Bill McKibben: This is how the earth works now

[AverageJoe90]

34. I'm afraid you're just not seeing the whole picture here.

Is that before about 2005 there were no "doomers" claiming nothing could be fixed. From the 1960s on there were a lot of people claiming that if we didn't act right fucking now, things might not be fixable later on. That is the Chicken Little claim that Big Energy reframed as "doomerism" and tarred all the climate realists with - the claim that you apparently bought hook, line and sinker. Up until 2005 virtually all the guys like me were saying "Pitter patter, let's get at her!"

Well, I'm sorry to say you read me wrong, and that your belief that climate doomers didn't exist before '05 is simply unprovable.

I've got almost 100 articles on my web site that detail why I think we're screwed, and mostly it comes down to the human brain and our cultural narrative. If we could change our cultural narrative we could act, but we'll only change it after the crisis hits - not before - because that's the way our brains are wired.

Link, please? I'm interested to hear your take on this.
Also, I think it can be legitimately argued that we're in a crisis right now.

A lot of us have realized this, and it has caused us to abandon the path you're on - we've seen that it has no destination, and we understand why that is.

Last time I checked, the path I was on is one of realism: yes, things are getting bad, and we need to urgently address the problems that we are facing, and may face in the future.

We thought the somnolent paralysis was due to a lack of education, or a moral failure on the part of leadership or something equally facile and superficial - but something amenable to education or exhortation.

Which actually turned out to be very correct.....not to mention the vast amounts of propagandizing that occurred.

These are the parts of our brain that hold the self-aggrandizing qualities of leadership and the herding instincts that keep us all together - following our leaders and blinding our rational neocortex to the simple fact that those leaders are leading us over a cliff for their own gain, while we all cheer them on.

That may be true to an extent, but do you think we would have made all of the social and economic progress that's been done over the past 100 years if that was the only factor? Sorry, but I don't buy it. If that was the only factor involved, TBH, we'd still have badly polluted urban water & air; Jim Crow would still be alive and well; people would still believe that the Earth was literally created in a week, 6,000 years ago; hell, the South might still have slavery to this day, even!

We can't fix it because the problem is not in how we act, but in why we act the way we do.

It's not that simple, I'm afraid.

Your deep-rooted desire to blame doomers is simply another manifestation of the problem.

If I was really doing that, I don't think I would have been as civil as I've been with you, GG. The truth is, the doomers were not really to blame for what happened; as I said, they were just used & manipulated. I don't play the "blame the victim" game; as frustrated as I may have gotten, and can still get with the doomers at times, I do realize that they were only trying to help.
I still place the real blame on Big Energy, because they were the ones who chose to be dishonest in the first place. They chose to lie, cheat, and destroy. Were it not for the criminality that became so pervasive amongst Exxon, BP, etc., and people like Dick Cheney and George W. Bush who enabled them, many of our problems wouldn't be as bad as they are now.

Regardless of whether or not we think Earth is doomed to destruction, or merely in for rough times ahead, let's try to fight for what's left. It's only hopeless if we quit. So let's try to do our part, shall we?