Don’t be tricked into reducing pressure on the fossil criminals

Michael Mann is one of the earth’s top climate scientists. As such, he’d had more than his fair share of insanity thrown at him, but he is still there, still on the side of survival, still doing his best to work for a future.

He has warned us of two recent twists by those who want to protect the suicidal fossil industry.

One is, “Yeah, sure, climate change is here and it’s terrible, but it’s too late, there is nothing we can do. You might as well buy a SUV and enjoy yourself.”

In Ascending Spiral, Pip says,

I dislocated a shoulder in 2009. About two months later, my rehabilitation homework was to play basketball with myself. This is brilliant: increasing strength, flexibility and self-confidence in a pleasurable way.

OK, I shoot for the basket and get it in. Beauty. I shoot again and miss. So what—I’m still exercising my shoulder.

We are on this planet for a purpose. This is not to make money or to be better than the neighbor. It is to learn Lessons, to progress toward the ultimate lesson of Love, the message of Jesus (and this is from a Buddhist Jew).

So, if you join my team and we create a sustainable society, beauty. But if we miss and humanity goes the way of the Dodo, so what. If the students destroy this school, let me reassure you: there are billions of other schools in the universe.

Michael Mann is right. We need to do the best we can do.

His second point is drawing attention to a new denialist strategy: making it all individual action. Instead of electing sane politicians and withdrawing resources from the fossil industries and transitioning to sustainable technologies, we should do our individual best (only): “Mann stressed that individual actions – eating less meat or avoiding air travel – were important in the battle against global warming. However, they should be seen as additional ways to combat global warming rather than as a substitute for policy reform.”