All of this sounds really, terribly, awfully pessimistic, and if you've followed my "Climate Sunday"posts over the past year or so, it really might seem like I'm full of doom and gloom and probably the least fun person at parties. But I'm actually pretty optimistic, conditionally.
You see, I tend to think that, as a species, humans are not actually completely freaking stupid, even if we do the world's best imitation of it. If we emerged from the Ice Age smarter and more technologically competent to handle living on this planet, I think we can make something work with the tools we have to confront climate change. I just think we could stand to get off our asses about it.
For me, it looks like the people who profit from fossil fuels have sunk a lot of money into propaganda supporting continuing use of diminishing and dirty commodities that they could have sunk into research into renewable, sustainable energy technologies, which would have vastly increased their return on investment as opposed to propping up increasingly inappropriate and sometimes intolerably backasswards political candidates. (I'm looking at you, Koch Brothers). Despite the evidence that the corporations behind continued "energy policy as usual" consider shareholder benefit over and above their employees' and energy consumers' welfare or very lives, we are bombarded by messages that lead us to believe that if we don't back them, all the jobs and technologies we have today will just go away. Because surely people who don't back Big Petrol and Big Coal are some kind of patchouli-scented hippie Luddites.
Except for a bunch of them being scientists. Like. Huh. Who aren't either Luddites or technology averse, and needn't necessarily even be hippies. (I'm a English Lit major who gets a lot of my HBA supplies at Whole Foods, so, usual suspect, here. Except I'm obviously spending all my time on the Intertubes.) And while I dabble in science writing, I kind of think a lot about economics for my real pastime. The ROI on fossil fuels is not going to be improved upon. The idea that tar sands or fracking is going to be superabundant and cost oodles less is a hard-sell treatment and a "pipeline dream". It's already cruder and uses more energy to get at. We've hit some kind of diminishing returns for anybody but the buck rakers at the top--but when deep-sea wells and all that start getting more expensive...
They're having you on, son. They're ramping up on diversifying their supposed advancements in eking out those last carbon-y ergs from yon earth because they know it's all got to end somewhere and haven't figured out where the next score is. But they're happy to try and sell you on them so long as they prevent whatever next big thing undercuts their take.
I think people don't like being had. I think deep down we get that the kinds of jobs like coal mining and drilling and all that are exceptionally dangerous. I think we distrust, if we think about it, folks who profit from our desperate needs and provide us with less and less of them. I think we have the tools and technology right now to make changes in our energy usage to solar and wind power, and we have ways of doing them cleanly and humanely-if we dare. The technology has to change fast though to ameliorate (not stop) what's going on with the climate.
I'm a hard-core Keynesian. I can only think of one way to manage what we have to do. Anyone who wants to call regulations that massively disfavor fossil fuels and subsidize solar and wind "tyranny" can stop and tell me about why union rallies that ended in massacres were something different. And tell me how the stakes were morally superior then.
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