The Subject Didn't Come Up!

Human arrogance toward Nature took another beating in the aftermath of Sandy, which caused widescale flooding and power outages in the New York City area. Predictably, many sought to link the "superstorm" to anthropogenic climate change, which gave the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert another opportunity to skewer the candidates for not talking about global warming. Politicians ignoring science is nothing new, so I didn't expect much as I read Watching Sandy, Ignoring Climate Change. But then there was this—

Coming as it is just a week before Election Day, Sandy makes the fact that climate change has been entirely ignored during this campaign seem all the more grotesque. In a year of record-breaking temperatures across the U.S., record drought conditions in the country’s corn belt, and now a record storm affecting the nation’s most populous cities, neither candidate found the issue to be worthy of discussion. Pressed about this finally the other day on MTV, President Obama called climate change a “critical issue” that he was “surprised” hadn’t come up during any of the debates, a response that was at once completely accurate and totally disingenuous.

As one commentator pointed out, he might have brought up this “critical” issue on his own since “he is the friggin’ POTUS.”

Oh, my! Just when we thought we'd heard everything the humans have to offer...

We know why the "friggin" POTUS doesn't talk about global warming even as he feigns surprise at his own reticence—it's the Economy, stupid! See my post For Humans, The Economy Is Everything. Also see Climate Change Idiots.

And then there are the people who never talk about anything else. They are every bit as clueless as the ones who don't talk about global warming, or deny it's happening. You regular readers will suspect that I am referring to "Wild Bill" McKibben, and indeed I am! We've got a recent quote from him demonstrating beyond all reasonable doubt that Wild Bill has abandoned Reality altogether to pursue his own special agenda, which is Saving The Earth. He is now officially deranged.

The crazy statement came up in an interview McKibben did with Salon's Andrew Leonard. If a baboon had joined the conversation, it would have raised the average IQ of the participants considerably. On Monday, October 29, 2012, as Sandy was bearing down on the east coast, Leonard wrote—

As a writer and activist Bill McKibben has devoted his life to tackling the threat posed by man-made climate change. As Hurricane Sandy brought normal life on the East Coast to a standstill, McKibben’s Twitter feed went into overdrive — a veritable deluge of storm updates and political commentary.

A few moments ago, he took some time out of a very busy day to explain why climate change hasn’t been a bigger issue in the run-up to the ongoing catastrophe:

Leonard — The candidates refused to talk about climate change during the debates and the mainstream media hardly dares mention global warming in the context of this storm. What’s going on here?

Wild Bill — What’s going on here is the astonishing power of the fossil fuel industry. They have essentially bought one party and scared the other.

And they’ve done the same thing all over the world. They’re the richest, most powerful industry on earth and they are able to keep people from questioning what’s become the most dangerous set of corporate practices in history.

It may come as a Big Surprise to you that Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and all the rest routinely tell the Russians, the Chinese, the Saudis, the Brazilians, and the other big oil producers what to do and what not to do. It certainly came as a Big Surprise to me because if Wild Bill thinks the oil companies have that kind of power, which he must think because his political position is incoherent otherwise, that means that Wild Bill and Reality have irrevocably parted ways, and will likely never meet up again.

All of those countries have state-owned oil companies in which the government (such as it is) tells the oil companies what to do, not the other way around. In fact, U.S. oil companies have been largely shut out of the post-war oil boom in Iraq. But in Wild Bill's feeble little brain, Exxon Mobil is a Planet Killer. Vladimir Putin is merely a tool of BP and Shell, carrying out their evil schemes.

Thus climate change did indeed come up in the wake of the Sandy disaster. And we're so glad it did

Comments

[Ken Barrows]

If men and women don't think culture is a bigger problem than politics, then they want to keep their lifestyle.

[adam]

I agree that it is the economy, or at least what is percieved to be the economy... Even if we could know with certainty that we could live decent lives with renewables + density + electric transit, the idea is in conflict with the "American Dream". Considering that we can't even be sure that it will work out even if we go all in for tranformation, it's a bet people are not willing to take.

I can't say McKibben is totally wrong; the fossil fuel industries are some of the most powerful, not just because of money but also because they control the energy supply. But considering they were already widely disliked and distrusted not so long ago, and they haven't really pushed their propaganda any harder since, the missing factor is that people want to believe them now.

Alternatives to our current lifestyle are literally unspeakable.

[Alexander Ač]

Hi Dave,

and another blow to exponential ecologists, DESERTEC seems to be finished (Nature magazine from today): http://www.nature.com/news/sahara-solar-plan-loses-its-shine-1.11684?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20121101

Alex

[James]

Climate change is just a hoax perpetrated by the liberal anti-human crowd to control us. It is not only a lie, it is CRIMINAL. Forbes (totally legit) tells us so:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2012/09/16/climate-change-hoax-or-crime-of-the-century/

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

[don]

"What kind of civilisation can change the climate of an entire planet – as far as it knows, the only planet in existence which sustains life – and yet find the evidence of this so uninteresting that it relegates it, in its hierarchy of ‘news’, below the latest murder, the inevitable re-election of one of its increasingly meaningless political figureheads and a lot of people running around tracks for a week in a big aerodrome?

"What kind of civilisation can tip the web of life into a ‘death spiral’ and then spend its time arguing about whether or not this is a good thing? What kind of civilisation can embed something it calls ‘economic growth’ so deeply into its sense of self-worth and meaning that when it dimly becomes aware that this growth is turning the Earth itself upside down, it responds with calls for more of it? What kind of civilisation arrives at a point of no return, and then insists that the only ‘pragmatic‘ response is not to change the way it operates but to remake nature itself, from the genetic level upwards, in its own image? Anything rather than change. Anything rather than face the impossibility of change. Anything rather than look down."

http://dark-mountain.net/uncategorized/re-wilding-the-human/