Wind-up

Since several commenters seem to be misunderstanding this post, it seems worthwhile to clarify that, of course, human activity alters the natural world in which it is embeded. I am dancing around the terminology deliberately. The language that describes "climate change" is problematic. (Global warming is actually better, if cripplingly overgeneral; it actually describes something that is happening.) It slips very swiftly into a mode of thinking that makes human activity and its resultant effects on environments, both locally and globally, exogenous rather than endemic. There is nature, and there is the environment, and then there are humans, both of and not of nature and the environment, and then there is human activity, by which we mostly mean industry and large-scale agriculture, which are categorically distinct, external agents of harm to non-human nature, which in turn affects the well-being of in-between human creatures. I say this sort of thinking is confused and unnecessarily complex, and more pointedly, I find that it leads to a concomittant error: a meliorist's belief that "climate change" is merely symptomatic of poor public policy choices rather than an ineradicable and inextricable component of "advanced" human civilization. Which obviously it is not. Fossil fuels are bad, though efficient, but can you really blame our clever ape brains? There are now seven-some billion 50-60-kilo bipedal mammals occupying the earth. She's gotta feed the monkey! Didn't that, like, ever occur to you, man?

What I am . . . what is the word? What I am skeptical about is not that billions of mammals can cause harm to themselves and others by burning too much carbon in the troposphere, but rather that there is a technological solution to a natural, if highly exaggerated, problem of population and consumption, short of, say, the engineering of a supervirus that reduces our numbers, uh, significantly. Climate change rhetoric, particularly as a component of Western political liberalism, is misleading not because the global environment (in aggregate) is changing (at a rate that we believe to be substantially accelerated) in a way that will be detrimental to the life quality of (some portion of) people, not to mention, of course, all the tigers and caribou and tuna, but rather because it totally misrepresents the import and meaning of this problem. The problem is emphatically not that seven billion people are consuming calories produced in the wrong way. The problem is that there are seven billion people consuming calories.

So, with due respect to the gallery, both this and the prior post are emphatically "another episode in the 'civilization ain't green' series."