Pirate's Cove

This is a rather interesting, and long, article in Politico by Michael Grunwald, and he makes some excellent points. Two that are missing are 1) Earth Day is about the environment, not the climate scam, and 2) don’t mix Bat Soup Virus into it. Anyhow

What the Climate Movement Is Getting Wrong on Earth Day

Fifty years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day, voting with their feet against the degradation of the planet. Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly captured the moment with his legendary anti-pollution poster: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

On Wednesday, environmentalists around the world will take to their keyboards for the 50th Earth Day, forced online by the coronavirus crisis but still dedicated to saving the planet from the slower-motion climate crisis. As the earth has begun to broil, though, the Earth Day movement has reshaped its narrative, arguing that the enemy isn’t really us.

Isn’t using electricity Bad in the CoC? Seems they will be using lots.

In recent years, green activists have pivoted away from guilt-tripping us about our carbon footprints and embraced a more politically appealing message: Our personal choices don’t really matter, so we should stop worrying so much about what we eat or drive and whether we recycle or compost. The new environmentally correct message is that only large-scale political and institutional change can save the climate, so lecturing ordinary people about using plastic straws and other individual behaviors with relatively paltry climate impacts is a distraction from government policies and corporate abuses with catastrophic impacts.

In other words, if you care about the earth, you should focus on the damage being done to it by real enemies like President Donald Trump and ExxonMobil, not the damage being done to it by you.

“You Can’t Save the Climate by Going Vegan,” a leading climate scientist proclaimed in a USA Today op-ed. “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care If You Recycle,” a climate activist declared in Vox. A Daily Beast columnist explained “Why Your Carbon Footprint Is Meaningless,” while a Guardian writer claimed “Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals.” The new thinking might have been best summed up by a recent headline in the eco-media site Grist: “This professor wants you to give up your climate guilt.”

For a movement trying to broaden its appeal, it’s an alluring message. Americans don’t want to feel guilty about driving, flying, eating beef, having kids, buying too much stuff, moving to bigger houses in outer-ring suburbs or other ordinary human activities that increase greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate activists don’t want to reinforce stereotypes of enviros as self-righteous anti-fun scolds. And it’s true that there’s no way to solve climate change without major systemic change.

But the idea that our individual actions don’t particularly matter is fundamentally bogus. And over the past several weeks, the coronavirus has been revealing that in unexpected ways.

What are those “unexpected” ways?

The newly iconic photos of a crystal-clear Los Angeles skyline without its usual shroud of smog are unwanted but compelling evidence of what can happen when individuals stop driving vehicles that pollute the air. Nobody is happy about what’s causing a 95 percent drop in air travel, but nobody will ever again be able to claim that massive reductions in airline emissions are impossible. And the dramatic reductions in overall emissions during this time of individual confinement are a clear demonstration that most emissions are caused, directly or not, by individual activities—the fuel we burn, the electricity we consume, the factories and farms that make the stuff we buy and eat. It’s horrible that it took an economy-crushing public health disaster to illustrate this on a large scale, but when people do less, for awful, virus-related reasons or noble, climate-related reasons, they emit less.

See, that is the real environmental impact, it has nothing to do with ‘climate change’. But, are people happy giving up their lives and being ordered to stay home? Apparently, we aren’t supposed to eat or have goods anymore.

One reason climate activists have stopped emphasizing individual behavior is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to persuade people to change, even under threat. Global warming has seemed less imminent than the viral threat, even in this new era of hellacious megadroughts, superstorms and wildfires, and the changes that individuals do make can seem pathetically inadequate to the task of transforming a fossil-fueled economy. The solar panels on my roof have prevented just 81 tons of carbon emissions in nearly three years, a period when U.S. emissions amounted to nearly 20 billion tons. My all-electric Chevrolet Bolt saved about 500 gallons of gasoline last year, while U.S. drivers burned 142 billion gallons.

One reason climate cultists have stopped emphasizing individual behavior is because they themselves refuse to practice what they preach. This is a Modern Socialist movement, one of government controlling everything. If Government is controlling all these companies, they control you. Getting people out in the street protesting these companies keeps them whipped up and enables government power.

But the new climate mantra is not just that individual behavior is less important than institutional change. It’s that individual behavior is basically irrelevant, and that harping on it makes institutional change less likely, alienating potential allies with victim-blaming and virtue-signaling, bamboozling the public into taking responsibility for problems caused by corporations and politicians instead of clamoring for corporate and political accountability. “It shifts the blame from the actual causes of climate change to fake ones … and shifts attention from meaningful actions to meaningless psychological ones,” wrote the Daily Beast’s Jay Michaelson.

At the end of the day, it is still a doomsday cult scam. One in which they make excuses to force Other People to practice what they preach, rather than themselves.