Climate change isn’t a problem that can be solved by summoning the “will.” It isn’t a problem that can be “fixed” or “conquered,” though these words are often used. It isn’t going to have a happy ending, or a win-win ending, or, on a human timescale, any ending at all. Whatever we might want to believe about our future, there are limits, and we are up against them.
Reaching net zero in the U.S. will require putting such wrangling aside. It will require building out the transmission system while, at the same time, expanding its capacity so that hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, and buses can be run on electricity. It will require installing tens of millions of public charging stations on city streets and even more charging stations in private garages. Assembling the electric cars and trucks will, in turn, necessitate extracting nickel and lithium for their batteries, which will mean siting new mines, either in the U.S. or abroad. The new cars and trucks will themselves have to be manufactured in an emissions-free manner, which will involve inventing new methods for producing steel or building a new infrastructure for capturing and sequestering carbon.
The list goes on and on. The fossil-fuel industry will essentially have to be dismantled, and millions of leaky and abandoned wells sealed. Concrete production will have to be reëngineered. The same goes for the plastics and chemicals industries. Currently, ammonia, a critical component of fertilizer, is produced from natural gas, so the fertilizer industry will also have to be refashioned. Practically all the boilers and water heaters that now run on oil or gas, commercial and residential, will have to be replaced. So will all the gas stoves and dryers and industrial kilns. The airline industry will have to be revamped, as will the shipping industry. Farming is responsible for roughly ten per cent of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions, mostly in the form of nitrous oxide and methane. (Nitrous oxide is a by-product of fertilizer use; methane is released by rotting manure and burping cows.) Somehow, these emissions, too, will have to be eliminated.
All of this should be done—indeed, must be done. Officially, the U.S. is committed to reaching net zero by 2050. But a task of this scale has never been attempted before. Zeroing out emissions means rebuilding the U.S. economy from the bottom up. Perhaps Americans recognize this, perhaps not. In early July, at a time when much of the country was baking in ninety-five-degree-plus heat, the Times took a poll of registered voters. Asked to name the most important problem facing the nation, twenty per cent of the respondents said the economy, fifteen per cent said inflation, and eleven per cent said partisan divisions. Only one per cent said climate change. Among registered Republicans, the figure was zero per cent.
Climate Change from A-Z
Elizabeth Kolbert
The New Yorker, November 28, 2022
The late-afternoon light was golden, molten now, pouring across the glass and stone buildings arrayed around the site, every surface incandescent. Before him the vastness of the emptiness of the hole in the city was inflamed with human noise and aspiration. An arrow's point of sparrows lifted from a nearby roof and wheeled into the deepening blue unopposed. The moment would last forever, or until everything contained within it was completely destroyed.
In “Fellow Creatures,” the philosopher Christine Korsgaard maintains that our treatment of other animals is a “moral atrocity,” but she also argues that nonhuman animals are not moral beings; that people are distinctive in being able to reflect upon their moral reasons and considerations and those of others. We’re not just aware of things; we’re aware that we’re aware of them. We’re uniquely aware too that others have independent interests and perspectives that may be worth respecting. So some philosophers will say that people who ascribe moralized emotions to their pets are indulging a sort of fiction.
What’s plainly not a fiction is that animals can suffer. The quality of the life of a dog or a cat is a matter of the quality of its moment-to-moment experiences. They have no projects to complete; their lives have no narrative arc that matters to them. They do not fear death in the way we do: As far as we can tell, they do not have the concept of death. That’s why the sorts of reasons a person might have for going on even after existence has become a source of pain don’t apply to them. We can ask people whether they want to undergo an arduous treatment that might prolong their days by some amount or whether, say, they prefer to enter hospice care. Your mother and her sisters evidently faced a decision like that. That’s not a question you can pose to your dog.
What you owe your dog is a life worth living by the standards that are appropriate to a canine existence, attentive to what matters to a dog. So you shouldn’t organize treatments that will simply extend a period of suffering, even if you can afford to do so without jeopardizing your own quality of life. Some people, hoping against hope, subject their animals to excruciating courses of radiation and chemotherapy in an effort to buy a few more months of companionship. They ought to do what human beings are capable of doing but often fail to do: reflect on their actions. They should think about whom they’re really helping, about whether this costly form of care amounts to cruelty.
