September 10, 2018 – 8:02 am
We can fix this all with a tax, you know
The Most Honest Book About Climate Change Yet
William T. Vollmann’s latest opus is brilliant, but it offers no comfort to its readers.
Authors like to flatter themselves by imagining for their work an “ideal reader,†a cherubic presence endowed with bottomless generosity, the sympathy of a parent, and the wisdom of, well, the authors themselves. In Carbon Ideologies, William T. Vollmann imagines for himself the opposite: a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation. Vollmann can’t blame this reader, whom he addresses regularly throughout Carbon Ideologies, because she lives in the future, under radically different circumstances—inhabiting a “hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet.†He envisions her turning the pages of his climate-change opus within the darkened recesses of an underground cave in which she has sought shelter from the unendurable heat; the plagues, droughts, and floods; the methane fireballs racing across boiling oceans. Because the soil is radioactive, she subsists on insects and recycled urine, and regards with implacable contempt her ancestors, who, as Vollmann tells her, “enjoyed the world we possessed, and deserved the world we left you.â€
Good grief. Sounds like a fun read. Especially when the two books in question “No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies” and “No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies ” are 624 and 688 pages, respectively. And, as Eric Worrell points out
Author William T. Vollmann seems a bit special even for a climate advocate. Back in April this year, Vollmann called for “regulatory hellâ€Â to force everyone to accept a greener lifestyle – an insight Vollman apparently reached by bathing his face in gamma rays, and other risky sounding activities.
I wonder what the carbon footprint is for publishing and shipping his books?
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Radioactive insects???? From climate change??? Methane fireballs racing across the oceans????
He may be a really good writer, but is likely completely illiterate in science:
Vollmann has a degree from Deep Springs College in the desert and a degree in Comparative Literature from Cornell.
Vollman concludes: “Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.â€
The author of the piece concludes: …[Don’t] mistake Carbon Ideologies for a work of activism. Vollmann’s project is nothing so conventional. His “letter to the future†is a suicide note. He does not seek an intervention — only acceptance. If not forgiveness, then at least acceptance.
Eric Worrall (WUWT) deliberately misinterpreted what Vollman said.
Recall that Vollman concludes: “Nothing can be done to save [the world as we know it]; therefore, nothing need be done.â€
His point was that IF we decided to do something it would require “regulatory hell”. He certainly did not advocate that.