Dream Log: Climate Activism in a Billionaire's Mansion

I dreamed that a billionaire had donated his mansion to be used as offices by an organization fighting climate change. I was one of the many volunteers working there. All around me people were bustling, appearing to be working very efficiently and effectively, but I was distracted by the house. It was very fancy. I kept staring at the floors, which had a very great variety of surfaces. I was especially fascinated by some granite squares bordered by strips of matte-finished metal which appeared to be a nickel-copper alloy.

 

Eventually I shook myself into somewhat greater alertness to the task at hand. Someone pointed out an impressive-looking white-haired gentleman in a very handsome suit, and suggested I offer to join his team. I walked up to the white-haired man and said I wanted to work with him. Right away he asked me whether I had been in the military. I said no, and he waved me off, dismissively, clearly considered the question settled.

I walked away, but then a moment later I approached him again, and told him that the reason I had not served in the military was that I had been raised in a very strictly pacifist Pietist Protestant denomination, and that although I was no longer strictly pacifist, the Pietists among whom I had been raised had for centuries bravely faced various forms of persecution for sticking to their beliefs, and that it was a heritage I could be proud of. I said that it his business who he wanted in his crew, but that he shouldn't get the idea that I was some sort of coward.

The old guy thought for a minute, then smiled, nodded, shook my hand and welcomed me aboard.

I followed the boss around the mansion as he busily networked with others. He and I and most of the other volunteers were wearing suits. I could see that the boss' suit and his shoes and watch were all much more expensive than mine. Likewise, the others in this particular crew, and most of the people we were meeting with, were very expensively dressed. I felt self-conscious. I wondered what the others thought about my appearance.

The boss got handed many pieces of paper. He handed some of them to me. Soon the stack of papers I was carrying was so big that I needed a backpack to carry them. Getting that backpack was as simple as calling out, "Hey, anybody got a backpack I can use? Big and roomy would be perfect." And just like that, a big and roomy backpack was tossed my way. 

Was the entire organization, everyone in the mansion, wired that tight? I wondered. Or just this boss' crew of a half dozen men and women quite a bit younger than he and I?

Most of the pieces of paper I was carrying contained color photos of people. "Hey Boss," I asked, waving some of the paper at him, "who are all these people?"

The boss laughed and replied, "Few people would recognize them. Few people have heard their names."

I took a guess: "So these are the 'fools' names and fools' faces' crowd?"

"That's right. They pull strings behind the scenes. And the ones in those pictures are profiteering from pollution. They're death merchants, no two ways about it. And we're going to take them public in a big way."

Energy Usage is Changing Fast. It Needs to Change Faster

Things are changing fast in the world's energy consumption. For over half a decade, the oil industry and people who observe it have debated when peak oil would come: the point when global oil production would begin to decline -- the point when the world began to run out of oil. More recently, a growing number of people have expressed the opinion that peak oil demand would come before peak oil: that the global demand for oil would begin to decline. Some foresaw peak oil demand in 2050, others predicted 2035. Recent estimates have been around 2025.

 

And some say that peak oil demand has actually happened. They say the decline in demand during the COVID pandemic is the beginning of the end of the growth of the oil industry, that the world will never burn fossil fuel at a fster rate than it did in 2019.

It's not such a crazy opinion. Sales of EV's are surging, sales of vehicles which burn gasoline or diesel oil are declining. Solar and wind power are growing rapidly too, and every kilowatt of electricity produced by solar, or wind, or geothermal, or nuclear, or hydro, or tidal, or biomass, represent less demand for fossil fuels. 

Some of this change is being driven by free markets, by consumers and entrepreneurs who believe that clean energy will save them and make them more money than fossil fuels. (They're right about that, by the way.) 

Much more change can be caused by laws. Governments intervened and gave us seat beats, air bags, catalytic converters, gas mileage standards, scrubbers on smokestacks and a lot of other healthy things. Free industry didn't ask  for any of those things. They resisted all of them. 

We can wait for free industry to change the world over to clean energy, and the human race can die waiting, or we can pass laws to make it happen faster. It's about as simple as that. 

What about all the workers on oil rigs and in refineries? Climate change will kill them too, along with everyone else. That's one thing about them. 

This is all pretty simple, and very serious, and none of it is a secret. Vote for people who support the Green New Deal, and whoever your representatives are, call their offices and bug them, tell them to make these changes happen faster. 

Call them every day. Let them know you're very serious about this.

