With No Illusions, Says Climate Leader, Clinton Must Be Elected—Then Fiercely Confronted

[elleng]

The day after the election, the climate movement will 'need to press harder than ever for real progress on the biggest crisis the world has ever faced.'

'Bill McKibben, author and co-founder of 350.org, minces no words addressing those environmentally-minded voters who are fretting over the mixed record of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton: Elect her, "and then give her hell."

In a column published at The Nation on Tuesday, McKibben shares the sentiment felt by many progressive voters this election season: "I'd much rather have been campaigning for Bernie Sanders."

Those feelings, McKibben acknowledges, were compounded after WikiLeaks revealed this weekend that behind closed doors Clinton defended natural gas and fracking, and said that environmental activists should "get a life."

Those damning email leaks only further underscored what McKibben describes as Clinton's "craven" silence over the Dakota Access Pipeline fight.

"Even the sight of attack dogs being used on peaceful Native American protesters didn't move her to break ranks with her industry allies and that fraction of the labor movement that still wants to build pipelines," he writes. "That's craven on her part, pure and simple."

"So why," he asks, "are many of us out there working to beat [Republican nominee Donald Trump] and elect her? Because Trump is truly a horror."'>>>

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/10/18/no-illusions-says-climate-leader-clinton-must-be-elected-then-fiercely-confronted?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

[truebluegreen]

1. + a brazillion

[NNadir]

2. Why do we need Bill McKibben? From where I stand he's a tiresome fool...

...who is more invested in repeating, endlessly, the same rhetoric that has failed, is failing, and will fail, so called "renewable energy."

It's the same bullshit Sanders offered, with Sanders going so far as to call for a "nuclear moratorium," that was dumb in the 1970's, dumber in the 1980's, dangerous in the 1990's, grotesquely illiterate in the 2000's and hopeless in the 2010s.

Um, Bill, despite your insipid sloganeering about 350, if you look at the science (as opposed to wishful thinking) we're now at more than 400 and we're never going back; and the reason is people like you are conservatives. No amount of information can make you change your mind.

And the information we're seeing is this: No amount of money thrown at the solar and wind industries can make them significant forms of energy, and their mere survival is dependent on access to dangerous natural gas, the fracking of which is a crime against all future generations.

We may contrast Bill McKibben's experience with that of Ms. Clinton.

Ms. Clinton servedin the Obama cabinet in the presence of Nobel Laureate Steven Chu.

Chu, unlike McKibben, is a scientist.

Chu's positions, as a Nobel Laureate and a scientist are pretty clear:

Secretary Chu's Remarks at Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant -- As Prepared for Delivery

Ms. Clinton is a highly intelligent woman, not some blithering fool, and I trust her far more than McKibben to assimilate and utilize information.

We frankly don't need even more shithead scientifically illiterate journalists demanding to dictate policy to the President of the United States. We need them to shut their mouths and report.

Bill is not reporting; were he, he would have noticed that trillion dollar expenditures on the shit he endorses, so called "renewable energy" has accelerated the decline of the atmosphere.

He doesn't deserve a policy place. He's even dumber than Joe Romm or Amory Lovins, meaning pretty damned dumb.

Rather than talk about climate change, he would do better to learn about climate change, and that, regrettably, would involve taking some basic science courses.

[Jim Lane]

4. Fortunately, McKibben is unlikely to heed your demand that he shut his mouth.

Normally, I wouldn't apply the term "demand" to your post. You merely made a recommendation. I make the exception here because you write:

We frankly don't need even more shithead scientifically illiterate journalists demanding to dictate policy to the President of the United States. We need them to shut their mouths and report.

By your lights, making a recommendation constitutes a demand.

I don't always agree with McKibben, but he's done a lot of valuable work in alerting people to the climate crisis. One of your main purposes on DU seems to be touting the joys of nuclear power. You should bear in mind that widespread public concern over atmospheric carbon dioxide levels might be helpful to the cause, because some climate activists will agree with Hansen rather than McKibben on the subject of nukes.

[NNadir]

5. I didn't "demand" he shut his mouth. I suggested that he be ignored, since...

...his "demands" of Ms. Clinton are idiotic.

Climate change is an extreme engineering and scientific challenge, and even though marketing is an important part of getting an ignorant public to recognize the magnitude of this problem, the marketing McKibben is doing is at best silly, at worst, dangerous.

I have spent the last 30 years reading - not idiot pablum from journalists or insipid garbage on Joe Romm's (and equivalent) websites - the primary scientific literature on atmospheric chemistry, nuclear engineering and related topics.

This allows me to formulate an opinion and to offer it.

Bill McKibben, from my standpoint, is part of the problem, since he offers glib and uneducated "solutions" to a problem he is not competent to understand.

