Gar Lipow on eco-optimism

Eric Franz Leher fr102anz at netvigator.com
Sat Aug 11 18:05:31 PDT 2001


Gordon Fitch wrote:


> Well, you're talking science, and I'm talking politics. So
> it probably depends which audience whose butt is facing. One
> audience is making money off this stuff, and another is paying
> for it, so they have different attitudes. If you're talking
> to the ones who are paying for it -- basically, the working
> class, because they pay for everything -- it's a bad idea to
> first exclaim "X is happening! Better do something about it!"
> and then, on further inquiry, say, well, you're trying to
> figure out what X is, anyway. Good science, maybe -- gets
> grants and nice jobs -- but bad politics: raises taxes and
> prices, produces burdensome regulations and restrictions,
> blah blah blah.
>
> But don't believe me. Just keep the act going and see what
> happens. Unlike many other leftist concerns, enviro has had
> a lot of public support, so far. If it turns out that people
> have been asked to make sacrifices for numbers pulled out of
> hats and conclusions jumped to over long distances, I don't
> think the reaction is going to be pleasant. I had the same
> experiences as this "optimistic environmentalist" fellow,
> that is, I started out with a predisposition to believe and
> went looking for accounts of the related physical phenomena
> to support the arguments I intended to make. They weren't
> there.
>
> If you think _I'm_ simple-minded wait 'til you run into the
> rest of the folk, who are being told, even as we speak, that
> the enviros are a bunch of creeping-socialist, nanny-state-
> loving power-hungry con artists who just want to take their
> SUVs away because they don't have the Soviet Union to worship
> any more.
>
Okay. We appear to have been talking about different things, and I seem to have misread your intentions, so I apologize humbly (and publicly) for the invective.

Though I can see what you are getting at, I don't think the public have been asked to make any significant sacrifices for the sake of the environment. Not where I come from, anyway (Australia). Working people make their real sacrifices (wages down, hours up, unions out) in the name of corporate profitability. The 'people' who are asked to make 'sacrifices' for the environment are paper mills, pastoralists, woodchippers and mining companies - and they never do it, obviously enough, and never will until there is some way of compelling them to.

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