Chris Hayes is going down a dangerous road:
“It’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion,” Hayes writes. “So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth.”
Note the phrase: “convince or coerce.” If persuasion were to fail, coercion — presumably by the federal government or some very, very powerful entity — could be pretty rough. Certainly by writing that the “climate justice movement” should be known as the “new abolitionism,” Hayes makes an uneasy comparison to a 19th century conflict over slavery that was settled only by a huge and costly war — a real war, not a metaphorical one. Is that how environmentalists plan to save the planet from warming?
They have to destroy humanity to save the planet.
I think I will do a census of the vehicles in the parking garage just outside by office window. I will prepare a chart showing the histogram of EPA Inertia Weight along with their “carbon footprint.” I will have this chart at the ready when the topic of divestment in those Evil Energy Companies comes up (again) in Faculty Senate.
Those evil, evil corporate interests, compelling enlightened persons with PhDs and faculty appointments to drive such large cars . . .
Hayes has nothing on Paul Kingsnorth, a Brit who has had “Uncivilization” get-togethers. The guy was profiled in last Sunday’s NYTimes magazine. His message is something like: ‘It’s all over, we’ve lost the planet to climate change and destruction. Time to deconstruct civilization’… if a few billion people die in the process, apparently that’s of no account.
“They have to destroy humanity to save the planet.”
That has been the privately admitted assumption of many Deep Ecology types for over 40 years by now. At SIU, in 1970, I spoke with with a grad student headed off to the EPA, who stated he was willing to see the life on Earth nuked back to bacteria, if it would just get rid of the “mistake” that was Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
I *do* have a quibble with the title of the article. The Deep Eeks are the sort of folks who started a Civil War to fight any mention of abolition among their own populations. The immediate incentive for the assault on the Union was Lincoln’s refusal during the 1860 campaign to continue the 25 years of censorship of the US mails that kept abolition materials from reaching non-slave owners, who were 3/4 of all white households in the Slave States. The plantation aristocrats had the same attitude towards “po-white trash” that the academic/journalistic/political coalition for Climate Change Progressivism has now towards skeptics. They were low life trash that don’t know their obligations to their social betters, and can’t be trusted to vote right unless their information is controlled by “the right sort of people”.
“The immediate incentive for the assault on the Union was Lincoln’s refusal during the 1860 campaign to continue the 25 years of censorship of the US mails that kept abolition materials from reaching non-slave owners, who were 3/4 of all white households in the Slave States. ”
I have been listening to tapes from Northwestern University’s David Zarefsky on “Lincoln’s Speeches.” Each major speech is presented in chronological order, and you can kind of follow the history that way, but there are gaps in terms of just how the Civil War erupted.
One of Lincoln’s few pre-inauguration remarks layed out that his (he, Lincoln’s) aims were limited to “protecting Federal property” (the forts and armories) and some remarks about “seeing that the mail gets delivered”, that the institution of slavery would very much continue in place, and its extension into the Territories was a matter for the political process.
Who knew that “seeing that the mail gets delivered” could start such a bloody war — don’t know if Zarefsky was clued into this aspect, but I can now see how unimpeded dissemination of information constitutes provocation, working on a college campus as I do.
We could abolish climate change by living in climate controlled environments.. in space,
Yes. We could. In fact, I rather think we will. But that would be a solution, you see. The eco-progressives have no interest in solutions. They are only interested in control. Of everything. By them. Any policy that does not advance toward their desired end state of air-tight, hermetically-sealed totalitarianism is irrelevant and annoying to them.
With Poe’s Law in mind, I would note that these people (assuming that they’re not just trolling) are extreme, even for the far left.
I’ve been present at campus gatherings of such people and was secretly greatly amused to hear someone from VHEMT (the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement–as far as I can tell these people are sincere and for real) being interrupted and shouted down by a Marxist group. “Human extinction? YOU FIRST!”
Which is not to say that these other groups are any saner, but isn’t it always amusing to see dissent in the ranks of one’s enemies? “Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.”