Love your neighbor as yourself.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nImagine Lincoln approached slavery believing abolition was impossible<\/h2>\n
Lincoln expressed the opposite of McKibben about slavery. The thirteenth amendment ended it immediately, ending generations of people promoting cockamamie schemes like only freeing slaves when a plan could be made to colonize Liberia with them and Diffusion Theory, which said that expanding slavery over more territory would cause it to diffuse and end.<\/p>\n
More trouble: acting like environmentalists and the fossil fuel industry don\u2019t overlap<\/h2>\n
On page 6, he wrote \u201cThe fossil fuel industry has read the numbers too, and so they\u2019ve girded for the fight.\u201d<\/p>\n
He refers to the fossil fuel industry as \u201cthey,\u201d but on page 15, he wrote \u201cIn the fall of 2021, I made my first post-Covid overseas trip, to the global climate conference, which was held that year in Glasgow, Scotland.\u201d<\/p>\n
He is funding the fossil fuel industry, its lobbyists, advertisers, executives, and politicians<\/strong>. I\u2019ll bet more of his spending funds increasing fossil fuel extraction than necessities like food or clothing, or near necessities like phone and computer use, especially considering that they all use plenty of fossil fuel.<\/p>\nBefore you say individual action doesn\u2019t matter, missing the necessity of leadership, on page 34, he wrote, \u201cIn 2015, while all the world\u2019s environmentalists were at the Paris climate talks\u2026\u201d Beyond just him, \u2018ll bet more of all environmentalists fund increasing fossil fuel extraction food, clothing, phone, or computer use. When environmentalists refer to fossil fuel interests as different than their own, watch your wallet.<\/strong><\/p>\nEnergy versus electricity versus pollution and depletion<\/h2>\n
Throughout the book he refers to electricity, especially in the rosy parts when he talks about how much energy solar and wind produce. He doesn\u2019t adequately, in my opinion, distinguish electrical energy from overall energy. He mentions steel manufacture and a few other things that today require fossil fuels. I don\u2019t remember if he mentioned the impossibility of flying without fossil fuels today, with no meaningful hope of alternative, but he did mention flying a fair amount.<\/p>\n
So what about all these other polluting, depleting activities he doesn\u2019t treat?<\/p>\n
He also doesn\u2019t distinguish between producing energy, polluting, and achieving the value of what the energy and pollution were for without polluting or depleting\u2014for example, living close to your family so you don\u2019t need to fly to them or never buying doof again.<\/p>\n
Back to culture<\/h2>\n
Recapitulating his capitulation on changing culture, he wrote on page 25 that he envisions accelerating our current culture, not changing it: \u201cSun and wind promise a new flood of electricity. But for that flood to put out the fires of global warming, we have to do more than just put up a lot of panels and turbines. We also have to convert our economy to use all that electricity.\u201d<\/p>\n
To clarify, he wants to use more electricity. As long as producing that electricity pollutes and depletes, which harms people without their consent, which means it violates the fifth amendment, the Declaration of Independence\u2019s principle of the consent of the governed, and other founding principles of this nation, and requirements for liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy, he is promoting their opposites.<\/p>\n
News you\u2019ll like<\/h2>\n
A small piece of news I liked was on page 50: \u201cForty percent of the world\u2019s ship traffic, for instance, consists of moving coal and gas and oil back and forth across the ocean to be burned.\u201d It shows the huge snowballing of savings when we pollute and deplete less.<\/p>\n
The big news you\u2019ll like is that humans have changed culture on the scale we need to in the time we have, we\u2019ve loved the change, we wish we\u2019d changed earlier, and essentially no one wants to go back. The big examples are democracy (speaking of the Declaration and Constitution) and abolitionism.<\/p>\n
This nation was founded on replacing tyranny with democracy. We made big steps. We have more steps and we\u2019ll do them. As evidence we can, one of those steps was abolitionism.<\/p>\n
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