After World War II there was a cliche that children asked their fathers what they had done during the war. Did they do the right thing, join the resistance and fight the occupiers? Did they collaborate? Or did they hunker down and simply wait for liberation by braver souls? The United Nations authority on climate change says the world has less than 12 years left to impose radical changes on industrialization or it will face extremely dangerous ecological consequences. What are we doing to fight industrial capitalism? So far, nothing. What is wrong with us???
What Did You Do During the Climate Wars, Daddy?
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Yes, far too many people, HUGE numbers, are not doing anything to avert the impending climate change disaster but there are numbers of people who are. Please help motivate people to join the activist groups working to make a difference by raising awareness that there are people are working to make a difference. I would love to see a cartoon depicting activists and asking readers why they aren’t helping to avert a climate catastrophe which will harm and kill millions. Here is an example: 350.org is activism in the US. That site and others are linked at this site which promotes Greta Thunberg’s activism: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQbz6u1CyABskXzDhav3vxw
“Every Friday Greta Thunberg and others will protest outside of Sweden’s parliament building until Sweden is in line with the Paris Agreement.”
So what?
First, Sweden is far from being a big polluter. Second, the Paris agreement is such a joke promoted by a bunch of clowns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWiFwIiFLL0&list=PLQv9JdkX2ZJO4bv5y4iPKkUwIl8snql7_
Heja Greta !…
Henri
Maybe I should have linked to the about page of that YouTube channel instead of the home page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQbz6u1CyABskXzDhav3vxw/about
Not to worry, Ted ; soon there won’t be any (human) children around to pose that embarrising question, and somehow I doubt that Blattoidea offspring give a damn….
Henri
embarrising → embarrassing. Ted, when are we going to get a chanceto either pre-edit oour posts or post-edit them during a limited period ? Typos like the above are embarrassing, to say the least…. 😉
Henri
I won’t criticize your typos if you won’t criticize mine.
No, instead I decided this already, unilaterally and unconditionally.
Sorry, can’t figure out how to solve the problem. I think it would be great if you guys could edit your typos If there’s a plug-in for WordPress, let me know.
«I think it would be great if you guys could edit your typos If there’s a plug-in for WordPress, let me know.»
Ted, I’m no expert on WordPress, but this webpage from 2014 may provide a solution that (still) works. Otherwise, I’m sure that other regulars here – or, not least, your webmaster, if, as I previously understood to be the case, you have one – may know how to go about providing limited editing functions to commenters….
Henri
@Ted,
“I think it would be great if you guys could edit your typos If there’s a plug-in for WordPress, let me know.”
I believe this fits the bill:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-ajax-edit-comments/
ooo! Here’s an even simpler plugin. Plug & Pray.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-comment-editing/
Ted,
Part of the reason for the lack of action on climate change? Environmentalists are terrible at messaging, terrible at action, terrible at … well, pretty much terrible at everything they try. The only effective environmentalists I ever read about? Who were those people going around torching SUVs? Earth Liberation Front I think they were called. Haven’t heard about them in a long, long time. Probably they crunched the numbers are realized they simply couldn’t do enough to stop anything.
You don’t think sorting your cans and bundling up old paper is going to do it, do you? It’s like telling a rosary in church. It’s a simple repetitive task that allows you to calm yourself but it doesn’t do anything. Nona praying for you to come out of the coma? It’s a nice thought, isn’t it? That love can actually do something to rebalance a monstrously unfair world, even in some small way? But those doctors who drilled a hole in Sonny’s skull and released the pressure around his brain were the ones who saved him. A lot of environmentalists go the Occupy Wall Street route: a lot of useless activity that makes them ((((feel)))) better and which does nothing to solve the problem.
Quick quiz: Did ANYONE hear any news presenter, meteorologist or Florida politician say “climate change” or “global warming” during any of the coverage of Hurricane Michael?
