{"id":16005,"date":"2018-04-11T10:23:14","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T14:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=16005"},"modified":"2018-04-11T10:25:07","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T14:25:07","slug":"william-t-vollman-what-if-the-leftwing-hoaxers-are-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/william-t-vollman-what-if-the-leftwing-hoaxers-are-right\/","title":{"rendered":"WILLIAM T. VOLLMAN: WHAT IF THE LEFTWING HOAXERS ARE RIGHT?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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VIA VIKING<\/a><\/div>\n

ON CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL AND THE RESURGENCE OF CARBON-FUELED IDEOLOGY<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
April 11, 2018\u00a0 By\u00a0William T.\u00a0Vollmann<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
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In the time when I lived, it was still possible to meet Americans who disbelieved in global warming, although the ones I knew became shyer and rarer in about 2013. In 2016, they helped elect Donald Trump president, upon which their various carbon ideologies naturally came roaring back.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe sure need a good Sierra snowpack this year,\u201d said a contractor friend of mine. \u201cSkiing was lousy last year and the year before. If we can only get some snow, that will make those global warming people shut up.\u201d\u2014That was just before Christmas. Come spring, the snowpack was six percent of what we had been calling normal. But why not call California a special case? Up in Washington the snowpack was a full 16 percent of what it should have been; and by May, \u201cseeing things happen at this time of year we just have never seen before,\u201d Governor Inslee declared a \u201cstatewide drought emergency.\u201d\u2014Fortunately, my contractor friend was vindicated, and those global warming people utterly foiled, for after a long dry year, the subsequent winter blew flurry-rich, and by January the Sierra snow level had reached 115 percent!<\/span><\/p>\n

February turned unseasonably warm. The leftwing hoaxers got impudent again. As for the skeptics, they took strength in the fact that carbon forecasters of other stripes had been wrong before, in token of which I quote from my grandfather\u2019s Mechanical Engineers\u2019 Handbook, <\/i>copyright 1958: Petroleum would soon run out! \u201cThe peak of production in the United States should come about 1965. . . World shortage of petroleum may be expected to begin about 1960.\u201d\u2014<\/i>If only!\u2014As for coal, in predicting that American production would reach its height in about 1975 the Handbook <\/i>was not far wrong, but it anticipated that a world shortage of \u201ctotal world fossil fuels. . . would be noticeable\u201d\u00a0<\/i>around that same year, which is precisely when a build-your-own-alternative-style-house primer warned us all: \u201cA Federal Power Commission staff study, released in January of 1975, concluded that natural gas production from the 48 contiguous states has reached its peak and will decline for the indefinite future.\u201d\u2014We were all on the verge of getting cold!\u2014But in 1993 the National Coal Association announced that \u201cat present rates of use\u201d our coal reserves \u201ccan be expected to last nearly 250 years. There are about 1,000 tons of recoverable coal for every man, woman and child in the United States.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>Then came fracking, which afforded gas enough to toast us in our planetary oven.<\/span><\/p>\n

In each of these dull and distant comedies, we got condemned to future deprivation, and then the diagnosis brightened! The prior errors of prophecy proved that no one knew anything about anything; therefore, climate change was the merest hot air.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0*<\/div>\n

