Right, and that is were the traditional green view came from. The idea, for example, that everything we buy and use should last as long as possible, and be repairable. That includes clothes - we have reached the point where people - probably mainly women - buy clothes for single use.
The other big thing has got to be population. If people pair as a couple and produce way more than two ofspring, you are obviously going to overload the planet sooner or later.
Sometimes I think climate hysteria was invented to distract from those ideas, and maybe ultimately to destroy green ideas for a generation.
David
Actually I suspect it is a materialistic substitute for spirituality. And for this reason it is especially dangerous - lacking structure and boundaries, let alone clarity.
For me the big turn off about climate change is the assumption that 'science' is the determining factor. I don't need a climate scientist to tell me my winters are getting milder and my summers hotter. The trend, empirically, is plain enough. Science will not tell me how to behave, but it may guide me as to the magnitude of the change and the areas to be most impacted.
Re population, it is worth noting that 'advanced' Western cultures are breeding below replacement rate. Education and women's rights are better birth control methods than the pill. So is the sheer economic cost of having a child for those determined to make a lot of money. My mother had 5 kids when the attrition rate was sufficient to encourage higher numbers, but in an age when that logic ceased to be pertinent. We either reduce the breeding rate or increase the attrition rate - at the moment we are breeding less, but have a lower attrition rate than is needed to reduce populations.
So this is important. It isn't just the breeding rate that has to be managed. We need more people to die sooner, and this is what exactly what we are working against. I am not suggesting we kill folk, I am just pointing out that there is a mismatch in logic.
I don't think climate hysteria was 'invented'. We are too stupid to do that.We really have to stop crediting the 'They' with powers they do not possess. There are political and economic reasons for 'inventing climate hysteria'. We 'invented' 'oil hysteria' not so long ago to fuel a new economic model. In so doing we violated human rights and dignities and wrecked ecosystems, economies and cultures.
The impact of the carbon economy is wider reaching than the oil economy, but there is so much evidence that the latter has been profoundly harmful, it is not absurd to project that to the whole energy economy. I do not know whether CO2 is having a catastrophic impact on our shared ecosystems, but I know the overall energy economy is.
Virtually from the time we started using fire we have adversely impinged upon the world around us, and as human populations have grown that impact has become more and more telling. Industrial waste is a subset of energy economics, because the crudity of our methods projects downstream consequences. For me, CO2 is the least of our worries in many respects.
We are shitting in our nest on physical and metaphysical levels. As well as physical consequences, there are moral consequences for accepting corrupted and degraded conduct that supports our access to cheap products and jobs.
I don't know the finer details of what is happening in Europe, but I know the consequences of electing shallow transactional politicians in the UK. US and Australia reflect an intellectuagressivl and moral failure to adhere to the finer principles. The decline is a long time coming, but well tracked. I am less ghost at who has attained power and more shocked by the vacuity of the alternative discourse - the supposed 'opposition'. The contraction into desperate fear-filled paranoia is understandable in the face of a crisis. But why is the only coherent response coming from deranged right wingers? Where was Labour's coherent's alternative? Why has the 'progressive' message become so dumb?
I think the answer is simple. It is rooted in materialism, and the logic of Marxist analysis. I don't mind Marxism as a critical tool. It is no good as a solution. We see this crisis playing out in the US at the moment. Will the Dems pick a socialist candidate to stand against Trump? I have no real interest, but I am interested that critical commentators fear the Dems could again pick a candidate Trump could beat. How hard is it to come up with a 'progressive' message that will unite a nation?
Apparently very hard. For me Trump is a gross threat. If you can't win a contest against him you have no chance in winning an argument about the impact of climate change. And not winning is not about the merit of the message. Its about how well the actual challenge is understood - which seems to be not at all. The right does well because it can frame its cause in terms of dire existential messages. The left can't?