If your dog is entering a final decline, marked by debility and suffering, and, out of concern for his welfare, you choose euthanasia, you will not be letting him down. He has no expectations to disappoint. There are no promises you have made to him. His loss will matter a great deal to you. Don’t make the experience worse by thinking that you have done him wrong.
You say that I desire only to rule or ruin... I planned to do neither, but I did endeavor to put before the country a platform of principles, and to inaugurate an organization, which will sooner or later, succeed in crushing our monopolies, and speculators in the necessaries of life such as grain, by whom the farmer, producer, and the laboring men, the consumers are alike robbed.
Benjamin Butler
I begin to doubt whether anybody can be President, of either party, who is not a slave of the same ring... Associated capital brought in contact with the Government by the war naturally affiliated with the Republican party then being in power, not because of any principle of the Republican party, but because the Republican party was in power... as soon as it is apparent that the Democratic party is to be in power, the same associated capital will become connected with that power, and will control its action.
Benjamin Butler
I note what you say about the prejudice that exits in the South in regard to myself... The people in the South remember that I carried on war against them when they were my enemy and the enemies of my country... When I am called to make war, I kill slay, and destroy my enemies in every way I can... I am sorry I did not do it better, and more of it, because that would have saved a great many valuable lives on both sides... I make peace the same way that I make war... When I am at peace, I am at peace all over, and I don't have any sleeping prejudices against those with whom I make peace because they were once my enemies.
Benjamin Butler
Age has brought me little if any wisdom. I knew more at twenty-one than at forty. Why is that? Because at age forty I was dumb enough to believe I knew anything at all. The only lesson I've learned in life is that the human personality does not change, and our propensity for destroying the earth and our fellow man is stronger and more wanton than it has ever been, and if the incineration of our cities and civilians and the increased lethality of our weapons during the last one hundred years has not taught us that, nothing will.
An aberrant social contract in American was created when the first British ships set sail with their cargo of slaves packed like spoons belowdecks, a repository of bilge and rotten rations and the stench of sweat and feces and corpses and stillborn infants and raped women who killed themselves by chewing open their veins. My ancestors, an elite group, profited from those ships. Culpepper's Cockney ancestors did the dirty work. They threw their souls over the gunwales, along with the corpses they pulled with ropes out of the hold every morning, and later were the custodians of the whip and the branding iron in the sugarcane fields where I grew up, and forever after were taught by the oligarchy that Black people were their enemy, lustful, subhuman, idle and mendacious, respondent only to the pillory: the only human beings lower than themselves and, at the same time, the only creatures over whom they could have total power, and none of that has changed, no matter what we tell ourselves.
There is no people in the world more self-opinionated without cause, more bigoted without achievements, more boastful without a status, no people in the world so quick to misjudge their countrymen and to misstate historical facts of political economy and to impugn the motives of others. History does not record a civilized people who have been so contented with so little and who can feed so long on a worthless, buried past.
We started out as children until the years got in our eyes.
We swapped our hearts for manhood and wore that grim disguise.
There were secrets and confusions about myths we thought were true.
I fell in love with Nancy, she fell in love with you.
So me I took to poetry, the sea of lonely souls.
I cloaked myself in innocence and freed my life from goals.
You cursed my independence, I scoffed your worldly life.
I had barroom girls for lovers, you had boredom for your wife.
So here we sit like strangers and drink our habits down.
Me the bleeding introvert, you the jockstrap clown.
We talk about the old times and force those hollow smiles
Until the whiskey comes between us and eases all the miles.
Until the whiskey comes between us and erases all the miles.
Name of song and songwriter unknown to me.
I have contemplated suicide only twice -- or perhaps 3 times. I have resolved not to be a suicide because I love life which I know, better than death, which I don't, and which I suspect to be the ultimate bore.
Musing on the way that anti-abortion arguments turn people into vessels for the production of babies, she asks: "What was the point of making another person, when the woman herself -- a person who already existed -- counts for so little?"
slubber + the British dialectal term gullion (“wretch”).
slubberdegullion (plural slubberdegullions)
from Wiktionary
Someone will need to forgive me for being
who I am, for sneaking back to my blue chair
by the window, where for the last three hundred and seventy days
I have learned that to be alone is what is good for me. I am pretending
as if I really belong with those who want to return to this world
with open arms, even though it has done to us
what it has done. I wish I could love like that,
instead of wanting to turn my back on it all,
as if life in the world were a marriage
assumed too young and necessarily left behind.
