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What to DO - a modest proposal

How to save energy through both societal and individual actions.

Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby ennui2 » Mon 20 Jul 2015, 09:39:11

Lore wrote:That is just a matter of time Rock. The public runs from pillar to post and it only takes a few events to change popular opinion 180.


Well, the Pope already weighed in on GW, for instance. Is this on the "few events" list? I can't think of many things more resonant that don't fall in frog-in-the-pot territory of, let's say creeping climate instability making things increasingly unpleasant but not outright apocalyptic.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby ennui2 » Mon 20 Jul 2015, 09:41:24

Tanada wrote:
Pops wrote:Common public opinion is pretty well just what has been laid out:

it is Their fault
why should I be a martyr?
doesn't matter anyway

dd I miss anything?


It Can't Be Helped.

I think there are 4 categories (your fault, not my fault, nobody's fault, everybody's fault)

LOL now I have that old plaque my cousin had in his woodworking shop going through my mind,

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody,

Anybody, and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and

Everybody was asked to do it. Everybody was sure Somebody would

do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody

got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job. Everybody

thought Anybody could do it but Nobody realized that Everybody

wouldn't do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when

Nobody did what Anybody could have done.


A shorter way to conceptualize the above:

TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby radon1 » Mon 20 Jul 2015, 19:03:00

Let's say I am sitting at a high office, read this petition, totally agree with it and want to act in the best interest of the people who signed it.

But I am totally lost - the question is, what exactly do you want me to do? Like specifically?
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 20 Jul 2015, 21:09:43

LEAD!
Open your mouth and say "Houston, we have a problem."

I don't know where that would eventually lead, that's not the point.

The point is to start.

"look Ma, the Emperor has no clothes!"

Maybe there is no answer, quite likely. But maybe there is. Don't know.

I'd still like to have the discussion start.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 20 Jul 2015, 21:12:42

On a side note, that is my personal both with O. He has the bully puppy and could have used it to start discussion.

The Pope has done a far better job.

"All the above."

Ass hole.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby ennui2 » Mon 20 Jul 2015, 22:19:01

Newfie, what can your activist idea accomplish that, let's say, Bill McKibben's 350.org hasn't? What would be your definition of success if you got everyone all fired up? How much breathing room really is left to soften the blow at this late stage in the game? Don't bother getting angry because it's just sliding back to an early stage of grief.

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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby dohboi » Sat 25 Jul 2015, 01:21:05

Ignore the grumblers, Newf.

Get angry!

If there was anything worth getting angry about in the history of life on earth, this is it!

I'll cosign your letter.

We have to do as many things as we can think of. No one knows ahead of time which one will work. Just keep lobbing spitballs and hope some of them start to stick!
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby Newfie » Sat 25 Jul 2015, 08:03:31

Doh,

I think you are right about expressing anger, which also answers Ennui2.

What this might accomplish that organizations can't is to express the anger of the populace.

350 or any other organization ( save perhaps Sea Shepard) exist by contributions. Thus they have to be careful to not make radical, or angry statements. Folks won't contribute money to angry organizations. They filter and dampen the anger, and by doing so provide cover for the leadership, political or commercial.

Think of the civil rights movement. Things didn't happen until people got angry.

The irony is McKibben himself understands this and advocates civil disobedience.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby ennui2 » Sat 25 Jul 2015, 17:04:48

Newfie wrote:Think of the civil rights movement. Things didn't happen until people got angry.


So MLK's peaceful approach didn't accomplish anything? It was Malcolm-X and the black panthers that really made the civil rights act happen?

How about the rioting after Rodney King? Did that really help matters or did it cause white people to have an even lower opinion of blacks?

How is getting angry any better when you fight for the good side rather than, let's say, the acting out of Dylan Roof for the wrong side? Don't you think the Unabomber had just as much conviction in what he did as Dylan Roof?

Anger has a way of just polarizing a situation, and we're ideologically polarized enough as it is.

Newfie wrote:The irony is McKibben himself understands this and advocates civil disobedience.


Bless his heart, but Bill McKibben is not a very intimidating figure. He looks like and acts like a reject from The Big Bang Theory, or that he could take over the role of Mister Rogers.

