Kim O'Hara wrote:
However, I think you've nailed Alex pretty accurately but have misunderstood my position slightly.
No the problem is the opposite, I understand your position better than you understand your position, that is your problem.
Kim O'Hara wrote:
I mean, if you were behind the wheel of a car that was speeding towards a brick wall, wouldn't you put your foot on the brake so that the crash would only injure you instead of kill you? If you were in the passenger seat (which is closer to our situation on climate change), wouldn't you yell at the driver to put the brakes on? Or grab the handbrake and yank on it as hard as possible?
Climate change is nothing like putting the brakes on a car you are behind the wheel yourself or telling a driver while you are in the passenger seat to stop. Billions of people will have to change their whole worldview, habits and orientation in the world and toward the world, and it is easier to kill off a billion people(which extreme climate change will do) than to change their minds, sadly. Your example is too telling, in the past in this thread I told you have a laughably mistaken sense of agency.
At my work under our union contract we are offered free spring water in 16 oz. bottles. I am the only worker I have met(out of two yards with over 40 workers) that brings a re-usable steel water bottle and fills up with tap water. It is a simple easy gesture but people don't give a shit, everywhere I look I see people who fill entitled to use as much resources as possible between now and when they die. Most my co-workers don't understand they are likely buying:
1) tap water just wastefully repackaged and marketed as "spring water"
2) actual spring water which is perhaps worse because these companies often locate at a water source, and use their "water rights" to deplete that source dry and pack up shop to the next water source.
Why? Because most people just care about themselves, their directly immediate family, one or two friends and they look at life as:
1) Collaborate with an earth destroying corporation in exchange for a salary expressed in money, and hopefully as high as possible(usually the higher the more essential to the system, thus the more sinister).
Thus the average homo-consumens monster cannot understand that life comes from the dirt, the worms, the micro-organisms, the trees, the bees, the mammals, the fish. They think life comes from killing and com-modifying all of the above.
The average Westerner doesn't have to do anything and a portion of the surplus from the liquidation of eco-systems and the immiseration of the Third World will be distributed to him, so he can live in the type of opulence reserved for kings(while paradoxically things actually essentially for life like rent or a home mortgage are comparatively more expensive, but that is good so the wage slaves are forced to sell their labor). As long as people don't have to pick up the butchers knife to slit's a cow's throat, they will eat the cow they don't have the guts to slaughter themselves. As long as the CIA plots coups in oil rich countries like Venezuela and occupies others like Iraq, to control the oil markets the oil supply for US consumption(USA actually gets most foreign oil from Canada and Venezuela but if Iraq and other countries nationalized their oil production to get higher prices, prices would push up everywhere) can be uniform and cheap for Americans to almost reach the level where every person who has the money in a family over 16-17 in each household has at least one car to themselves. As long as local zoning forces people to maintain lawns millions of people will do it, wasting precious water and other resources. In supermarkets in the West almost half the food ends up in dumpsters, just because the system is about making money and not feeding people
What I am getting at is the total structure of society and the mentality of the people in society would have had to have changed sometime around when I was born and that didn't happen and it won't happen. What every person does is externalize the self, they seek to possess as much of the world as they can. The more of the earth's life sustaining resources they can consume, and the more wasteful ways they can do it, the more proud of themselves they will tend to be, with very few exceptions. You won't get woman if you ride a bicycle. You won't make many friends by dumpster diving instead of drinking beer at a bar, clubbing or boating. If you use a humanure toilet(basically shitting into a bucket and then covering it with organic matter like dried grass, sawdust) your guests will be disgusted. But if you use a resource wasting toilet connected to a sewer, they will be relieved. But people want to believe in easy solutions like the Prius, solar panels and yet more technology, when technology is exactly the problem that has allowed so much labor specialization and alienation from natural processes which has lead to a total war of man against everything else, which man is winning so splendidly and handily, the only thing left for him to destroy in the future will be himself. Look online, alot of people are jizzing themselves over these genetically modified mosquitos! Rather than just coping with getting stung as humanity has for millions of years and still survived, they would rather play genetic roulette. But those who gamble tend to lose, unfortunately in this case, we are taking those beings who didn't gamble, all the non-humans down first.