Try as I might I will never become
one of the world’s faithful ones.
My naked face and your naked face,
maskless. A cold March dawn,
harsh sunlight, impersonal and honest,
mindless like the light from a surgeon’s lamp
worn on the forehead as you peer down
into the wound. Nothing in this new life
is asked of me except to remember how small I am.
2
Sometimes the world won’t let itself
be sung. Can’t become a poem. Sometimes
we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough.
Warm moonlight and wind. I am sitting here,
simply breathing because there is no other way
to be with those who no longer can.
I don’t know what to say about it all,
but if you do please show me how to be you.
In the last play I saw, fourteen months ago,
before there were no more plays,
they had made a sea of the stage. Songs were chanted
on its shore. Lives lived. People pretended to die
and a ship sailed into the night. A moon. One star.
Afterward, applause. Then began that long silence
which it is now time for me to admit I have loved
beyond any reason or defense. Who among us
has not seen that star to the left
of the lockdown moon, shining
as the ship sets sail?
"Paraphrasing an American saying, she used to argue that patriotism is like a penis: irrespective of its size, it's not a great idea to go waving it around in public"
Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.
Because you made of our adoration, mockery.
Because you were the predator male, without remorse.
Because you were the greatest of our actors, and you threw away greatness like trash.
Because you could not take seriously what others took as their lives.
Because in this you made mockery of our lives.
Because you died encased in fat
And even then, you’d lived too long.
Because you loathed yourself, and made of yourself a loathsome person.
Because the wheelchair paraplegic of The Men was made to suffocate in the fat of the bloated Kurtz.
Because your love was carelessly sown, debris tossed from a speeding vehicle.
And because you loved both men and women, except not enough.
Because the slow suicide of self-disgust is horrible to us, and fascinating as the collapse of tragedy into farce is fascinating and the monstrousness of festered beauty.
Because you lured a girl of 15 to deceive her parents on a wintry-dark December school day, 1953.
Because you lured this girl to lie about where she was going, what she was doing, in the most reckless act of her young life.
Because you lured this girl to take a Greyhound bus from Williamsville,
New York to downtown Buffalo, New York, alone in the wintry dusk, as she
had not ever been alone in her previous life.
Because you lured this girl shivering, daring to step onto the bus in
front of Williamsville High School at 4:55 pm to be taken 12 miles to
the small shabby second-run Main Street Cinema for a 6 pm showing of The Wild One – a place that would’ve been forbidden, if the girl’s parents had known.
What might have happened! – by chance, did not happen.
Because inside the Main Street Cinema were rows of seats near-empty in the dark, commingled smells of stale popcorn and cigarette smoke – (for this was an era when there was “smoking in the loge”), and on the screen the astonishing magnified figure of “Johnny” in black leather jacket, opaque dark sunglasses, on his motorcycle exuding the sulky authority of the young predator male.
Because when asked what you were rebelling against you said with wonderful disdain, What’ve you got?
Because that was our answer too, that we had not such words to utter.
Because as Johnny you took us on the outlaw motorcycle, we clung to your waist like the sleep of children.
Because as Johnny you were the face of danger, and you were unrepentant.
Because as Johnny you could not say Thank you.
Because as Johnny you abandoned us in the end.
Because on that motorcycle you grew smaller and smaller on the road out of the small town, and vanishing.
Because you have vanished. Because in plain sight you vanished.
Because the recklessness of adolescence is such elation, the heart is filled to bursting.
Because recklessness is the happy quotient of desperation, and
contiguous with shame, and yet it is neither of these, and greater than
the sum of these.
Because the girl will recall through her life how you entered her life
like sunlight illuminating a landscape wrongly believed to be denuded of
beauty.
Because there is a savage delight in loss, and in the finality of loss.
Because at age 23 on Broadway you derailed A Streetcar Named Desire, and made the tragedy of Blanche du Bois the first of your triumphs.
So defiantly Stanley Kowalski, there has been none since.
Because after Brando, all who follow are failed impersonators.
Bawling and bestial and funny, crude laughter of the Polack-male, the
humiliation of the Southern female whose rape is but another joke.
Because you were the consummate rapist, with the swagger of the rapist enacting the worst brute will of the audience.
Because you were Terry Malloy, the screen filled with your battered boy’s face.
Because sweetness and hurt were conjoined in that face.