Bashing EV's, and Ecological Action in General

Some say that EV's are bad for the environment, because some pollution is involved in making them. I disagree, because I think you've got to measure their effect by comparing it to the effect of ICE vehicles. Yes, not owning a car at all would be even better. 

 

But saying that EV's are bad for the environment, imho, is like saying that rooftop solar panels are bad for the environment because it would be even better if humans just went extinct. Which some environmentalists actually want. See for example Jeff Gibbs and his recent, disgusting documentary Planet of the Humans, which basically takes a big long piss on everybody who's trying to combat climate change and pollution for not doing a 100% perfect job of it. News flash: nothing is 100% perfect, not everyone who's trying to help is a fool or a dupe, and it is possible that humans will reverse the damage we've done to the environment. People don't deserve to be castigated for trying to help. Jeff Gibbs is a huge jerk and a pathological misanthropist. He's not trying to help.

Improvement is improvement. Some ICE vehicles are, in fact, much cleaner than others. A hybrid is better for the environment than an ICE vehicle. An EV is better than a hybrid. Walking, riding a non-electric bicycle or taking public transportation is better than driving an EV. 

Misinformation or disinformation (deliberate misinformation) is bad. It tends to encourage people to think that their actions make no difference, and that they might as well just give up, keep polluting as much as anybody does, and get ready to die, because the whole planet is going to die soon and there's nothing we can do about it. Which is completely inaccurate, there are all sports of things we can do about it and are doing about it. We need to keep on doing those things, and doing more. For example, the charge that EV batteries are going to end up causing horrible pollution in landfills, besides coming from people who never before in their lives expressed any concern about pollution or landfills, also happens to be dead wrong: those batteries, after lasting much longer in EV's than anyone expected, will be used in other ways, such as storing energy in people's homes or for utilities, and when they finally do expire, they will be recycled. No part of them will go into landfills. So if you've been telling people that EV batteries will soon be choking landfills and killing us all, please stop, and inform yourself on the topic. Thank you very much.

Of course, the belief that global warming is a hoax and that burning coal doesn't harm living things and that windmills are causing birds to go extinct, and so forth, that form of misinformation and disinformation is bad, too, but, thank goodness, it's finally dying out. Which shows us that other forms can be overcome as well.

The charge that driving EV's causes people to stop worrying about other causes of climate crisis such as overconsumption and overpopulation, seems to be untrue as well. On the contrary, while a few EV owners may be unconscientious, massively-polluting pigs who own six huge EV's which are all powered by coal-generated electricity and never carpool, most tend to support climate science and renewable energy (including putting solar panels on their own roofs in a high percentage of cases), and to be better than average at reducing consumption of plastic, to be vegan more often than non-EV drivers, and in general: it's crap, the charge that driving an EV makes a person think they've done all they ever need to do for the environment, and they're done.

Thank goodness, more and more people already know all of the things I've said in this post, and it's getting harder and harder to attack EV's, or solar or wind energy, or climate science, or engaged, woke people in general, without looking like a complete fool.

Who is Jordan Peterson and Why Have 7 of My Previous 8 Posts Been About Him?

(8 out of 9 if you count this one.) I'm so glad you asked!

Jordan Peterson

is a Canadian professor of psychology who is one year younger than I am and specializes in myths and their Jungian interpretation. For example, he points out that in some myths males represent order and females represent chaos. So far so good, that is an accurate description of those myths.

But then, instead of pointing out that such myths (developed and propounded mostly by males, of course, with very little consultation of female viewpoints) are descriptive of the psychology of the myth-tellers, he actually claims that they are literally accurate. He insists that males are ordered and that females are chaotic. All 4 billion or so human males, Peterson says, are ordered, and all 4 billion or so human females are chaotic.

And furthermore, he insists that male and female are the only 2 human genders which exist. (Any real experts in myth who never heard of Peterson before this blog post are already beginning to sense how much myth Peterson has to ignore in order to keep his worldview intact.) And this leads to the way in which Peterson became famous: by objecting, in 2016, to the the 2nd clause of Bill C-16, which reads:

This enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression and to clearly set out that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.

Peterson objects to this because, he claims, it will infringe upon his freedom of speech by forcing him to use pronouns other than "he" and "she" when referring to persons.

As far as I know, Peterson has not yet faced any criminal or civil prosecution because of his use of pronouns. Still, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he is claiming to have been victimized when no-one has done anything to him.

