OFF: UK's premier green awareness festival under threat from police and local council.

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Wed, 5 Aug 2009, M Holmes wrote:

> Jonathan Jarrett writes:
>> But this, and Mike C.'s
>> suggested population culls, are all targeting the wrong places. Our
>> consumption in the US and Europe is pretty appallingly high
> Huh? What makes any particular level of consumption "high"? Comparison
> with others? Compared to our ancestors of a few hundred years ago, the
> consumption of 99% of the world is extremely high.

 	Well, sustainability, fundamentally, wouldn't you say? Of course 
as you go on to suggest we can up the rate of replacement, and 
sociologically that's a lot more likely to work than getting everyone to 
wear hairshirts. And it's more pleasant to aspire to as well. But if we 
can't replace what we use or substitute it...

>> but our
>> environmental practices, while nowhere near what we might like, are
>> globe-leading.
> In fact China produces more pollution and the US. In terms of pollution
> caused per Dollar of wealth created, the US is way lower than most of
> the world, and *that's* the index we should be looking at if we agree
> not to wear hairshirts. It's the fucked up countries who are dirt poor
> and yet still have a godawful amount of pollution, that really need
> their butts kicked into gear.

 	I think that's what I meant that line to mean, in fact I think it 
actually does. We're agreeing and you're still arguing with me dammit :-)

> Such as solar power satellites or nuclear power (fusion preferably, but
> fission will hold the dam in the meantime). The problem is that the
> greens themselves are part of the political resistance to this. Green
> beliefs have become in large part a religious cult rather than a serious
> search for solutions to the problems facing us.

 	I think parts of the movement always were like this, and people 
have been pointing this out since the 1960s but now that green is more 
mainstream the basic contradictions are beginning to be addressed, as with 
any ideology that attracts a following. Again, however, as to the 
necessity of solutions like nuclear power, I agree with you, though my 
money's on solar-catalysed fuel cells.

 	As a historian what tends to irk me is that many of the landscapes 
and zones of natural beauty that conservationists want so much to preserve 
are themselves the results of centuries of human use. But that's a far 
smaller issue.

> Hey, why non halt that too? If it's too hot, we normally put up a
> sunshade. Let's test-deploy solar sails, then scale 'em up and put 'em
> out by L1 in the tens of thousands. Build a sunshade for Mother Earth
> and stop her getting sunburn. *There's* an idea to rally behind.

 	Ironically, there's no profit in preventing global catastrophe, so 
funding is hard to assemble... Yours,
 				      Jon

-- 
       Jonathan Jarrett, Cambridge    jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
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  "With Capitalism, man exploits man.  With Socialism, it is exactly opposite"
 	                 -Robert Anton Wilson