Posted on by qscrisp

Blog action day

Well, today is Blog Action Day.

The topic for this year's Blog Action Day is climate change.

I've been thinking about this, and I don't know if I'm really the best person to write about this, because I feel pretty conflicted and emotional about it. Also, I find myself tending towards fatalism. There may be happier times for human beings at some point in the future, but, as they say, not in my lifetime.

Anyway, so I decided to look at some other people's blog posts on the subject.

Here's one from a blogger in Bangladesh:

http://my.opera.com/tratul/blog/show.dml/4413120

Here's one from a blogger in Pakistan:

http://my.opera.com/Changing_woman/blog/2009/10/12/be-a-captain-planet

Here's one from a blogger in the USA:

http://my.opera.com/ellinidata/blog/show.dml/4426525

Here's one from a blogger in Canada:

http://my.opera.com/Tabmartel/blog/2009/10/15/what-on-earth-is-going-on

Here's one from a blogger from the Netherlands:

http://my.opera.com/jekav/blog/2009/10/15/blog-action-day-09-climate-change

Here's one from a blogger in the UK:

http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20931

I keep getting e-mails from Ed Miliband. We're on first-name terms. Yesterday he wrote to me thus:

Quentin,

We face a fight and I need your help.

He knows who to turn to when the situation calls for a bit of pugilism. He continues:

Our generation is the first to understand that climate change needs to be combatted – and could be the last to make a significant effort to curb its worst effects.

Senior Tory backbencher, Douglas Carswell MP this week declared that those who believe that climate change is happening are part of a "lunatic consensus".

I want you to help spread the word about what the Tories really believe. Click here.

It's incredible that Conservatives still think like this. Their green rhetoric is undermined by their uncosted and incoherent policies. They claim to support renewable energy but across the country Tory MPs routinely campaign against w ind power.

In December, more than 180 countries will go to Copenhagen to thrash out a new international deal to tackle climate change. The stakes could not be higher.

Those of us who understand the need for action need to make our voices heard.

Visit the EdsPledge.com letter-writing page to send a letter to your local newspaper and spread the word about the need for a fair, effective and ambitious deal at Copenhagen.

Thanks

Ed

Just in case you wanted to click that link, it's here.

I was outside just a while ago, involved in redecorating, and the neighbour mentioned something like, "They've just said on the telly that there'll be no more snow at the Poles within 15 years."

Or was it 50 years?

I've tried looking the information up, and can't find it. I found this, but not an estimate for when snow will disappear entirely from both Poles.

I do wish there would be a readily available digest of all this information. I've said this before. There just seems to be a kind of blizzard of information in which it's hard to discern quite what is happening.

If this post seems rather listless, it's because I've been contemplating armageddon. There's really no way I can write down all my thoughts and feelings on the subject, and I'm not sure it would do any good if I could. Nonetheless, I felt like writing something.

I shall leave you with this clip:

10 Replies to “Blog action day”

  1. Justin Isis writes:I really feel like an iPod is more insane and beautiful than the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon formed randomly and has no intrinsic meaning other than what we impose on it, but the iPod is the result of centuries of cumulative thought, experimentation, collaboration, design, etc. I feel like the fact that the iPod has existed means humanity has justified itself to the universe, and so it no longer really matters whether we go extinct or not. If I feel depressed or ambivalent about the future I can usually feel better by contemplating the development and production of the iPod.

  2. Justin Isis writes:My own viewpoint is climactic. I want the planet to change, I don’t want it to stay the same. Stasis seems like boredom and death. Climate change seems beautiful. I want to live (and die) in the future, so I support anti-green activities like littering and leaving the lights on all the time. I feel like five minutes of electrical beauty are worth a thousand years of vegetative boredom.There is no “delicate balance” of nature. Nature is a random and meaningless collision, like putting baking soda and vinegar in a blender. It’s not some perpetual cycle that can be “unbalanced.” The ice age, for example, occurred regardless of human activity. Who cares if the human race (or any other race) goes extinct? None of us asked to be born. We have no responsibility, no guilt, no mission. Life is avoiding boredom, that`s about it.”Climate change is the biggest threat to all our futures. It will affect every individual, every family, every community, every business and every country.”I don`t have any invested interests in families, communities, businesses or countries…so what does it matter?Death makes everything beautiful by fixing it in time. Sustainability is the very definition of ugliness.Humans should live like cockroaches, fucking in garbage, eating whatever they can find. Children born in the wastelands of the future will regard the garbage around them with as much sentiment as environmentalists regard forests and canyons now.