[quote]Quick quiz: Did ANYONE hear any news presenter, meteorologist or Florida politician say “climate change” or “global warming” during any of the coverage of Hurricane Michael?[/quote]
Or any other!!!
Answer: Such expressions are officially prohibited by the Florida government.
And as law abiding citizens we will go compliantly to our deaths, believing the writers of these laws are serving, and want to serve the afflicted.
“Occupy Wall Street route: a lot of useless activity that makes them ((((feel)))) better and which does nothing to solve the problem.”
Wall Street was, and continues to be, a great and real problem.
The problem with Occupy Wall Street was that their image didn’t fulfill the popularly imagined image of the great heroes held by masses upon whom the greatest damage was being done; Occupy Wall Street didn’t look like the heroes who are portrayed in the popular imagination through political campaigns, and the corporate creations of this culture’s manufacturers of mythology.
We live in a society that demands service, one that believes a neat organization with proper optics will present a neatly packaged one-size-fits-all solution to whatever problems are encountered by the masses.
The masses are no more than spectators awaiting, applauding, and cheering their expected saviors from science or government to deliver balm to what ails them.
The failure was not with Occupy Wall Street, but the failure of the zombied masses failure to recognize a problem that would not be solved by the institutions that caused them, these who personally benefited most greatly from the mess they created for their mostly believing, compliant, and atomized victims.
> Environmentalists are terrible at messaging
True, dat. But also the Great Unwashed is terrible at hearing inconvenient messages.
e.g. “Don’t saw off the branch you’re sitting on” You’d think that would be a self-evident truth, but evidently it’s not. Which calls into question whether the current crop of homo is sapient after all.
“Which calls into question whether the current crop of homo is sapient after all.”—the question I address in my post above.
There was a cartoon from the NYT showing a fat (Texan) oil executive looking down at two (yes, only two) climate “lacktivists” and commenting: “People don’t grasp the short-term consequences of saving the planet”.
It’s too late, much too late, and the only ones who seem to understand it are the ones who created the problem and fattened themselves at the trough.
Excellent excuse for them to squeeze even more money out of it, more than enough to ensure their own survival watching all the rest dying from a thousand (million?) cuts.
Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity.
«First, Sweden is far from being a big polluter.» Not that I wish to question your no doubt profound knowledge of this country, SomeoneElse, but we are, in proportion to our population quite a large polluter if, which, alas, is often not done, one includes the pollution caused by the production of products which we import. Ms Thunberg and her friends do, indeed,know what they are about….
Henri
The above was intended as a reply to one of SomeoneElse’s posts below….
Henri
Unfortunately, we’re being betrayed by what was originally an evolutionary advantage. We concentrate on what’s in front of us today, and let tomorrow take care of itself. e.g. why worry about a volcano that might erupt when you’re being chased by a saber toothed kitty cat?
We won’t take action until California is consumed by fire and Florida sinks beneath the waves. At which time, it will be too-much too-later.
The real problem is over-population, Malthus warned us about it two centuries ago. It’s simple grade-school arithmetic, but did we do the math? Oh, hell no. We kept breeding like bunnies without considering the long-term consequences.
The good news? The coming eco-eco-catastrophe* will wipe out 99% of humanity, thereby fixing that problem. But the downside is that we’ll take a lot of innocent bystanders (“flora and fauna”) along with us. Gaia will survive, and maybe her supposedly-sapient children will as well. Maybe they’ll learn the lesson, but I don’t really have that much hope – overbreeding is likewise a survival trait (in the short term.)
*eco-eco-catastrphe – we’re facing both economic and ecological collapse. It ain’t gonna be pretty, but the adjustment is as necessary as it is inevitable.
Prior to machines powered by external exothermal reactions (powered by fire, in the earliest case) most work was powered by animal metabolism, whether our own or that of other species.
The problems of tomorrow come largely from today’s solutions.
Everybody finds something to love that comes from science, but almost no one recognizes that nasty bit of science known as entropy.