He's just another rabid dogmatic anti-nuke who wants everyone to pretend that they can build enough wind turbines and solar cells to live in a bourgeois dreamland.

It's garbage thinking, not worthy of the attention it gets. So called "renewable energy" hasn't worked; it isn't working and it won't work.

We owe it to future generations to not live in McKibben/Romm/Lovins bourgeois dream lands. The issue is far too serious.

Of course, McKibben won't shut his mouth. He's obviously a man who's not bright enough to know how weak minded and uninformed he is. What I am saying is that I am hoping with all my heart, and with all the great love I have for this remarkable and rare planet, that President Hillary Clinton will brush him off with the same appropriate disdain with which she brushed off similar loud mouths, say for instance, Donald Trump or the Bengazi committee.

Have a nice day.

[GliderGuider]

6. McKibben/Romm/Lovins/Klein/Hansen/Monbiot bourgeois dream lands... nt

[NNadir]

7. Oh please...

Over the years, I've seen, you have a very limited understanding of technology; knowing only that you hate it, and to repeat your common theme, we all just have to give up and wait like the members of some doomsday cult to die.

There is a distinct difference - a powerful physical difference between diffuse energy sources and concentrated energy sources. To place them at equivalence is, well, just ignorant.

This past week I had the pleasure of touring - a private tour led by a very inspiring young graduate student - a major university materials science department with my son, who is seventeen and who is developing a fine scientific mind of his own. I will tell you that there are things being studied that you cannot even barely imagine.

It is true that cynical old bastards have left the world in a shambles, but cynical old bastards who expect to compound their crimes against the future by offering only hopelessness - punctuated by a certain insistence on their own ignorance - by demanding that everyone just kill themselves because they can't see a way out, are, well, useless.

You're not as prescient as you think you are, and I have a strong suspicion that you don't live in a very broad world.

I have seen economic histories that argue that periods of dire tragedy - the bubonic plague comes to mind - often result in a new paradigm and a new world that exceeds the reach of the dying and dead worlds.

It is very clear that the so called "renewable energy" scheme has failed. What you choose to ignore - and you really ought to read Jared Diamond's treatise on how societies choose to fail - is that technological and social choices matter and it has never, not once, been the case that there were no choices, viable choices. One of Diamond's examples refers to the fate of the Greenland Norse, who apparently starved to death because for some cultural reason they refused to eat salmon. He notes that the Inuit, living in the same landscape, by contrast, did quite well and survived quite well. They had no cultural fear of eating salmon, so they, um, did.

I note that the nuclear industry - despite decades of malign innuendo and fear mongering - is still quite alive, still of intense international interest, and still the world's largest, by far, source of climate change gas free energy. I personally do not expect these facts to escape the young minds who will need to address these problems.

Speaking on behalf of my son, and perhaps the fine young students and professors I had the pleasure of meeting last week, I can only say "stuff it."

Enjoy the rest of the week.

[GliderGuider]

8. It's always easier to dish out criticism of others' beliefs

than to accept criticism of your own, isn't it?

[NNadir]

11. Of course it is, especially if one HAS "beliefs" or more accurately, educated opinions.

I apologize for my tone, but not for the concept I expressed, which is very much involved with physics and a concern for the future.

[GliderGuider]

12. Gracefully accepting criticism of your own beliefs is very good exercise.

I should know, all sides of this debate have been criticizing mine for a decade now. It has taught me not to take beliefs so seriously, whether they are mine or anyone else's.

It doesn't matter how educated one's opinion is, it's still just one opinion among 7.5 billion others. I'm quite conversant with the feeling of self-righteous superiority that rises up when one feels they have discovered a Truth about the world that others have missed. From one step back, however, it's all bullshit. However much lipstick you want to put on that pig (whatever its breed), it's still just a belief.

IMO it would help the world a great deal if we all took our beliefs far less seriously.

On edit: Apology accepted, by the way.

[hatrack]

9. I say this as someone who enjoys your posts, but also as a group host . . .

Rein it in.

"Stuff it"? Really?

[NNadir]

10. I apologize. I was just very angry. n/t.

[hatrack]

13. I understand, and appreciate your response!

It's just that I've had more than enough screeching and screaming and slamming every-bloody-where else for the past few months - maybe it's getting to me.

E&E's been sort of a reasonable haven compared to GD/GD12.

Of course, maybe relative lack of traffic has something do do with that . . .

Anyway, thanks!

[NNadir]

14. Well you're very brave. Evan a hothead like me would never dare to go into...

...GD!

It seems as if environmental issues have taken the back seat everywhere around the world, at least to me, not just here, everywhere.

As my time runs out, it's the biggest fear I have for the future, that instead of caring more, as we should have done, we care less.

But there are some fine young people in the world, and I hope they will do better than we did.

[Fast Walker 52]

15. so to clarify-- you don't like McKibben or don't think she needs to be pushed on climate change

solutions?