That's what made him famous. That, and some very popular YouTube videos in which he spews his right-wing viewpoints which, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he claims are not right-wing, but Classical-Liberal (or, as we would say in the United States, libertarian.) And also his book which followed very quickly upon his sudden fame as a martyr against pronoun abuse, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. (Remember: as mentioned above, Peterson says that males are orderly, females are chaotic, and that no further human genders exist.)

Peterson is a far-right-wing nut. He checks all the boxes: He claims that women need (and secretly want) to be dominated and controlled by men. He says that postmodern neo-Marxists have (again, secretly, as the postmodernists deny that they are Marxists and the Marxists deny that they are postmodern) swarmed into the faculties of our universities, where they are trying their best to enslave the minds of our young people in preparation for marching all of us off to the gulag. He is a climate-change skeptic. He says that white privilege doesn't exist. He's against women's right to choose with no if's and's or but's. He's against casual sex and gay marriage.

And he's passing himself off in many -- by no means all -- mainstream media outlets as not being right-wing at all. And he has a huge following among incels and other groups of misogynistic young men. And, annoying to me personally as a real intellectual, very many people, even including some generally-sensible Leftists, keep referring to this doofus as an intellectual. Does this help answer your question about why I've been posting about him?

Jordan Peterson Is a Climate-Change Denier --

I'm trying to find something Jordan Peterson has said or written which isn't both erroneous and right-wing -- including his claim that he's not right wing. You see all those wingnuts praising him? Me too. You see any Leftists claiming him as one of our own? Me neither.

There's climate change: Peterson said it isn't happening. He compares people who say that climate change is happening and that humans are making it worse and that it we don't make major changes it will kill us all -- that's most of the people on the planet, right? Most of the people on the face of the Earth, and well over 90% of the experts on climatology, agree that climate change is happening, and that we humans are making it worse, and that if we don't make major changes it will kill us all -- Peterson compares those billions of us to old men walking around in robes with bald heads and long beards, carrying signs proclaiming "THE END IS NEAR!" Peterson's insults, like his take on the climate, are decades out of date.

Peterson claims that smart women want smarter men as mates, and that strong women want stronger men, because they want to be dominated and controlled. ...Eh, res ipsa loquitur. It's hordes of frustrated young men who are flocking to Peterson, not great crowds of women who think that he is stronger and smarter than they are, and therefore find him irresistible.

And by the way: Peterson claims that he's not anti-LGBT+, but this and other positions he has taken, much like a lot of the worst stand-up comedy of the past few decades, fail to account for the existence of non-heterosexuals.

If Peterson is an actual expert in anything, it's mythology: he's studied many myths. He can tell you the stories -- it's when he tries to tell you what they mean that the familiar right-wing gasbag appears again. Peterson, like Jung, insists that myths lead us to universal truths, when the truth is closer to the opposite: myths distract us from uncomfortable truths which we are in danger of learning. Peterson wants the truth? He wants me to tell him the truth?! HE CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

And that's the truth!

Lobsters and dominance and serotonin, anyone? Peterson says we share ancestry with lobsters, the most recent shared ancestors having lived 350 million years ago, and that lobsters get a nice serotonin rush by dominating other lobsters and maintaining the lobster hierarchy.

Our most recent shared ancestors with lobsters lived more like 500 million years ago, or more, than 350 million years ago. Our most recent shared ancestors with chimpanzees and bonobos lived several million years ago. Lobsters and chimpanzees and bonobos, in their natural states, live outside. Chimpanzees throw their poo. Humans and chimps and bonobos and lobsters and bananas and some single-celled organisms all have serotonin, and humans eat lobsters and bananas. The wide range of social structures and hierarchies among chimpanzees and bonobos, who are much more closely related to us than lobsters, would tend to suggest that lobsters having one particular sort of hierarchy is irrelevant to understanding human sociology.

Some leftist critics of Peterson say that he will soon go from revered guru to universal laughingstock, as it becomes understood that his supposedly deep understanding of various branches of knowledge is mud-puddle deep at best. I hope so. The more broadly-dispersed and deep scientific and other academic forms of literacy are, the more quickly will come the time when it is generally understood that Peterson was never more than a charlatan posing as a multi-faceted intellectual. I had at first feared that Peterson might pose a great challenge to my ambitions for Leftist intellectual credibility. Now, after two short posts about him, it feels as if my work on him is just about done. There's no substance there with which to grapple. The man is quite simply a raving loon.

