How's it going Diebert! Nice to see you're still keeping the lights on as it were.
Diebert van Rhijn wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2017 9:20 pmthe current approaches seem to ignore a couple of crucial aspects in the rush to save something from something else.
The science is probably sound, it's the "so what do we do?" part where the problem lies, as usual. While Green proponents insist there are no easy solutions, the overall effort seems to be directed at precisely that - providing easy solutions that can be neatly packaged with ideology and commerce (like post-modern drama porn or Tesla). My view is that the systems of warming have already reached a point where we can't alter them either way, and can only attempt to guess at the consequences and timing. I'm writing this now in an Indian coastal city where it's raining in fucking December, which is quite unusual but nevertheless cannot be definitively attributed to AGW. Besides that, emission reduction will happen on its own since we are already running out of cheaply extractable fossil fuels.
The real irony of Green philosophy though is that its axioms are identical to those of its supposed antitheses. That is also true of 20th century philosophy in general. In short, those axioms all boil down to value (and truth) originating outside the individual, and being made accessible to the individual or society through choice/force and subsequent legitimisation. The contradiction inherent in that axiom has so far been largely ignored, and attempts to point it out dismissed, because so far the "outside" has more or less corresponded with the *real* values, goals and motivations. These latter all revolve around the desire for happiness as they have throughout history, but this time the "outside" of industrialism fulfills that desire on a scale and to a degree unimaginable in past ages.
So people see no reason not to think that the "outside" can/will/should always resemble the "inside", and that all asymmetry is due to the imperfections of the "inside" and therefore fixable. Reason itself is no more than a tool that can fix the "inside", either by innovating and erasing the wrongly perceived limits of the "outside", or by refuting notions about the reality of those limits, or by invalidating desires to remain within them. Past ages abandoned reason for unreasonable values about the "outside". We laugh at their hypocrisy and stupidity because we use reason to make our values reasonable enough for the "outside".
Within such a worldview, it is possible to think of fossil fuels as an obsolete and perhaps evil energy source which all rational people must stop using by choice rather than as the natural consequence of their usage of them on a massive scale for a century or so. Or to envision solar or wind power or biofuels as a ready-made and economically scalable alternative to fossil fuels which is being thwarted by our own ignorance and greed. Or indeed to rub the Green groupies' noses in the compost, and encourage everyone to stimulate the economy by burning more oil because AGW is a hoax.
I think the Age of Schism/s is due in large part to the increasing disparity between the actual "outside" and the now-venerable ideas and perceptions of both the "outside" and the "inside". People are simply doubling down on what has hitherto seemed to work, or failing that pretending that at least it works better than something else (that others are doubling down on). This behaviour is also not, as Kevin thinks, currently most characteristic of or most prevalent in the authoritarian left. Trump's tax cut, and elimination of medical care for the non-rich, is really just a way of going back on promises made in happier times while assuring everyone that doing so is all part of the plan to return to those times.
It's interesting that my generation (millenials) really hasn't found their voice yet, unlike the postwar generations who found theirs early and then forgot what they were saying. What we’re witnessing right now in the West - and in the East - is the last hurrah of these now old guys, inheritors of the postwar ideological/leadership cadres. They are secular versions of the early mediaeval Pope, the last vestige of the long-gone Roman Empire. Theirs is the power of the Image (of industrial might and magic). We on the other hand have so far only expressed violence either via ironic, foppish subversion and undermining or ironically ironic, foppish emulation or whining (ironic or otherwise). But we won't be denied. I suspect that before long we shall find our power, and our voice, in the Word.