[NNadir]

16. Rather than it being about HER; I suggest it's about US.

If WE are concerned about climate change, WE can do better than what Bill McKibben suggests, which is "listen to me, Bill McKibben."

The problem is that Bill McKibben is a fucking idiot. His "solution" to climate change is the consumerist war cry, "Let's buy all new stuff," where the "all new stuff" is wind turbines and solar cells.

Since Bill McKibben's war cry is pure mindless consumerism - "we'll all be great if we have solar cells on our McMansions and Tesla cars in our garages" - if WE encourage Ms. Clinton to do what Bill McKibben suggests, i.e. "Listen to me, Bill McKibben," then WE are doing nothing about Climate Change, because, um, Bill McKibben knows zero about science and engineering.

What he proposes hasn't worked - with trillions thrown at it -; it isn't working, and it won't work.

We have, in case you haven't noticed, been doing, on this planet exactly what Bill McKibben has been crying for for years. We have built and are building more wind turbines than ever before; we have manufactured and installed, and are manufacturing and installing, more solar cells than ever before.

The result of this vast experiment is written in the planetary atmosphere. As of this writing, the current figure for the week ending October 23, 2016, at 402.07 ppm is 3.57 ppm over the same time last year. In any other year, as recently as 2010, this 3.57 figure would have been astounding. In 2016 it's, um, ordinary.

Fuck Bill McKibben and his idiot "350" chanting. If he were honorable, he'd shut the fuck up and listen to engineers and scientists. But he's not honorable. He's a conservative. He believes that one must do everything the same way one has always said it should be done, i.e. that the results don't matter, because he loves the means to death.

To death.

Our atmosphere is dying, and the rate at which it is doing so is the fastest ever observed. If Ms. Clinton is as intelligent as I think she is, she will do what President Obama did, and bring scientists into the cabinet.

You know, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and even Richard Nixon all gave Glenn Seaborg de facto cabinet rank. He moved things in such a way that nearly 100 nuclear reactors were constructed, saving hundreds of thousands of American lives that would have otherwise been lost to air pollution.

Mr. Obama must have had as much in mind when he appointed Steven Chu, like Seaborg, a Nobel Laureate to his cabinet, although as Nobel Laureates go, I think it's hard to match Seaborg's stature.

I would encourage Ms. Clinton, if she is interested in climate change - and I hope she is - to bring, oh, um, James Hansen to advisory meetings. He, unlike Bill McKibben, has profound scientific training on the subject of climate change, and he's not going to offer asinine platitudes about wind turbines and solar cells and bullshit about electric cars for billionaires and millionaires.

Again. They didn't work. They aren't working. They won't work.

Thanks for asking. Have a nice day tomorrow.

[Fast Walker 52]

17. from what I understand, he's trying to draw attention to the issue and mobilize people

for a massive effort to go to clean energy. I'm not sure he is so set on particular technology. I think you are giving him too hard of a time.

[NNadir]

19. Well I obviously disagree. I don't think he deserves attention. He's out to lunch. He doesn't...

...even know what "clean energy" is, and therefore he is not qualified to bring attention to it.

[Fast Walker 52]

20. So you don't think his activism is worthwhile at all?

I really have to disagree.

[NNadir]

21. One can be an activist either in a positive or negative sense. Let's look at a McKibben...

...piece published in what I long regarded as one of my favorite magazines, "The New Yorker," and I will offer an idea about why I find his "activism" to be, not to put too strongly, appalling.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous.

I will only quote the very first two paragraphs and a sentence from the third and leave it for his admirers to read the rest since I detest this kind of rhetoric and need not suffer more of it:

Mark and Sara Borkowski live with their two young daughters in a century-old, fifteen-hundred-square-foot house in Rutland, Vermont. Mark drives a school bus, and Sara works as a special-ed teacher; the cost of heating and cooling their house through the year consumes a large fraction of their combined income. Last summer, however, persuaded by Green Mountain Power, the main electric utility in Vermont, the Borkowskis decided to give their home an energy makeover. In the course of several days, coördinated teams of contractors stuffed the house with new insulation, put in a heat pump for the hot water, and installed two air-source heat pumps to warm the home. They also switched all the light bulbs to L.E.D.s and put a small solar array on the slate roof of the garage.

The Borkowskis paid for the improvements, but the utility financed the charges through their electric bill, which fell the very first month. Before the makeover, from October of 2013 to January of 2014, the Borkowskis used thirty-four hundred and eleven kilowatt-hours of electricity and three hundred and twenty-five gallons of fuel oil. From October of 2014 to January of 2015, they used twenty-eight hundred and fifty-six kilowatt-hours of electricity and no oil at all. President Obama has announced that by 2025 he wants the United States to reduce its total carbon footprint by up to twenty-eight per cent of 2005 levels. The Borkowskis reduced the footprint of their house by eighty-eight per cent in a matter of days, and at no net cost.

