https://cli-fi-books.blogspot.com/2018/07/my-personal-4-minute-video-reaction-to.html
Dan Bloom blogs: Here is my personal 4-minute video reaction [above] to Roy Scranton's brilliant essay collection titled "We're Doomed. Now What?" (In the title: Note the Period. Note the Question Mark.)
NOW READ ALL THIS BELOW:
''My @nytimes piece on parenting, climate change so upset @DavidAFrench @NRO that he wrote a specious piece in response full of denial, deflection, cherry-picking, and the accusation that I might find predatory capitalism morally repulsive. Yeah, I do.'' -- ROY Scranton in a recent tweet. Followed by:
WE ARE NOT DOOMED, writes David French.....
Hugh Massengill commented July 17
I don't know if the world is doomed, but certainly the US is showing all the signs of a falling empire, complete with massively ignorant wealth cults making sure it is all about them.
Cutthroat capitalism and unbridled elitism makes life pretty bleak, and it always has. We need a system to live under and that system creates its leaders and reasons for all to get up in the morning. For me, that is socialism, but the wealth cult elites running America makes looking at the future as anything but a magnification of South American Banana Republic despair.
Glad I am in my 70's.
Hugh
Cutthroat capitalism and unbridled elitism makes life pretty bleak, and it always has. We need a system to live under and that system creates its leaders and reasons for all to get up in the morning. For me, that is socialism, but the wealth cult elites running America makes looking at the future as anything but a magnification of South American Banana Republic despair.
Glad I am in my 70's.
Hugh
Tacomaroma commented July 17
A thoughtful meditation on the current human circumstance. Not sure those tears are misplaced.
aacat commented July 16
These comments are a showcase of people in deep denial. If you honestly think that your child's world will be different in the same way yours is from your grandparents, then I would say you have an extremely limited understanding of what climate change will do to earth in 100 years. But you will be gone, so what does it matter?!
Davym commented July 16
While it is normal to wax sorrow and loss over the future world, it might help to remember, 'twas ever thus.
The world our children and grandchildren will grow up in and live their lives in will be different, no doubt. But my world was and is different from my father's and grandfather's worlds. I don't know their worlds, all I can do is read about them and imagine.
A little over 150 years ago a people, the American Indians, watched to their sorrow, as their world was systematically and irreversibly being destroyed by strange people they did not understand and for reasons that seemed senseless. They were powerless against the onslaught of technologically superior, numerically superior and amoral strange foreigners who, for some reason wanted to own everything and make money on everything and knew no moral boundaries to their greed.
These people are who we are. And we are not going to stop until we own and profit from everything.
Of course decreasing the population, lessoning pollution and cleaning up the planet would be good but what's the fun of that? Logically, as stated in the article, it's best to just commit suicide. Gloomy.
Better to keep on gobbling up the planet and, while we're popping out more humans, tell our children to be nice and kind.
The world our children and grandchildren will grow up in and live their lives in will be different, no doubt. But my world was and is different from my father's and grandfather's worlds. I don't know their worlds, all I can do is read about them and imagine.
A little over 150 years ago a people, the American Indians, watched to their sorrow, as their world was systematically and irreversibly being destroyed by strange people they did not understand and for reasons that seemed senseless. They were powerless against the onslaught of technologically superior, numerically superior and amoral strange foreigners who, for some reason wanted to own everything and make money on everything and knew no moral boundaries to their greed.
These people are who we are. And we are not going to stop until we own and profit from everything.
Of course decreasing the population, lessoning pollution and cleaning up the planet would be good but what's the fun of that? Logically, as stated in the article, it's best to just commit suicide. Gloomy.
Better to keep on gobbling up the planet and, while we're popping out more humans, tell our children to be nice and kind.
