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Monday, April 16, 2012

But I Feel Fine...

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:
...so much climate change denialism really amounts to the very familiar, very ugly North Atlantic racism that says: Sure, climate-change will increase famines and droughts and lethally destructive storms that end the world for millions... sure, it will release more disease-carrying insects at higher human-dwelling altitudes and undermine hygiene and despoil freshwater and swell slums to intensify plagues that end the world for millions... sure, it will demolish infrastructure and empower warlords and further destabilize societies and set millions more precarious refugees in motion whose worlds are turned upside down... and so on and so forth and so on and so forth... hell, it already is, sure enough, right now, even now! -- but, hey, it doesn't matter, it's not the end of the world, not really, not the END end of the REAL world... because it will mostly continue always only to happen to THEM, you know, OVER THERE, you know, where everything is always nothing but lethal and devastated and alien and precivilized and not-world... WE will be okay, WE will still have our bottled water, WE will still have our big box retail outlets and air conditioned malls, WE will still have our lawns to mow and our freeways to motor and our drive-throughs to have fries with that, WE will still have our high walls and our bubble-domes, WE will still have our guns to protect our treasure hoards... So often, climate change denialism is just another variation on the usual denial of humanity to the majority of humans on the planet, not least by people who smugly declare themselves to be some kind of humanists.

2 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

I used to think that maybe people living in the North might be able to get away with ignoring it for a few decades.

That's changed however, Russia's been effected. The same kind of thing could happen to Canada.

And in a cruel irony the Southern US is already feeling the pinch and heading towards permanent dust bowl conditions. The tea pariters are correct in thinking they've helped delayed action on climate change but they won't be bragging about it to their grandchildren.

jimf said...

> The tea partiers are correct in thinking they've helped delayed
> action on climate change but they won't be bragging about it to
> their grandchildren.

Not to worry. By then, we'll have all moved to Venus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacque_Fresco#The_Venus_Project

Oh. Um, unless it's under water.