Doug writes
'C'mon James, this is ridiculous. I have no interest in holding down mass consupmtion; I'm a member of the masses, and I like consuming goods & services. I despise hair-shirtism, whether it's coming from a monk or Ralph Nader.'
I'm happy to assume that you have no interest in holding down mass consumption, which makes it all the more strange that you would argue for it.
You say that that's not what you mean. But what else can it mean? Car journeys are a substantial part of mass consumption. Just think of the money and time that people spend on their cars and you have to acknowledge that reducing car use is reducing a significant dimension of mass consumption.
I suppose then you would say that the masses are somehow in error when they spend their wages on cars and gasoline. But that would be very presumptuous. Who are you - or I - to say what people ought or ought not to be spending their money on? If we are talking about *their* consumption needs as opposed to ours then you have to take their choices seriously.
Then you might say that if society was organised differently then people wouldn't need cars. For myself, I think the discussions about knocking down the suburbs and moving everyone into the cities are kind of utopian, I mean utopian in the sense of unrealistic. According to the US census, the numbers living in the suburbs outnumbered those in cities in 1980, if I read them right. Dispersed living has happened. It is not going to be reversed by the wave of a wand. And again, who are we to turn our noses up at people's aspirations to a plot of their own. It might not be your taste, but you can't substitute your ambitions for theirs.
Doug on global warming:
'The consensus of scientists is that there's a serious problem. On my radio show, you dismissed this by saying that scientists used to believe in eugenics. Yes, they did, but they were refuted by better science.'
No, as it happens I don't believe that Eugenic science was refuted by better science . Rather they retreated from the social consequences of their beliefs put into practice, once the German concentration camps were opened (Elazar Barkan's book is good on this subject). The advances in genetic science that could refute eugenics came much later, and their application to 'race' (now demonstrated an unscientific concept) even later than that.
The point here is that, as you know, the global warming 'consensus' was forced by diplomatic and political arm-twisting as much as anything else.
But in any event, the rhythm of natural climate change is so slow (on a ten-thousand year cycle according to ice core samples) that the human contribution to it is famously difficult to identify.
But more obviously, the gasoline car will be outmoded within a quarter century, as all the industry knows, to be replaced in all probability by a hydrogen car. Compared to the slow pace of natural change, industrial processes displace each other in a frenzy. No doubt the world would have drowned in horse shit if the internal combustion engine had never been developed.
'I just searched the Guardian website for a correction and couldn't find it.'
I presume that they don't include the corrections in the www version.
'I did find a John Vidal column that assumed the original report was correct <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4379387,00.html>.'
Yes, I've read Vidal's column (very interesting it is too). He doesn't assume that the original report was correct in its dimensions, only in that part of the ice shelf fell off - a fact I'm not denying. I only pointed out that they had scaled-down their dimensions by a factor of six (area) and one million (weight).
Would you mind giving the text of the correction?
On p25 of the paper Guardian
'Corrections
The estimated weight of the ice that has collapsed on the Larsen-B iceshelf in Antartica is 500 billion tonnes and not 500 million billion tonnes as we said in our report and headline...' etc etc
They also retract the proposition that the Larsen-B iceshelf is the 'size of Wales', - it's about a sixth the size. -- James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99, plus GBP5.01 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'. www.audacity.org