This is just to back up my claim that people fly too much. I know this contradicts an earlier post about how travel broadens the mind (re: high speed rail in other countries). One of the truly discouraging things about the climate change debate it that there are so many people who seem truly convinced that climate change is a problem—only NOT for them. So Al Gore flies around in a Gulfstream, somber climate change conferences are held in remote places where everyone has to fly in, and leading climate scold, Bill McKibben, actually encourages people to travel to Washington to protest all the carbon being pumped into the atmosphere. It’s one of those systemic contradictions arising from the failing system cracking from the stresses and strains imposed upon it, similar to the way Bob Fosse danced to deny the fact that he was having a heart attack. Here we see that in a world where we should be cutting the flying around at 10,000 meters to its bare minimum, there is an explosion of low-cost airlines whose principal beneficiaries are people looking for a cheap holiday. Climate change might be a problem, such people argue, but its not so severe that I should forego my vacation in Jamaica or my scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef (after all, coral reefs are dying so I should see them now.) I used to imagine a future era when fusion’s byproduct (helium) could be used to inflate solar-electric dirigibles. Gracious living, unaddicted to speed. My contemporaries probably loathe the idea, not realizing that their zeal for speed stems more from a need to compensate for the insecurity caused by a system that must be propped up by frantic fear-based activity.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 18:51:57 +0000
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