More to the point, who are we supposed to direct our anger towards? Should we throw bricks through the windows of Hummers? This is not a problem with easily identified villains. The Koch Brothers and you and I only differ in the level of scale of our damage to the planet (and internal guilt-levels). You can't lash out at anything without also accepting a fair share of personal responsibility.

It's not the same problem as the civil rights movement where a downtrodden people were demanding equal rights. It's about the need for a wholescale refashioning of the way things work in order to minimize or forestall a malthusian catastrophe.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby dohboi » Sat 25 Jul 2015, 21:43:48

"So MLK's peaceful approach didn't accomplish anything?"

He didn't say violent, he said angry. And MLK was certainly angry. Listen to many of his speeches!

We're talking about direct action, not necessarily bombs (they have a lot more of those than we do :) ).

"Should we throw bricks through the windows of Hummers?"

Something like that has crossed my mind. :roll:

But we do have to stop being tolerant of people who think it's cool to blatantly waste resources of any sort.

In the civil rights struggle, ordinary Americans were also the enemy (still are) as well as laws, law makers, businesses...

But in this case, most ordinary Americans don't get up planning to cook the planet. They get up having to get to work, cook food, and keep warm. If they can do those in ways that don't harm the planet, most would be more than happy to.

It is only heads of ff companies and the minions they bribe to do their will who are dead set on making sure that the only way people can fulfill these basic needs is by depending on burning up their fossil-death-fuels.

The people who are making the decisions that are damning us and our children and most complex life on earth to suffering and oblivion all have faces and all have addresses.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby ennui2 » Sat 25 Jul 2015, 22:10:43

dohboi wrote:But we do have to stop being tolerant of people who think it's cool to blatantly waste resources of any sort.


Well, we've entered into an "anti-shame" era of hyper-individualism. Social mores and stigmatizing is now equated with bullying. Everything people do is now classified as a valid lifestyle choice. So we're not supposed to weigh in on it. That means gay marriage is no worse than driving to work and back in a Hummer limo. You know, pursuit of happiness, right in the constitution. I just don't see a social climate towards "shaming" any sort of behavior other than "shaming" itself.

At any rate, trying to guilt-trip people for their environmental-footprints isn't really that new, and it hasn't succeeded, and probably never will.

dohboi wrote:If they can do those in ways that don't harm the planet, most would be more than happy to.


Except when those ways are more expensive and/or less convenient, which is currently the case. Plus you'll also have the "coal rolling" crowd who equate green with liberal weakness.

dohboi wrote:It is only heads of ff companies and the minions they bribe to do their will who are dead set on making sure that the only way people can fulfill these basic needs is by depending on burning up their fossil-death-fuels.


See my above quote. I don't think big oil are good guys but the fact remains that fossil fuel BTUs are still the cheapest way for joe sixpack to get things done.

The only way to help level the economic playing field would be a carbon-tax.

dohboi wrote:The people who are making the decisions that are damning us and our children and most complex life on earth to suffering and oblivion all have faces and all have addresses.


We all make decisions every time we pay for things (story of stuff) or the fuel that powers them. And what about people who have kids above replacement? Who here has ever said anything to a family with kids about overpopulation? (I groaned when my cousin announced she was going to have a 2nd child. She thinks it's ok because she's vegetarian. Whatever...) It's easy to attack a corporation or an institution. It's not so easy to talk about individual ecological responsibility with the neighbors or the guy in line at the grocery store. How many people would like to be the local pariah for bringing up third-rail topics?

People like to attack me by mocking how my animated doomer videos didn't amount to much. What they did do, for those here who watched them, was dramatize the likely result of any doomer actually speaking "truth to power"(TM) as it were. You get a combination of corny denial, deer in the headlights with crickets, and angry shoot-the-messenger blowback in response.

For instance. (cue some trigger point in the small-talk)

"Sounds kind of tragic to me. Tragic due to the massive die-off that awaits us due to peak oil, global warming, and population overshoot."

<deer in the headlights, in through one ear and out the other>

"Have you seen Bruno yet? There's this scene of him swinging his schlong around."

I see a wide gulf here between the rhetoric and where the rubber meets the road.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 26 Jul 2015, 05:14:03

Yes, carbon tax would be good, but at this point probably doesn't go far enough.

