A Can-do Attitude

Well, look, Sartwell, obviously you have totally failed to understand that the greatest moral crisis mankind has ever faced is the authentication of Warhol works.

But, yeah, obviously the idea that "climate change" represents a moral crisis rather than, you know, a changing climate is preposterous. I want to point out to you that organisms change their environment all the time, sometimes to the detriment of their own species. When herd animals overgraze and experience die-back, no one proposes that it is the greatest moral crisis ever to afflict the Thompson's gazelle. And yes, yes, matters of scale, matters of scope, the "global" nature of the man-made catastrope. By my lights, the greatest moral catastrophe of all time was the arrival of multicellular life. No, the advent of photosynthesis. The . . . sufficient cooling of the primordial earth so as to allow for liquid water?

Now I like clean air and fishable rivers, and I'm happy to recycle and take mass transit and substitute the Scott for the Saturn as often as possible and so forth and so on. I spent the extra hundred-and-fifty bucks on the efficient washing machine when the old one went kablooey. But here is the thing, and I said the same thing about the "oil spill": industrial civilization is not green. No number of Prii can account for the fact that there are 7 billion of us, etc. etc. Let me propose to you that the only way to "address" human-derived global climate change is for half of us to die or to move to other planets. If any of these fuckers were half as serious about saving mother earth from her profligate children as they were about the remittance of their speaker's fees, they wouldn't be selling us all on 7th-Generation toilet paper; they'd be selling us on colonizing the asteroid belt.