Thursday, January 1, 2009

Climate challenge and objective centrism

Climate change. I was in McMurdo 95-96, right after I left my friend Don Brogan emailed me to say the road to the airfield had melted. Unprecedented melting on the permanent ice shelf had occurred.

Climate change was a buzz topic amongst my crowd of Sierra Club political ops and progressive politicians back in Arkansas, then in Antarctica it was beyond buzz.

Now it is strange to see every other paragraph of PR from the biggest companies saying the phrase "this is easier on the environment" or "green". I am slightly like the Fox News and Repubs who question/mock this green religious conversion. I think its the right religion, its just that a superficial (ahem) affection for the religion undermines both legitimacy and effectiveness. e.g. Every high school kid that is "freaked out" by the plight of polar bears, then a news feature shows a grand hopeful story of the "freaked out" having a bake sale in which they heavy hand their fascism in the face of anyone that will listen.

[ side note: the link between the superficial and fascism is almost a one to one correspondence. ]

I want a cold-hearted technical fix mentally, and if no fix is possible at least technical approach. Engineers only. For this technical approach, their are two goals that are very different from each other: 1) mitigation of undesirable climate change if possible 2) adaptation ( e.g: Air conditioning, build houses underground in tornado belt, or on stilts in flood areas. Migrate from areas emerging as dangerous.)

The superficial religiosity form of being green has silenced #2, and for that I want to gun for these superficial mamby-pamby's. I return to my mantra that most students at Evergreen and faculty at Antioch need to disappear in the night, last seen boarding train cars to an unknown town in Poland.

Bringing this back to objective centrism, there should be a way for all of us who are not crazy or superficial to agree on some data and a baseline of assumptions, move on and build adaptations for greater incidence of inclement weather, water either rising in oceans or ceasing in mountain snowmelt tributaries, and other changes that are facts of our times.

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