"We all make decisions"

Well, duh.

And I've made decisions to not do any long-distance travel, to not eat meat and dairy, to have only one child, and that late in life (and she's also vegan and bikes everywhere)....

But my personal decisions don't amount to a hill of beans compared to what a billionaire chooses to do with all the influence his money can buy. The difference is so many orders of magnitude apart, they're not really comparable.

But some prefer to primarily, for example, blame junkies rather than the pushers and drug lords that got and keep them hooked....
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby ennui2 » Sun 26 Jul 2015, 11:36:27

dohboi wrote:what a billionaire chooses to do with all the influence his money can buy. The difference is so many orders of magnitude apart, they're not really comparable.


Then what are we supposed to do with billionaires? It seems like you're hinting at per-capita energy consumption caps. I'd support that, starting with a 1-child policy and moving on down the line. I think this is politically unfeasible, though. It runs against everything Americans hold dear as far as freedom and the free-market.

Overall, the country is pretty strongly anti-regulation, as the GOP have sold the idea that regulation kills jobs and the economy. Trump is one of those rich people you're talking about, and he leads the polls right now with the GOP base. That he couldn't win the general election doesn't change the fact that there's a huge gulf in ideology between the average american and ecologically pro-active/protective policies.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby dohboi » Sun 26 Jul 2015, 13:02:06

"per-capita energy consumption caps"

Sounds good. Though it is ff consumption that needs to be capped even more immediately.

America has been inundated with anti-socialist/communist propaganda (and of course direct witch hunts, etc) for many many decades. Never the less, the younger generation, at least, are more and more open to radically different ways of structuring the economy. Most see that, to the extent it ever had, the economy is more working against them than for them.

And of course the change is not just at the level of the youngest generation. Look at the crowds showing up for openly socialist Bernie Sanders.

So attitudes can change rather quickly, even apparently deeply entrenched ones. Whether such a massive attitude change could actually change power structures is another question, of course.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby Newfie » Sun 26 Jul 2015, 23:16:35

What I was proposing was a radical idea.... a simple statement of fact. Plain and simple.

We will have no carbon tax nor even a fair discussion of the issues until the talking heads recognize the truth, out loud in public.

Kinda like the Pope did. Bully for him for doing it. I think the French President may have done something similar?

Unless we ourselves state the truth, and tell the lying bastards we know the truth, and expect recognition of the truth, then why should they proclaim the truth?

That is my modest proposal....a simple and plain statement of the truth... That we are cooking our planet and our kids future.

Why is that so radical? So controversial?
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 27 Jul 2015, 07:48:01

Take Obama, for example. He likes to SAY he understands climate change, he gave his big speech on climate change, he gives it a head nod every now and again.

But recently he said not being able to enact reasonable gun control laws was his biggest regret. They may or may not be important, but relative to the threat pose by climate change they are minuscule. The relative order of the threat is important.

Also, if you truly "get" the threat of climate change then you understand that you can't be talking BOTH climate change AND "all the above" energy development, GDP Growth, and increasing global trade.

These concepts are mutually exclusive. So he is either lying, dishonest with himself, or disconnected from the reality. It is simple.

Obama is easy o pick on because he is so visible. But none of the other presidential candidates are any better. Why?

Because we the people require them to lie to get elected.

Thus my simple statement and petition/open letter. By making a simple statement of the facts it lays them bare and, maybe, starts an open dialog. If we want honesty in our leadership we need to demonstrate honesty among ourselves.

Maybe.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby ennui2 » Mon 27 Jul 2015, 15:28:41

Leaders are not wired to deal with dilemmas, only problems that they think they can solve. I don't think Obama or many others who care about AGW have connected the dots all the way to know what a worst-case-scenario looks like, nor do they realize there is no easy technofix that enables BAU to coexist (hence Obama talking about clean coal).
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby Newfie » Mon 27 Jul 2015, 19:16:28

Not very bright then are they.
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Re: What to DO - a modest proposal

Unread postby ennui2 » Tue 28 Jul 2015, 13:32:29

Newfie wrote:Not very bright then are they.


Not many people are. That's why there are red and blue pillers.
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