AlwaysElegant commented July 16
It is hard to read some of these comments - people saying things like, "stay positive". Mr. Scranton's worries about climate change are probably minimized here for our consumption. Those who say he should focus on the positive should understand that, by having a child, he IS focusing on the positive!! As the oceans die from hyper-acidity, large mammals really are going to disappear - and that includes humans. It is going to take millions of years for the Earth to wipe away the stain of humanity. What I do not understand is Mr. Scranton's choice to have a child, knowing that he is likely dooming her to a really marginal existence. The only possible excuse is that he will raise her up to be a political leader who will force carbon out of our energy mix. People who tell him to stay positive should understand that he IS being positive here.
AVIEL commented July 16
The US gov't under President Trump is not dealing with climate change responsibly, but he won't be president forever and while late in the game to avoid some continuing damage changes in lifestyle as you write are possible. A collective will and societal pressure should help. No need to stop having children even if the world they are coming has serious problems without a known solution. The world was always a challenging place to raise kids for the vast majority of people, and most didn't survive to adulthood. At what time in history would it have been better to be born?
Jordan Sollitto commented July 16
Sadly, I concur with nearly everything written here. However, I find some solace in the following. First, while climate change is certain to profoundly upend our biosphere, I doubt it will threaten the very existence of the author's child, or mine. I shudder when I think about the world they'll inhabit, but it will likely strike them as relatively unremarkable, as they will have known no other. Second, although no technology currently available at scale can significantly mitigate the climate catastrophe underway, "technology" in a broader sense is racing forward with staggering leaps and bounds. When one considers the technological marvels now woven seamlessly into our everyday lives that were -- a mere generation ago -- only the dreams of brilliantly imaginative science fiction writers, it isn't unreasonable to hope that similar heretofore undiscovered miracles will come to play an ameliorating role in this realm. Finally, the carbon fee and dividend advocated by the Citizens Climate Lobby is a pragmatic and potentially bipartisan policy proposal that I believe can help bend the planet's future arc in favor of a vast reduction in C02 emissions. I urge all who share the despair described here to explore it as it has restored for me at least a modicum of optimism that a potentially transformative solution, albeit neither immediate nor retroactively capable of undoing the damage already baked into the equation, is at least within reach.
CBH commented July 16
You are describing a parents anxiety. You can't make the world a safe place for your child. You do the best you can to protect them for as long as you can. I don't know what the future will bring. But, I am pretty sure we are past the point where protection from the effects of climate change will have anything to do with convincing people to reduce their carbon footprint. The people who will survive are those who invest in the engineering that wards off the effects of climate change.
Progress is not the enemy of womankind.
This morning, the New York Times published an essay by University of Notre Dame English professor Roy Scranton that began with this remarkable paragraph:
I cried two times when my daughter was born. First for joy, when after 27 hours of labor the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.
I cried two times when my daughter was born. First for joy, when after 27 hours of labor the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot, the strip mall across the street, the box stores and drive-throughs and drainage ditches and asphalt and waste fields that had once been oak groves. A world of extinction and catastrophe, a world in which harmony with nature had long been foreclosed. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.
Anyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted. And anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume we’re almost certainly going to botch it. To stop emitting waste carbon completely within the next five or 10 years, we would need to radically reorient almost all human economic and social production, a task that’s scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, enormous state investment in carbon capture and sequestration and global coordination on a scale never before seen, at the very time when the political and economic structures that held the capitalist world order together under American leadership after World War II are breaking apart. The very idea of unified national political action toward a single goal seems farcical, and unified action on a global scale mere whimsy.
And even if world leaders somehow got their act together, significant and dangerous levels of warming are still inevitable, baked into the system from all the carbon dioxide that has already been dumped. There’s a time lag between carbon dioxide increase and subsequent effects, between the wind we sow and the whirlwind we reap. Our lives are lived in that gap. My daughter was born there.
Barring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation and a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war. After that, things will get worse. The middle and later decades of the 21st century — my daughter’s adult life — promise a global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror.