Because you took up the glove dropped by Eva Marie Saint, and put it on
your hand, appropriating the blond Catholic girl and wearing her like a
glove.
Because you exposed your soul in yearning – I could’ve been a contender! – knowing how defeat, failure, ignominy would be your fate.
Because in 1955 at the age of 31, after having won an Academy Award for On the Waterfront,
you were interviewed by Edward R Murrow wreathed in cigarette smoke
like a shroud and in your rented stucco house in the hills above Los
Angeles already you were speaking of trying to be “normal”. Because you
endured the interviewer’s lame questions – “Have you discovered that
success can have its own problems?” – “Are you planning a long career as
an actor?”
Because you conceded, “I can’t do anything else well.”
Because you said you wanted to sing and dance on screen, you wanted to be “superficial” – you wanted to “entertain.”
Because on the mantel of the rented house was a portrait of your mother
at 40, your alcoholic mother who’d failed to love you enough.
Because your discomfort with the interview was evident.
Because you spoke of the fear of losing “anonymity” when already “anonymity” was lost.
Because the awkwardly staged interview ended with you playing bongo
drums with another drummer, in the bizarrely decorated basement of the
rented house. Because quickly then your hands slapped the drums with a
kind of manic precision, your eyes half-shut, a goofy happiness
softened your face.
Because at this moment it was not (yet) too late.
Because your beauty seduced you, and made of you a prankster.
Because the prankster always goes too far, that is the essence of prank.
Because you were a prankster, sowing death like semen.
Because all you had, you had to squander.
Because you tried, like Paul Muni, to disappear into film.
Because you were Mark Antony, Sky Masterson, Zapata, Fletcher Christian,
Napoleon! You were the clownish cross-dresser-outlaw of One-Eyed Jacks – a film debacle you’d directed yourself. You were Vito Corleone and you were the garrulous bald fat Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, mumbling and staggering in the dark, bloated American madness.
Because as the widower Paul of Last Tango in Paris you stripped your sick soul bare, in the radiance of disintegration. Because you were stunned in terror of annihilation yet played the clown, baring your buttocks on a Parisian dance floor.
Because confounded by the corpse of the dead beautiful wife framed
ludicrously in flowers you could hardly speak, and then you spoke too
much. Because you were stupid in grief. Because you could not forgive.
Wipe off the cosmetic mask! You hadn’t known the dead woman, and you
would not know the dead woman, who had not been faithful to you. All you
can know is the compliant body of your lover far too young for you, and
only as a body.
The futility of male sexuality, as a bulwark against death.
The farce of male sexuality, as a bulwark against death.
Because nonetheless you danced with astonishing drunken grace, with the girl young as a daughter. On the tango dance floor you spun, you fell to your knees, you shrugged off your coat, you were wearing a proper shirt and a tie to belie drunkenness and despair, fell flat on your back on the dance floor amid oblivious dancers and yet at once in rebuke of all expectation you were on your feet again and – dancing…
And in a drunken parody of tango you were unexpectedly light on your
feet, radiant in playfulness, clowning, in mockery of the heightened
emotions and sexual drama of tango – as in your youth you’d wanted to be
“superficial” and to “entertain” –
And then, lowering your trousers and baring your buttocks in the exhilaration of contempt.
Because the actor does not exist, if he is not the center of attention.
Because the actor’s heart is an emptiness, no amount of adulation can
fill.
Because after the slapstick-tango you lay curled in the exhaustion of grief and in the muteness of grief, a fetal corpse on a balcony in greylit Paris.
In Hell, there is tango. The other dancers dance on.
Because you made of self-loathing a caprice of art.
Because what was good in you, your social conscience, your generosity to liberal causes, was swallowed up in the other.
Because you squandered yourself in a sequence of stupid films as if in
defiance of your talent and of our expectations of that talent.
Because by late middle-age you’d lived too long.
Where there has been such love, there can be no forgiveness.
Because at 80 you’d endured successive stages of yourself, like a
great tree suffocated in its own rings, beginning to rot from within.
Because when you died, we understood that you had died long before.
Because we could not forgive you, who had thrown greatness away.
Because you have left us. And we are lonely.
And we would join you in Hell, if you would have us.
"Both Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would , without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it...Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong."
"And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building," said Gimli. "It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise."
"Yet seldom do they fall of their seed," said Legolas. "And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli."
"And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess," said the Dwarf.
"To that the Elves know not the answer," said Legolas.
