kids like Greta have grown up facing a very bleak future, with climate change as the worst prospect currently in their minds.

    And we put them there.

    Nopt sure who’s the idjit: the angry but misinfirmed kids or the adults who call them idjits for being understandably freaked out.

    Thanx, WES< for demonstrating why humanity won’t fix the problems it creates.

    We’d rather gather at perceived territorial boundaries (these days more virtual than not such as ideological boundaries) and fling p[oo.

    Like I said, they’re gonna start killing old people soon. Why should political, religious and ethnic terrorists have all the fun?

    One can see why zerosum recommends keeping an ample supply (OD-plus strength, I assume) at hand these days.

    ***

    Obviously, wind power is useless when it comes to reliably pushing electrons around a power grid so we can all have hot running water, easy heat, and magic light switches. But it would be useful, very useful, for pumping water up and around, which would be one less odious drudgery for we modern humans to revert to.

    Solar power is also useful for lotys of things, but again, not maintaining az power grod.

    Power grids? Great for fooling billions of people into thinking that the future will be about atomic power “too cheap to bother to meter” and flying go-carts (next year’s big Xmas gift spectacular. Great for removing any sense of realistic energy use expectations from several generations of humans who now are taught to believe that the answer is magical robot cars and information somehow being the basis for an economy.

    Basically, a giant homo rodentia mouse trap, them power grids. But everyone is so used to them that my kids, back in the day, could never master the art of turning lights and tvs and whatnot off even though I taped by every light switch a sign that said LIGHTS ON/LIGHTS OFF.

    We has met the enemy and it are us. Anyone wanna fight? How about to the death, for food? Like maybe the loser’s carcass. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Let’s call each other names just because we don’t have, in our mid-teen years, the wisdom of a middle-aged adult.

    Why So Mad?

    #52844
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    The real delusion amid all of this is our quaint delusion that we can find political solutions to our problems. Politics are the problem. Politics is our spurioous belief that we can cooperate in groups larger than those in which we can find and personally kick the ass of the motherfucker with whom we disagree.

    Yes, I know, we’re doomed to be political. Which is why you can drop the last three words off the previous sentence.

    Hello Dere

    Do it yourself or so without.

    #52846
    WES
    Participant

    Bosco:. You bring up a good point about the kids!

    Dam if I can get my kids or my wife to turn off any lights! They seem to think they exist only to be turned on!

    Now about recycling! I get shit from my entire family because I won’t throw out good stuff! A button falls off a shirt! No, it is too much trouble to sew on a new button! It is so much easier to just go out and buy a new shirt!

    Look I can turn this still good stuff into other useful good stuff! No, No. We can’t have this shit around my house! It clutters up the house and collects dust!

    What is wrong with turning my neighbor’s broken Ikea furniture into new furniture or a shelf? And turning my neighbor’s dead battery lawn mower into a regular electric lawn mower? Replacing my neighbor’s burnt out weed whacker motor with another’s used motor? And about that chain saw?

    However, I can not hold a candle to what my parents did! Both were children of the depression. Nothing went to waste! I pale in comparison to them!

    So as each succeeding generation arrives, they seem to become ever more wasteful!

    Maybe this climate shit is just a way to soothe everyone’s feelings about the throw-away world we now live in!

    #52847
    zerosum
    Participant

    HOPE
    Greta has been turned into a ” strange attractor”.
    Yet, she and her PR want-a-be cannot affect the dynamics of the flow.
    More people listen to her message than all of the blogggggers.
    Its too late. We can’t affect the outcome of the flapping of the butterfly that flapped in the past.

    Who can see through the key hole and see what’s behind the green door ( insert song )

    Midnight, one more night without sleepin’
    Watchin’ till the mornin’ comes creepin’
    Green door, what’s that secret you’re keepin?

    There’s an old piano
    And they play it hot behind the green door
    Don’t know what they’re doin’
    But they laugh a lot behind the green door
    Wish they’d let me in
    So I could find out what’s behind the green door

    Knocked once, tried to tell them I’d been there
    Door slammed, hospitality’s thin there
    Wonder just what’s goin’ on in there

    Saw an eyeball peepin’
    Through a smoky cloud behind the green door
    When I said, “Joe sent me”
    Someone laughed out loud behind the green door
    All I want to do is join the happy crowd behind the green door

    Midnight, one more night without sleepin’
    Watchin’ till the mornin’ comes creepin’
    Green door, what’s that secret you’re keepin?

    Green door, what’s that secret you’re keepin?
    Green door

    #52848
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    And all energy use produces waste, not just fossil fuels. I suggest you read those. In the meantime, Greta, go home, enjoy the snow and the northern lights on your skin, have the youth you’re supposed to have, share your views with your friends, study study study and keep things in perspective. Your fans are not in Davos, but you are; that’s an ego-trip that will backfire on you because you’re being played for a fool.

