Much though this insidious attack offended me personally — I'm sure Oliver would lump we in with the crazies — it didn't surprise me. Oliver's attitude is in fact typical of business and government, whose interests are always in short-term profit over the long-term welfare of the public. What they fail to understand — or perhaps, more rightly, acknowledge — is that the destruction of the environment will actually lead to more lost jobs and disastrous economic decline, and that the environmental agenda is not in fact about the environment but about humanity. Environmentalists want to save the world because they — we — want to save the human species. This planet, as I said in the previous post, is the only like it within the nearest 200 million light years; we don't get another one. It is finite.
David Suzuki had a clever response, I thought, calling the environmental paradigm "a pretty conservative approach" that seeks to "'live within our means,' 'save some for tomorrow,' [and] think about the 'legacy we leave for our children.'" He pointed out that the government's policies actually deplete and destroy the very resources it seeks to profit from, ensuring, in the long-term, economic depression (not big 'D,' though that could easily follow).
Here's another writer saying the same thing as me: 350.org
Really?
ReplyDeleteD.Suz. runs lobby groups paid millions from Chinese manufacturers with terrible polluting records to demonize Western production, energy and standards of living.
EU & Asia is using dirtier oil, coal and other shale oil with a dirtier record for energy and you're complaining about the cleanest energy producer in the world?
What's your real bone you're picking?
...I have heard criticism of Suzuki before, but haven't really found a ton of evidence about his ties to said groups. Could you post some references?
ReplyDeleteAlso, being the "cleanest energy producer" is a false paradigm. We may be producing less emissions than many Western nations — mostly given our reliance on nuclear and hydropower — but our oil extraction and consumption are still dirty, still causing pollution, still degrading the planet.
There is huge pushback against ramping up alternative energy solutions because there is money to made in oil, and our Western way of life is based on it. Virtually everything we have and eat has some basis in oil. Naomi Klein recently pointed out that the idea of climate change threatens our very way of life, and that for many it thereby threatens their worldview (see http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/02/29-4).
Assuming this is the only post of mine you read, the bone I'm picking is the same one I always pick in this blog: I'm my doing my best to live in a way that's going to be the least damaging for the planet, and subsequently for our species, specifically my own family. I find the minister's comments exasperating and polarizing, and I think that kind of inflexibility is useless when it comes to trying to actually solve or get to the bottom of an issue.