Building Apathy
‘We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,’ he said. ‘It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.’” says Rex Tillerson, Chairman of the Board of Exxon Mobil.
Those who spend their lives building bank accounts and privilege have nothing but their certainties about the universe to guide them.
To call climate change an engineering problem, susceptible to an engineering solution is like an arsonist calling a gigantic forest fire a chemical reaction. He might as well say, "dump water on it" as he races to the next forest to set a fire for which he receives lavish reward from fire fetishists everywhere.
To call climate change an engineering problem, susceptible to an engineering solution is like an arsonist calling a gigantic forest fire a chemical reaction. He might as well say, "dump water on it" as he races to the next forest to set a fire for which he receives lavish reward from fire fetishists everywhere.
Simply build a giant umbrella to shield earth from the sun's heat.
What could be more simple?!
Problem: heat.
Solution: less heat.
We can seed the atmosphere with sulfur or shoot some mirrors into space. These solutions are called Geo-engineering.
Now let's talk about something more complicated like tax shelters.
So as the earth heats and the icecaps and glaciers melt, a vaunted noble who jets above the common rabble says, that people would be able to adapt to rising sea levels and changing climates that may force agricultural production to shift."[ibid]
Those people? The ones who "will adapt" (and die by the hundreds of millions, oh by the way) come the many disasters accompanying radical climate change?
You and me.
Well, me, anyway. You might be one of those billionaires who thinks you have the ability to avoid the ordinary fate of commoners -- like the nobles of Europe who moved to their estates to wait out the Black Death as it ravaged through the population. (We'll adapt ... we'll adapt ... poor things ... we'll adapt though, we always do.)
You may think you'll be saved because you're wealthy enough to move from the drought-stricken US to the relatively verdant slopes of Switzerland or the tropical paradise of Belize. This is what Tillerson means by "able to adapt". Adapt to new locales and new locals, new crops and new peasants, new trade routes and new foods -- in short, new areas to dominate and exploit. You may think you won't be affected tomorrow because you're not affected today. You may think you will be one of the lucky ones who, by cleverness or wealth or good luck, survive the worst of it.
Maybe you will survive it. Maybe you'll grow gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld. Maybe aliens will land and whisk you off to safety like the aliens in Octavia Butler's series of books. Maybe you think you can build an estate in Uruguay to escape the worst of it. Maybe it won't happen to you but to your children or, (better still no doubt), your grandchildren.
I'd like to tell Exxon-Mobil chairman Tillerson that he won't survive it. He won't adapt, His children won't adapt because the problem isn't an engineering problem.
It's nature: like gravity or hurricanes, unmoved by the privileges of wealth, deaf to the prayers of all, especially the most devout, merciless to the arrogance of the stupid, and and indifferent to all the propaganda spewed by those who've turned the world predatory and ruthless.
As the earth spins through the cosmos, circling an anonymous sun, among a few planets on the fringe of the Milky Way, there is no quibbling with the universe.
As the earth spins through the cosmos, circling an anonymous sun, among a few planets on the fringe of the Milky Way, there is no quibbling with the universe.
Yet this liege lord among mankind, a master of society, a grandmaster moving pieces on the chessboard of Earth, casually reiterates the prevailing, defining, fatal arrogance of most of the humans species for the last ten thousands years:
"We can fix it."
A boast.
An epitaph.
A boast.
An epitaph.
[Note: this post responds to Glenn Greenwald post deploring the use of propagandist Hollywood film scheduled to open in October of 2012.]
[Backqround: OCTOBER SURPRISE: The term came into use shortly after the 1972 presidential election between Republican incumbent Richard Nixon and Democrat George McGovern, when the United States was in the fourth year of negotiations to end the very long and domestically divisive Vietnam War. Twelve days before the election day of November 7, on October 26, 1972, the United States' chief negotiator, the presidential National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, appeared at a press conference held at the White House and announced, "We believe that peace is at hand".[1] Nixon, despite having vowed to end the unpopular war during his presidential election campaign four years earlier, had failed to either cease hostilities or gradually bring about an end to the war. Nixon was nevertheless already widely considered to be assured of an easy reelection victory against McGovern, but Kissinger's "peace is at hand" declaration may have increased Nixon's already high standing with the electorate. In the event, Nixon outpolled McGovern in every state except Massachusetts and achieved a 20 point lead in the nationwide popular vote. The fighting ended in 1973, but soldiers remained in Vietnam until 1975.)]
Way, way back when, there was a very bad president who used his public office to ensure his re-election. He used dirty tricks, he spied on his opponents, he referred to people with ethnic and sexual slurs. He used every underhanded and despicable tactic he and his advisers could imagine.
He was a very bad man. He used his public office for private gain.
When he was caught being bad, he had to resign in disgrace. He carried the sins of his party -- his patrons and his retainers, his political allies and his beneficiaries -- almost alone. He was hounded out of office by both parties. He endured the disgrace with dignity and self-pity, assuming his party's sins as his own. This allowed his own party to remain viable.
(Meanwhile, shortly after this scandal and during the national turmoil that followed in its wake, a man who would dominate American politics as vice president, as president, and as father to a president assumed leadership of the CIA.)
By the by, another president was elected who, everyone of both parties admits, was too honest and too noble for the dirty job of President of the US.
He too was forced out of office when the opposition party used the very sort of dirty tricks against 'the too honest and too noble for the job' President to worm their way back into office and into the good graces of the American people.
They had learned their lesson:
Ratfuck your opponent before he ratfucks you. And don't get caught.
(Oh, by the way ... if you do get caught, use the office that you have to protect yourself:
You can deplore the tactics and demonstrate the hypocrisy of the Obama administration, that's fine. But if you ignore -- rewrite -- history and pretend the two parties are exactly the same, you miss the point and contribute to the ineffectiveness of government that the Republicans have so slyly created and ruthlessly exploited since 1968. (see, for instance, Bush v. Gore, 2000)
The Democrats are playing according to rules Republicans established.
Finally.