Homo Incendiarius is a much better name for humans than sapiens, a species that is more foolish than wise, and now lives almost unthinkingly with comforts now powered by fire, and other more dangerous exothermic reactions.
Got a doctor’s appointment on the 21st floor, try walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, and also walking the 20 miles to that stairway?
Unfortunately, due to the previous large amount of low cost fuel, our cities were laid out, both in horizontal and vertical distance, with consideration of only fuel availability, and without consideration of the cost of entropy, the cost of which is not a dollar amount because that energy which is degraded by entropy can never be reconstituted by money.
Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
Malthus suggested that the poor whose lives were so wretched were better off dying young, and so living and dying near the swamps in disease was a mercy to them.
But if the poor can no longer be moved to the swamps, maybe the swamps can be moved to the poor by climate change, so the modern Malthusians appear to believe, while they move to more secure places, abandoning the hoi polloy to a fate that is of no concern to them, and never could be.
Glenn, CrazyH,
And that’s my point in a nutshell. OWS had the right idea–rebalance the system, hold the corrupt accountable, etc.–and they had terrible “mouthfeel.” And coming up with the correct “mouthfeel” is the responsibility of the seller. That’s Business 101: if the buyer knew they needed the product, you wouldn’t have to advertise it.
OWS didn’t present a message that was palatable to anyone except fellow college students who, drinking $4 coffees and texting on $400 smartphones, wanted to complain about how unfair everything is. Anyone who has worked a political campaign understands that a lot of it is getting the message out. A big part of it is getting voters registered. OWS did NOTHING to actively use the huge number of students and dispossessed to increase voter registration rolls .
They, in fact, went out of their way to make their message as unattractive as possible. And they made mistakes that any old-school activist could have seen coming a mile off. Remember how the cops would send mentally unstable people to Zuccotti Park so that, when the unstable person had a crackup, the cops would have an excuse to raid the place? That’s right the fuck out of “Grapes of Wrath,” a book that LITERALLY millions of students have read. None of these chuckleheads have a drop of real-world awareness in their waxed mustaches or artisanal yoga mats.
I don’t blame some factory worker hanging on to his job by his worn-down fingernails for not being able to undertake a statistical analysis of the underlying data concerning global warming and the impact of CO2 emissions on weather patterns. But this UN report? First, I wonder if the reporters have correctly interpreted it because 12 is a remarkably precise number for something as complex as the climate. Not 13 years, not 14, but 12. Exactly 12. Will it be half as hard if done in 11 years? Or 11/12ths as hard? Second, in 12 years, assuming the reporters got it right, when nothing has changed remarkably from 11 years from now, what will be the consequence of that? President Trump will hold a presser outside on the coldest day of the year in Washington DC: “Yeah. They said global warming would be catastrophic by now! Anyone wanna strip down to a T-shirt and shorts and debate it with me?”
And the scientists will be there, Frinking out. “Glaybin! They’ve outglabined us with their treachery and the adveristing and the clever comments. …”
And, of course, OWS had zero credibility compared to the media savvy Democrats, they who let the criminals off the hook, and who lowered the boom on the hated OWS for creating such a “disturbance”.
I talked to people in an OWS encampment in Iowa who, due to their unexamined tribalism, could not imagine that Obama would excuse the real disturbance caused by the Wall Street criminals, and would then bring the hammer down on OWS protesters.
But they weren’t wrong about everything. They just couldn’t bring themselves to believe how deeply involved this fake democracy could be involved in the Wall Street treachery against the demos.
I blame everyone who criticized OWS for the “crime” of not being wealthy enough, and sophisticated enough, to have their own shiny presence in the media, a presence that would be their own and not be one filtered and distorted through the anti-OWS bias of the capitalist parties and media.
Too bad you didn’t get the heroes you wanted, but from my perspective someone who does something to get the word out stands head and shoulders above the whiny OWS detractors who got their asses whipped economically by a ten year Obama “recession”, a discredited Wall Street-backed Democratic Party, topped off by a Trump revolution where the capitalists operate the government directly without the pretence of involving intermediate representatives.