In 2014 my friend Philip, a cheerful, hardworking realtor in his early forties, allowed that global warming might exist, but that it was natural and \u201cevolutionary\u201d; the human race had little to do with it. For years we had drunk together and listened to each other, so I asked him to tell me more. \u201cWhy should I concentrate on anything that stresses me out?\u201d he demanded, and when I saw that the subject might dent his cheerfulness, I changed it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kindred sorts reassured me that our new weather was \u201cnatural\u201d and cyclical, and therefore required no action. Indeed, precious little action was taken. \u201cFor more than 40 years, Homer City [Generating Station in Pennsylvania]\u00a0has spewed sulfur dioxide from two of its three units completely unchecked. . . because it is largely exempt from federal air pollution laws. . . Last year, the facility released 114,245 tons of sulfur dioxide, more than all of the power plants in neighboring New York combined.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>This pollutant was both a killer of many organisms and a dangerous \u201cprecursor\u201d gas with unpredictable effects on the climate. In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency finally demanded that Homer City clean up. After threatening \u201cimmediate and devastating consequences\u201d\u00a0and losing a lawsuit, the utility found a way to comply\u2014without even raising its electricity rates. When I read this tale in the newspaper, my first emotion was happy astonishment that mitigation had proved so practicable\u2014after which I felt all the more\u00a0amazed that Big Coal kept digging in its heels against reducing harmful emissions elsewhere\u2014and was allowed to do so\u2014while Big Oil and Big Frack behaved much the same.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe prior errors of prophecy proved that no one knew anything about anything; therefore, climate change was the merest hot air.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anyhow, the gloom-and-doom hand-wringers like me, the climate change deniers and the consoling weather-cycle asserters, we were all outnumbered by ordinary practical folks for whom cheap energy and a paycheck incarnated all relevance. One fellow wrote in to the newspaper: \u201cMy son works in the coalfields of southern West Virginia[;] he supports my two grandchildren by mining the coal that keeps the lights on in America\u201d\u2014<\/i>this last phrase being often used by my nation\u2019s carbon ideologues. <\/i>\u201cSo I know firsthand the importance of winning the war on coal that Obama declared five years ago.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>Whether it was truly Obama who started it, who our enemy was, and whether America\u2019s lights might beneficially be dimmed here and there, failed to encumber him. The maintenance of his two grandchildren trumped other arguments; their needs caused him to \u201cknow firsthand\u201d\u00a0<\/i>the small selfish thing that he knew. I will not celebrate him, but I decline to blame him, either. Why should his kin go hungry? (You in our future can go hungry instead; after all, we don\u2019t even know you.)<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A Russian woman opined that the winters of her city, Saint Petersburg, were often just as severe as formerly, but their duration had diminished from five to four months. A fellow Californian who had backpacked the Sierras for decades returned from a hike in June, when he would have expected to see wet green meadows, and then snow at the high elevations; this time he told me: \u201cA lot of trees dead and dying. Kind of alarming, actually.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>A businessman in Bangladesh asserted that 20 percent of his country would lie underwater within 35 years. (You from the future might know that more of it sank faster.) And as we waited to board our Amtrak train in Sacramento, I asked the old lady who stood beside me on the platform whether she believed in global warming, to which she said: \u201cOh, absolutely. Even the children are getting sunburned more easily. When you wear black pants you feel the sun sooner. We\u2019ve done too many things not knowing what the effect would be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat should we do about it?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPray. That\u2019s all we can do.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As the Unabomber calculated in his manifesto: \u201cWhen a decision affects. . . a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>So we couldn\u2019t do anything. Or else we just didn\u2019t want to. In 2015, when the price of crude oil decreased by half, the US Congress might have increased the fuel tax, however modestly, and employed the proceeds on funding renewable energy (or, if nothing else, on building seawalls). In its customary elevated style, Time <\/i>magazine announced how everything would actually play out:<\/span><\/p>\n

CASHING IN: THE DROP IN OIL PRICES IS EQUIVALENT TO A $125 BILLION TAX CUT. HERE\u2019S WHAT THAT MEANS:\u2026 BIG CARS ARE BACK.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

For a while our powerlessness got represented and recapitulated up through various levels of government. In 2014 the Attorney General of West Virginia announced: \u201cThe Office\u2019s end goal is to stop the EPA from hurting our state, and if we can\u2019t do that, we plan to at least gum up the works enough so that it limits the damage that the Obama administration can inflict on our citizens.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>The defiant frustration in his utterance, which played well to certain interests, must have been felt in greater measure by the White House\u2019s feeble occupant. (Near the end of his second term he sadly remarked: \u201cThere\u2019s this notion that there\u2019s something I might have done that would prevent Republicans to [sic<\/i>] deny climate change. . .\u201d) You see, we were all <\/i>feeble! A West Virginian delegate (who happened to be a coal miner) complained that Obama \u201cspeaks as though the Earth\u2019s climate ends and begins at the shores of the United States, while willfully ignoring the fact that China is revving up its economy by using coal\u201d\u2014some of which came from the United States, a fact he <\/i>willfully ignored. In other words, we Americans could hardly make a difference; therefore, nobody should make us try.<\/span><\/p>\n