  4. Justin Isis writes:I also think the iPod is better than the Pyramids, because more subtle. Mass slave labor can pile up stone blocks, but the iPod could not have been achieved without centuries of complex experiments and abstract thought. I feel like the Apple corporation has transcended history and bested all the wonders of the ancient world. I think they should use this in advertising,“The iPod is more beautiful than the Victoire de Samothrace.”I don`t understand how anyone can be worrying about the future when we are surrounded by miracles like the iPod, Playstation 3, and the machines at McDonalds which produce McFlurries. Millions of species went extinct before humans ever developed, but nothing like the iPod, I feel, has ever appeared anywhere else in the universe. I think the recipe for happiness is an extreme fatalism, an extreme appreciation of the iPod, McDonald`s McFlurry machines and other cheap readily available ice cream, and not having children.

  5. Justin Isis writes:I feel like poets have not recognized the iPod, even if they recognize fatalism and the natural world. Ex. Robinson Jeffers:Yesterday morning enormous the moon hung low on the ocean, Round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn; The night-herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings. Today Black is the ocean, black and sulphur the sky, And white seas leap. I honestly do not know which day is more beautiful. I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years I shall not see these things- and it does not matter, it does not hurt; They will be here. And when the whole human race Has been like me rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moon and ocean, Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more meaning Than the whole human race and the race of birds.But I disagree with Jeffers…because I think the iPod is more beautiful than dawn and the birds, and more meaningful. Birds have no names, but the iPod contains artist and track information for every song in its registry.

  6. I suppose I associate technology (as it currently exists) with mass-production, and therefore with a kind of stagnation. I don’t see it as very beautiful. I mean, I can do, but aesthetically, my primary responses are to what people generally call ‘natural’ things. What I would like to see is a different kind of technology that is more organic. I mean, I’m not a scientist, and I’m going off into a flight of fantasy here, but something that is powered by the residual consciousness of matter, or something, so that you have to have a personal relationship with all your technology, and all the artefacts are as unique as things that are born biologically. That kind of thing.

  7. Also, an increase in natural disasters may well lead to a Dr. Strangelove world of bunkers and military rule, as per the Pentagon report: “Life will once more be defined by warfare.”I suppose one may ask when it hasn’t been defined by warfare. Warfare may also be seen as natural, etc. But I have a suspicion that warfare is really another form of stagnation, a stage we have to get past if we’re to get anywhere at all interesting.It does seem likely to me that technology will continue to be essential to our lives, or, maybe, let’s see… At the moment it seems like we’re at the mercy of technology. Once the resources run out that fuel a particular kind of technology, we hit a crisis. This is just a form of short-sightedness and weakness. What we really need is a relationship with technology that is less crippling to us, which seems to mean an entirely different, redefined technology.

  8. Justin Isis writes:I agree that the technologies we have are stupidly wasteful. Cars for example; I don`t know why anyone would want one. I think this will change with time, though. I think the technology of the future will eventually come to resemble something nearly organic. The REAL problem though, isn`t climate change or technology…it`s overpopulation.

  10. I’ll put this here in the appropriate place:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/6375775/Climate-change-could-cause-more-problems-than-two-world-wars-Brown-warns.htmlFrom Gordon Brown:”The threat is not only humanitarian and ecological, it is also an economic one… Failure to avoid the worst effects of climate change could lead to global GDP being up to 20 per cent lower than it otherwise would be – an economic cost greater than the losses caused by two World Wars and the Great Depression. Let us be in no doubt then that this is a profound moment for our world – a time of momentous choice.” Typical politician’s language: “only humanitarian and ecological”. Of course, it doesn’t matter if mere human (and other) lives are lost. What really matters is that some imaginary numbers in a computer in the banking system will fall. Politicians are all cunts.

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