I’ve travelled the world writing about and organizing against climate change, but, standing in the Borkowskis’ kitchen and looking at their electric bill, I felt a fairly rare emotion: hope.

He um, "traveled the world," and he has "hope," because the Borkowskis, living in an old quaint house in, um, Vermont used 2856 kw-hr of electricity, down from 3411 kw-hr of electricity, and um, no fuel oil.

Isn't this wonderful? How is it that I'm not all giggly with um, McKibbenistic "hope?" Something is wrong with me perhaps?

Well, let me start, admittedly rather egotistically, by quoting myself, writing elsewhere about the McKibbenistic fool Amory Lovins:

Seen from this perspective, Lovins’ writings are all marked by myopic bourgeois provincialism. The huge flaw in his 1976 conceit, and his conceits forever thereafter, was that for him, people living in the United States, and maybe Western Europe, represented the only human life that mattered. Chinese and Indians, for two examples, may as well have not existed if one reads his 1976 fantasy; he blithely assumed that they would agree to remain unimaginably impoverished while Americans pursued hydrogen HYPErcars[5] in every suburban garage and solar heated molten salt tanks[6] in every suburban backyard.

Emphasis added for this occasion.

(The full text is here: Current World Energy Demand, Ethical World Energy Demand, Depleted Uranium and the Centuries to Come)

Let's do a calculation. The Borkowski - presumably white middle class types living in Vermont (since Vermont is better than 95% white) - used in a 3 month period, again, 2856 kwh of electricity, or converting to SI units, 10.3 billion joules of electricity.

The world population is 7.4 billion people roughly, with a little under 600,000 of them represented by White people living in Vermont. If all the world's population could live the equivalent of nice old farmhouses in Vermont in a life style similar to the "improved" Borkowskis - they can't but no matter - they would consume, by pure multiplication, the world would require 76 exajoules of energy every three months to heat, cool, and um, of course, watch TV, run their refrigerators, and of course, log on to the internet to announce how "green" they are. Multiplying this figure by 4 to represent a full year, we come to 300 exajoules just for domestic use of electricity. No hospitals, no schools, no factories for making swell solar cells and equally swell electric cars, no cultural institutions, no farms, included and certainly no cadmium mines, no mines for aluminum frames for solar cells, no concrete, no steel, no water pumps for irrigation, no carbon fiber cars for billionaires and millionaires. Just being swell Borkowskis living at home.

Mark and Sara. How cute!

Right now, world energy consumption is about twice that, about 570 exajoules per year. And, to boot, vast numbers of the people living on Earth are living in dire poverty.

Let me tell you something, OK? I have no use for smug hand waving. The issue of climate change is an extreme challenge, and unbelievable challenge, and even the very best technology and engineering (that would be nuclear technology) may not prove sufficient to address it. What is happening is a vast crime against the future of humanity, and in fact, the entire biosphere beyond humanity.

And what do we have here? A smug, self absorbed - again I'm rather fond of my own locution "myopic bourgeois provincial" telling us, well, "It's easy, Just be like the Borkowskis and everything will be fine. Have hope!"

How absurd.

There are 2.4 billion people on this planet whose lives would be vastly improved by just having communal access to a toilet or even a safe latrine. The issue for them is not about being like the Borkowskis.

The problem of climate change is intimately involved with the human issue of poverty, dire poverty that the poorest people in Vermont cannot even imagine. The real problem is that the Chinese and Indians didn't agree to remain in dire poverty so McKibben could download his rhetoric to the New Yorker server.

He's fucking completely clueless to say that the power companies are trembling in their boots because of the Borkowskis and their ilk. The solar industry in its entirety on the whole damn planet remains, after decade after decade of rote cheering, a trivial form of energy.

He has zero insight to engineering, zero insight to science, and zero respect for the magnitude of this problem.

He is trivializing the issue of climate change with his glib unrealistic rhetoric, and this kind of marketing can only increase passivity and hopelessness, not address it, since the only outcome of such disappointed hope can be nihilism.

Personally, yes, I find such "activism" such as it is not only to be useless, but also to be pernicious in a very real sense.

Feel perfectly free to disagree. I'm used to it after all, being subject to disagreement. I'm not popular, I assure you, but I suspect that my lack of popularity may be tied to trying, in my own way, to state what I know to be true.

Somehow I think this calls for Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, depicting the prelude to a rape:



Have a nice day tomorrow.

[Duppers]

3. A.frickin.men

[sylvanus]

18. Settle my friends

The political climate will resolve itself with the "climate.
Go kiss a loved one and adopte another pet , spread some peace.
Because, we're fucked. The Earth is better for it.