I couldn’t help but think back to the day when my son was born — my second child. I had tears in my eyes twice that day as well. The first, when he was born (seemingly healthy), and the second time when he was pulled out of our arms for emergency care. He had pneumonia. His breathing was labored. And for almost two full weeks he received the best care that modern medicine could provide. He wasn’t born on a dystopian planet. He was born in the only era of human history when he could survive.
Think for a moment about the elements of modern life that Scranton condemns in his essay. Cars and roads that enable people to travel to hospitals for the births of their children, box stores and drive-throughs that provide goods and comfort and nourishment without the necessity of scratching out a living from the land. Curiously, he even decries “drainage ditches” and “waste fields” that keep our communities sanitary and protect public health.
Indeed, it is the very spread of this progress — the spread of the very things that Scranton decries as the instruments of our doom — that has contributed to longer life expectancies across the planet and a stunning 74 percent plunge in extreme poverty from 1990 to 2015. I wonder: Are the speculative projections of a dystopian future ever weighed against the very real relief from a dystopian present? Do the many millions of lives saved now matter when we calculate the “costs” of progress?
And even if your focus is on the future, does our past ability to triumph over the challenges of the natural world — challenges that shortened human lives and impoverished generations past — give you any confidence for the days ahead?
Consider this: The United States — the nation that activists constantly decry as not taking the challenge of climate change seriously enough, the nation that allegedly is dilatory in mobilizing its government and national resources to combat a mortal threat to our planet, and the nation that continues to grow in population and national output — also happens to lead the world in reducing carbon emissions. And it’s not close:
Innovation and modernization are enduring features of capitalist economies. They have transformed the human condition and freed the vast bulk of humanity from the formerly omnipresent dangers of disease and famine. Simply put, the greatest engine for human progress in the history of mankind can’t be the instrument of its doom.
But don’t tell that to Scranton. He looks at an expanding economy and a shrinking national carbon footprint and sympathizes with even suicide as a response:
There is simply no more effective way to shrink your carbon footprint. Once you’re dead, you won’t use any more electricity, you won’t eat any more meat, you won’t burn any more gasoline, and you certainly won’t have any more children. If you really want to save the planet, you should die.
He’s not willing to go that far, of course. He does want to live, but he also wants us to know that “to live at all means to cause suffering.”
This is the language of a doomsday religion. Of course all men suffer, all men cause a degree of pain, and all men die, but the enduring, eternal imperative to “choose life” rests in part on the reality that children are a blessing, that the human mind has an extraordinary capacity to create, and that those who are good stewards of of their considerable intellectual gifts can create, well, the progress we see today.
Honestly, I’m puzzled by the environmental doomsday prophesies. I remember in the 1970s, when my family would drive south to Chattanooga, for example, and you could see the dark cloud of smog from many miles away. There were times not long ago when rivers caught fire. The alleged “point of no return” — when the world is too far gone to save — keeps getting pushed back at the exact same time that economies continue to grow. The America of today is far more populous, it’s wealthier, and it is still an industrial powerhouse. Yet it is cleaner. If anything, it is more beautiful, and with a few additional changes (more nuclear power, anyone?) even the alarmists will be forced to admit that the doomsday will never come.
But one gets the feeling that men such as Scranton don’t want to save us more than they want to change us. There’s more of a sense of aesthetic and moral revulsion at American capitalism and consumerism than a scientific argument that growth and progress are incompatible with human flourishing. But if changing us is the goal, make that case. Try to convince us that living with less is morally better, not that living with less — fewer children, less comfort, and stopping progress before the rest of the world reaches American levels of prosperity —is the only thing that can save our lives.
In fact, I’d argue that history has shown us that restraining growth is ultimately the more dangerous course. Yes, we can turn our tools into deadly instruments, and greed can pollute the human heart, but time and again our capitalist societies have demonstrated that they can improve the human condition and can solve and control the problems and complications that prosperity invariably yields. That’s not to say that capitalism enriches the human soul. Despair can touch the richest of men. But if dystopia is to come, it will come as it always has — through human sin, not through human progress.
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