If money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns, then P.R. campaigns and snappy catchphrases are the kindling. (Bill McKibben – New Yorker Magazine)
An interesting and profound analogy. I personally don’t care what your thoughts are on global warming… whether peer reviewed scientist or nonbeliever. Either one does not make you a friend or enemy. I’m speaking from the standpoint of a 67 year old person living on a boat moored on the edges of a temperate rain forest…
It really doesn’t matter to me for several reasons. 1. I’m well into my 6th decade and I probably will perish sometime within the next 20 years. 2. I don’t have children, so I don’t have to worry about how they will fare when political and potentially violent societies are tasked with coming to terms with what is coming. 3. Well, there’s always a 3rd point, isn’t there: I live on a boat and probably will into the foreseeable future, so for the most part, as the surface of the water rises, so does my home, and when the storms come there are many places for me to hide out of harms way. On the other hand, in the short and long term it does matter. For now, for most living and breathing humans, it may not seem to. Well, as with most things… it doesn’t until it will. And that is what makes me mad as hell in defiance of my above 3 points. It should at least make you wonder about what is really happening, who is telling the story, and what they are getting out of it.
So it ends up being more about who you listen to and believe. I’m more on the side of the scientists who spend their time measuring, remeasuring, publishing their findings. Yes… yes… yesssss… there is a 5% group of naysayers. There always is. That is the beauty of science is it not? The naysayers just make the 95% work harder and with more diligence.
And then… there are those who have been hired by people hiding behind companies that tell eloquent tales about how increased carbon dioxide is really good for trees… so the more the merrier. And that opening up the Northwest Passage to more extraction is good for us all; that the reliance of fossil fuels is best for business to continue as we know it. For some it is. For most it isn’t…
That is what Bill McKibben wrote about most recently in the New Yorker Magazine. Yes… yes… yesssss… he is an environmental activist. That will taint the message for some of you. For others… you might find it an interesting read:
When “Creatives” Turn Destructive: Image-Makers and the Climate Crisis | The New Yorker
Like an old cowboy friend who trained border collies to work sheep once said to me: “Don’t let nobody fill yer ears fulla shit.”
Words to live by…
Northwest Boating Travels With Blair, Les, and Leo 