Accordingly, carbon\u2019s ideologues empowered themselves when and where they could. In 2015, a Wisconsin \u201cagency that manages thousands of acres of state land. . . banned its employees from working on climate change issues while on the job.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>The only person who voted against that ban, Wisconsin\u2019s Secretary of State, was a scientist. In other words, he actually possessed the competence to determine whether or not our actions could \u201cput up enough smoke to make a difference.\u201d Remarking that climate change was in fact altering forests, he decried \u201cthe trend of public officials who, either out of ignorance or out of political expediency, deny climate change.\u201d\u2014And so denial led happily to silence.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cThe future for which I write will most likely also be a more radioactive time.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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In that year the Norwegian Parliament, the Church of England, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the French insurance entity AXA all decided to divest in varying degrees from coal-associated businesses; fortunately for order and tradition, these measures would have little or no impact on the vast market capitalization of most companies.<\/span><\/p>\n

So the War on Coal rolled on, until we all lost.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

The future for which I write will most likely also be a more radioactive time. Just as we continued mining the coal, fracking the shale and drilling the oil that kept the lights on in America, not to mention Bangladesh, even as carbon dioxide levels crept up and up in our atmosphere, so it was that even after Hiroshima, Chernobyl and Fukushima, plenty of Japanese kept assuring me that nuclear power was \u201cnecessary.\u201d It might have been \u201cbetter,\u201d at least. According to the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, \u201clow level radiation is probably less \u2018dangerous\u2019 than the emissions from burning coal.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>Anyhow, I hope that you in the future have learned how to make your spent fuel rods safe.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

I who send this letter to the future hereby plead that we were no more evil or even selfish than anyone else. Some of us lived in a fairly robust democracy of opinion, but lacked any democracy of ideas, let alone of policy. Our various educational systems failed to impart the minimum knowledge which a citizen would have needed to judge <\/i>coal, nuclear power and other methods of keeping on the lights. This knowledge would have entailed some competence in the following procedures: carrying out simple mathematical conversions, marshalling facts, comparatively quantifying energies, emissions and efficiencies; performing risk-benefit analyses, deducing the specific material interests of each carbon ideologue, recognizing omissions, inaccuracies and outright lies, positing and testing relationships between facts, verifying and disproving all claims, including our own\u2014and, most crucially, deciding what we needed to know, and how to seek that information. Some apparent phenomena would still have resisted measurement and much would have remained arguable. But the less we measured, the more conveniently we could argue\u2014while the threat continued to become a calamity. <\/span><\/p>\n

Of course we did it to ourselves; we had always been intellectually lazy, and the less asked of us, the less we had to say. Again, we were no worse than others. (If anything, we might have been less rigid in our ideas than the Assyrians.) In our time the sky never stopped raining claims and counterclaims. We came to think that we had heard them all. Had we in the teeth of our complacent miseducation arrived at any common conclusion, we lacked the power to enact it. So we lived private lives, not worrying about the unpreventable, while the \u201cexperts\u201d kept cashing in.<\/span><\/p>\n

So did I. When I lived, the profit motive was unanswerable. An unemployed West Virginian told me: \u201cWell, I can\u2019t blame them coal companies for going away. I mean, business is business.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For those who couldn\u2019t aspire to profit, mere survival was even harder to argue with. An art teacher in that same county (the high school where he taught sat right on top of a mountaintop removal mine) remarked: \u201cIt\u2019s cultural devastation to lose families in the coal mines and it\u2019s cultural devastation to have families break up when men can\u2019t feed their loved ones. When you make a product, and you base it on the labor of men\u2019s backs, and then you take it away, you turn us into a Third World country.\u201d Naturally he did not want the coal companies to take it away. Coal was poison, sure. It poisoned the rivers when it got cleaned. His solution: \u201cWhy do you clean coal? It\u2019s got dust on it. Why not make the Chinese clean their own coal?\u201d\u2014He was another good man, who couldn\u2019t see that what hurt the Chinese would eventually hurt us. Well, maybe he saw it and didn\u2019t care. Were I in his shoes, or in his pupils\u2019 shoes, I might have behaved the same. I might have said: \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a hungry winter, and the baby\u2019s sick, and I can\u2019t pay the electric bill. Let me worry about my own.\u201d\u2014Isn\u2019t that how it must be for you in our starving future?<\/span><\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

\"No<\/p>\n

From\u00a0<\/span><\/em>No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies<\/span><\/a>. Used with permission of Viking Books. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by William T. Vollmann.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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