    Also, dump the PR teams; you’re bigger than that.

    A wee bit late to the party but: Very well put Ilargi. Good council for Greta. And I agree completely…
    The past is well positioned as a predicter of the future for our collective behavoirs/actions…

    Edvard Munch Ashes 1894
    That’s a very interesting painting, particularly given its date/age…

    #52855
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    Green door! I haven’t heard that song in ages!

    #52856
    boscohorowitz
    Participant

    “Maybe this climate shit is just a way to soothe everyone’s feelings about the throw-away world we now live in!”

    It keeps our mind off nuclear missiles, trashed aquifers, the looming post-anitibiotics plague, runaway population explosion, topsoil erosion and farming based on constant applications of poison, and so on. Plus, it comes from the sky, this clkimate stuff, and the sky has always dominated our thoughts as clueless cosmic orphans wondering how we got here.

    #52862
    Dr. D
    Participant

    “Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do Without: A motto for getting out of debt.”
    Book available.

    “We don’t have an economic problem; we have a political problem”

    “Walk the plank with our eyes wide open.

    Some people offered up answers.
    We made out like we heard, they were only words.
    They didn’t add up to a change in the way we were living,
    And the saddest thing is all of it could have been avoided.

    But it was like to stop consuming is to stop being human,
    You’ll want to make a change if you won’t.
    We’re all in the same boat, staying afloat for the moment.”

    When they stop buying stuff and lower GDP, I’ll believe them. Especially since it’s the buying and GDP that’s making us so unhappy. Until then, it’s all nonsense.

    #52866
    anticlimactic
    Participant

    CLIMATE CHANGE

    In the atmosphere only about 1 in 2,500 molecules is CO2.

    To raise the temperature above background by one degree these CO2 molecules must raise the temperature of the other 2500 molecules by one degree. This means each CO2 molecule must ‘trap’ heat equivalent to raising its’ temperature to 2,500C!

    Can it be incremental? No, as soon as the Sun stops shining CO2 will become the same temperature as surrounding molecules.

    Can the atmosphere store heat overnight? No. Consider the Sahara desert where temperatures fall by 30 to 40 degrees overnight, down to freezing point. This is how good the atmosphere is at storing heat! The desert is important as it minimises the influence of water vapour, which has a massive effect on climate and temperature.

    I have no idea how CO2 is supposed to affect climate. I think it supposed to be heat [see above].

    As climate scientists have pointed out : there is no climate ‘crisis’. Bad weather is happening roughly at the same rate as before, usually with worse examples in the past. What has changed is that there are more people and properties in harms way. For example, California fires were many times worse in the 1930s.

    However the MSM concentrates on the climate activists.

    I feel some sympathy for Thunberg who has been brainwashed since she was a kid into believing everything that the climate activists say. It has been likened to a religious cult where all prophecies are believed instantly and without question [In fact questioning is heresy and calls for the most extreme punishment possible!]

    It doesn’t matter if the prophecies do not come true as new prophecies will be made. When the Earth does not heat up by 2 degrees by 2030, or 1 million species do not go extinct, new prophecies will be in place for the faithful.

    I do not know how people like Thunberg will feel when they realise climate activists have always been wrong and she has a huge bill to pay for ‘fighting’ climate change.

    #52907
    TonyPrep
    Participant

    Well, the elites will make money out of any activity that they can exploit. Climate change is no different in that respect. It is different in that it is one of a number of environmental stressors that could spell, and has spelled, the end of countless species, possibly including our own. I don’t listen to everything Thunberg says but I don’t think she espouses any particular “solution”, instead trying to point out that we should listen to climate scientists and that no significant actions have been taken in 30 years of talking about the issue. You’re right, though, that humans will consume as much as they can as rapidly as they can. With no significant predators and a temporary ability to constantly increase that consumption (through tool use and high density energy), we seem to be on a collision course with catastrophe.

    Thunberg is doing just fine, I think. Somehow, she’s getting away with speaking truth to power. However, though she’s doing as much as can be expected, she will have no definable impact because the human species has a characteristic behaviour which doesn’t allow us to use our ability to see the long term consequences of our actions. As an example, take anticlimactic’s comment above; he/she has “no idea how CO2 is supposed to affect climate,”, despite a quick Net search yielding reams of information on that.

    So people will continue to believe what they want to believe.Environmentalists are no different – most want to believe a modern civlisation can be operated on electricity which doesn’t have environmental effects, even though no such power source exists. Given that the effects of environmental toxins is fairly well known, we can be sure that such effects will be effectively ignored.

Viewing 16 posts - 1 through 16 (of 16 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.