The Heat Wave and Climate Change

[bae]

And isn't it all, in the infinite wisdom and infallibility of the invisible hand of the market, just fine to do these things?

Well, in this case, it is likely because the market isn't allowed to function that these things are happening. The government is subsidizing the conversion of our public lands and resources to private profit, while foisting the environmental costs off on the citizens. Fraud and coercion and corruption.

That's not "the market". That's "crime".

My take on "the answer" is increasingly moving towards Jensen's.

[ApatheticNoMore]

All it would take would be an act of will by our citizens in one election cycle to dismantle this insane military apparatus we have, that is consuming our resources and wealth at a tremendous rate, and that is used to impose our will on others.

Not entirely unrelated as it seems the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest consumer of petroleum in the U.S.. Now all the usual caveats apply, much manufacturing of U.S. companies is outsourced so it may not count in the figure etc.. I mean obviously war is not the ONLY thing using petroleum in the world. But it *IS* WASTING IT in massive quantities for sure.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/13199

ANM - have you read any of Derrick Jensen's works? In particular his Endgame series, or "Resistance Against Empire"?

no

(and I do admit I often think of him and ApatheticNoMore in the same thought )

I think I've spent way too much time following poltical stuff . And it and some natural darkness leads to a not very happy systematic view of how things are working (you won't see it reported on your t.v. set it goes without saying (do they tell you the gulf never healed, that shrimp are still being born mutated?), but it's all what is happening in the world now).

The thing about human climate change denial is people are more than sick of how it is USED politically by actors one can definitely conclude don't care about the environment. Local attempts to switch to alternative energy are a fallback plan because we can not seem to get the powers that be to care about it, even though we really do need larger scale consensus (we need larger scale consensus here because so many environmental issues are global issues).

[bae]

Local attempts to switch to alternative energy are a fallback plan because we can not seem to get the powers that be to care about it, even though we really do need larger scale consensus (we need larger scale consensus here because so many environmental issues are global issues).

This is part of the reason I posted the coal issue above. Public lands stripped of coal for pennies on the dollar, shipped through US communities at great environmental cost to those communities with no mitigation of the harm, then on to China to be burned in what I can presume are coal plants that are not up to the latest environmental standards, further polluting our joint resources.

And then junk shipped back to Walmart for everyone to buy!