1. The United States are irrevocably breaking apart.
2. The federal government is being deliberately eviscerated.
3. The people with whom we must work are zillionares who care about the planet. We know a few of their names. Mackenzie Bezos, Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, George Soros. They must know others. These are the people who can deploy the business, finance, and industrial entities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly.
4. Every other place to put our attention is cheap talk, patter, and jive.
While I may be indulging in cheap talk (it’s true that I’m not charging for it), as long as a majority of the voting public cannot disentangle fact from fiction and seems uninterested in doing so, I don’t see how billionaires with a conscience will save us. It may be a quixotic battle, but that’s why I’m taking on the epistemological nihilism that plagues the present moment.
There needs to be a lot more of us, a critical mass sufficient to mobilize those, like Gates and Soros, who have the resources the federal government, especially under Trump, refuses to deploy to address the climate crisis.
See my post To Be Or Not To Be. We can't depend on government to enact policies we need. Therefore, we have to turn to the markets for renewables, and hope to organize the wealthy who have said they are concerned about the earth. I don't think it takes critical mass, I think it takes people who know each other, like Michael Bloomberg probably knows some of the others. And I don't think we should be focused on winning within our next decade, if we live that long. We need to be thinking about how we spend our lives. To quote the old song, which side are you on . ..because we are not going to win in what's left of our lives. The fate of the world that is ahead of us in the coming decade is more terrible than we have any ability to imagine. We can be restoring parts of the Earth. That's what we can do.
I agree with everything you said in your piece. The war against the forces of petro-fascism and their mercenary enablers in political office will have to occur on multiple fronts—economic, technological, political, and psychological. The approach you outline is clearly vital. While I have often criticized Manichean worldviews, we have come to a point in our species' history where you are either on the side of life in all its glorious manifestations or on the side of short-term greed and extinction.
Here's what I think -
1. The United States are irrevocably breaking apart.
2. The federal government is being deliberately eviscerated.
3. The people with whom we must work are zillionares who care about the planet. We know a few of their names. Mackenzie Bezos, Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, George Soros. They must know others. These are the people who can deploy the business, finance, and industrial entities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly.
4. Every other place to put our attention is cheap talk, patter, and jive.
While I may be indulging in cheap talk (it’s true that I’m not charging for it), as long as a majority of the voting public cannot disentangle fact from fiction and seems uninterested in doing so, I don’t see how billionaires with a conscience will save us. It may be a quixotic battle, but that’s why I’m taking on the epistemological nihilism that plagues the present moment.
There needs to be a lot more of us, a critical mass sufficient to mobilize those, like Gates and Soros, who have the resources the federal government, especially under Trump, refuses to deploy to address the climate crisis.
See my post To Be Or Not To Be. We can't depend on government to enact policies we need. Therefore, we have to turn to the markets for renewables, and hope to organize the wealthy who have said they are concerned about the earth. I don't think it takes critical mass, I think it takes people who know each other, like Michael Bloomberg probably knows some of the others. And I don't think we should be focused on winning within our next decade, if we live that long. We need to be thinking about how we spend our lives. To quote the old song, which side are you on . ..because we are not going to win in what's left of our lives. The fate of the world that is ahead of us in the coming decade is more terrible than we have any ability to imagine. We can be restoring parts of the Earth. That's what we can do.
I agree with everything you said in your piece. The war against the forces of petro-fascism and their mercenary enablers in political office will have to occur on multiple fronts—economic, technological, political, and psychological. The approach you outline is clearly vital. While I have often criticized Manichean worldviews, we have come to a point in our species' history where you are either on the side of life in all its glorious manifestations or on the side of short-term greed and extinction.