Yikes!

Keep an eye on Alaska's many wildfires with this map.

"Last updated: 24 Jul 2016, 11:50. Data from the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center, which is currently tracking 176 fires in Alaska (active, smoldering or in the process of being demobilized). Circles represent the size, but not the shape, of the fire. This page is hosted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks Arctic Region Supercomputing Center as part of the UAF SMOKE forecast project."

Many of the circles are red, representing fires covering more than 2500 acres each. 2560 acres is 4 square miles.

Global warming global schwarming, right? Drill, Baby, drill!

I'm Not Watching "South Park" Anymore

Who cares? I would imagine maybe 2 or 3 people care. The usual number of people who care about my opinions. If anything, this post might boost "South Park" viewership, because that's the way the world is. I don't think Trey Parker or Matt Stone will lose any sleep because I've decided they're dicks and that watching their show will from now on just remind me about what complete dicks they are.

It became too much for me a couple of nights ago, partway through the episode "Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow," from 2001, in which the kids reunite Terrance and Phillip for the South Park Earth Day Brainwashing Festival. I don't remember when I changed the channel, but it wasn't long after Clyde said, "Ah, excuse me? My Daddy is a geologist and he says there actually isn't any concrete evidence of global warming." Ah, excuse me, Clyde? Your Daddy gets paid to lie by oil companies. I don't think Parker and Stone have that excuse. I could be wrong, but whether they're getting paid off or they own a lot of Exxon and BP or they're actually that dumb, or whether they actually do realize that global warming is real and they do shit like this just to spite Sean Penn DOESN'T REALLY MATTER all that much any more to me.

It's the message of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Mother Night again, the one I've quoted so often in this blog, the one which has become almost a mantra for me: "We are what we pretend to be." In the introduction to Mother Night Vonnegut said he didn't think it was a particularly deep message. I must disagree. It's very deep, and its applications and implications are wide. I did a bit of research for this post, trying to find something concrete about Parker's and/or Stone's views on global warming. A quote, one way or another, "I think global warming is a hoax" or "Of course we know global warming is real and catastrophic, we're just torturing Sean Penn." A massive donation to the Republican Party or the Audubon Society. I found squat. Besides being done with "South Park," I think I'm done with RationalWiki too, which claimed that Parker and Stone are climate change skeptics and offered no evidence for this beyond "South Park." And I'm sorry I ever saw Encyclopedia Dramatica in the course of searching for info on Parker and Stone. Again, it's the we-are-what-pretend-to-be thing: if Encyclpedia Dramatica isn't a neo-Nazi website, it's pretending to be one convincingly enough that it actually is one.

I'm not telling anybody else what TV shows they should watch. Some people can't watch movies with Tom Cruise or John Travolta, because of Scientology. In some cases some of those movies used to be among their favorites, but in the meantime they learned more about Scientology, and now they just can't stand those movies anymore. I have no problem watching movies with Cruise or Travolta in them. Scientology doesn't bother me nearly as much as global warming. To me the main difference between Christianity and Scientology is that Scientology is a lot newer. But if people want to boycott movies with Cruise or Travolta, or keep watching "South Park," that's fine with me. I understand. Sometimes I can separate art from politics, as I do when I read Eliot and Pound and Yeats. I can understand progressives who love Wagner and progressives who can't listen to Wagner. I can separate the art from the politics.

Some of the time I can. But not all of the time. Not with Parker and Stone, not any more. Not with the treatment of environmentalism on "South Park," not with Parker being a Libertarian either, and not with Stone saying stupid shit such as that W and Michael Moore are equally clueless and that Alec Baldwin is even worse.

It would be great if one of them had a big come-to-Jesus moment about the climate, and they started to have a huge bitter public feud over the environment. That would be awesome. "Terrance and Phillip: Behind the Blow"-in-real-life-level awesome.

I tried really hard to find out that Parker and/or Stone was an anti-vaxxer so that I could pile more contempt upon them in this post, but no luck. I'm not saying they're not anti-vaxxers, I'm not saying that it would surprise me to learn that they're anti-vaxxers. Anti-vax is truly rampant in Amuurkin show biz, probably more widespread per capita than in Amurrkin trailer parks, but I have no evidence to show anti-vax tendencies on the part of either Parker or Stone. At this juncture.

Anyway. Trey, Matt: screw you gazz, I'm goin' home.