Exactly how stupid can you OWS detractors be? What would it take for these detractors to draw a line, abandon propriety and form an opposition, whether against the Wall Street economy destroyers or against the climate destroyers (both of which have powerful members in common)?
Glenn,
I’m not saying they’re wrong about everything. I agree with a lot of what they were pushing for: universal single-payer, bigger minimum wage, a robust social safety network, and so forth.
My big complaint is that I saw that they were doing it wrong. I can’t say it any more plainly than that. They went into it like it was going to be fun and exciting and just like the 1960s man, and then it started to get a little cold, and a little rainy, and the cops started with the cop tricks, and the whole damned thing fell apart.
I’m saying the last thing the OWSers waould want to hear: “Friends, you don’t know it all, and the opposition has no problem pulling every dirty trick in the book. If you want to win this thing, you have to put both knees on an economic windpipe, somehow. And that means you have to get your shit together. You need a plan and you need one that works. If you’d like, I can give you a suggestion.”
But hell’s bells and buckets of blood, no one wants to listen to my ideas. They don’t involve texting or sitting around drinking bad coffee from Starbucks while complaining about unfair life while going to a school that costs $40K a year (now up to $50K).
If Sanders announces, his people can reach me through Ted; I’ve got some great ideas to pitch.
Glenn & Alex – here’s a different viewpoint. OWS didn’t bring about immediate revolutionary change (anyone who expected it is far too naive to participate in a discussion about the real world in the first place …)
What they did do is bring the term “one percent” into the discussion. Now look at the ‘tax cut’ the GOP just wrote – for the first time ever, the wingnuts realize that the cut was for the rich. Not them. That’s yuge. They’re not expecting anything to trickle down – at least not anything you’d want trickled onto you.
I don’t expect that to bring about immediate, radical changes either – but simply raising awareness of the problem is a step in the
right… proper direction.That is, those are, excellent points.
@CH
Agreed.
Alex,
I will assume that you will acknowledge that the Wall Street personal economy destroyers and climate change destroyers both consist of largely of the same people, both consisting of those who can buy a congress that will turn businesses free to profit at a terrible cost to both personal economies and a future climate that we all will share.
Since you have let your personal animosity toward those culturally different from you prevent your joining your voice with OWS on issues you deem relevant to the general well being of all who participate in the US economy, it seems safe to say that should young people, those who have most at risk from climate change (as they did from the Wall Street criminals) that you will oppose their efforts that do not align with the two parties, based again on your personal beliefs and animosities.
I believe that you are deluded in your expectation that participation in this corrupt fake democracy can bring the necessary positive changes to the climate and that you will choose to denigrate those who take the position that change is necessary but not possible through the two parties (a belief that I hold).
I hold that you made of yourself an enemy of OWS and will make of yourself the enemy of any popular climate change actions. You chose in favor of Wall Street over OWS and will, I expect, choose again likewise, not overtly, but in effect, with climate change deniers, because of your personal distaste of activist lifestyles, just as you did with OWS.
The generation gap is reborn.
Great cartoon. Great comments.
I’ll take a different tack: sports teams should be nationalized.
That’s low-hanging fruit the socialists could easily pick.
The New York Yankees should belong to the City of New York, and etc.
Tickets and boxes should go to spelling bee and science fair winners, firefighters, police, regular smo’s through a lottery, and etc.
Forget taxes, all profits will go to the city/state.
The fact that we pay these private for-profit corporations to build their stadiums is beyond outrageous.
Way off topic as I see it, but:
That’s already happening in Green Bay Wisconsin.
The only socialist team in the NFL, its ownership grandfathered in after ownership rule changes so that that aberration cannot occur again.
Now about climate change and divergence from the real by the entertainment industry, trying to keep our eyes on the screen while waves lap against ankles, and Cat 5 hurricanes blow roofs off.
Maybe socialism isn’t that far off topic after all.