“Fear accompanies the possibility of death. Calm shepherds its certainty.”

A quote that I love from the end of the first season of Farscape, that has stuck with me for many years now.

I’m just gonna post a bunch of excerpts from this, a blog post by one of the people behind the movie What a Way to Go that I started talking about last fall.

Hansen says, and McKibben underscores, that there is a critical maximum number of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to heed to prevent climatic catastrophe. That number, he says, is between 300 and 350.
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We’re at 383 parts per million and counting, well past the number Hansen suggests is critical.
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Hansen and McKibben say it’s not too late. They say: All we have to do is stop using fossil fuels… Now and everywhere.
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It would take closing the highways, now and everywhere. It would take ending industrial agriculture, now and everywhere. It would mean shutting off everyone’s natural gas and oil fueled furnaces, now and everywhere.
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Everything most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives is currently dependent on fossil fuels. When McKibben says “now and everywhere” he’s talking about the shutdown of industrial civilization.
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We asked everyone we talked to, “What’s it going to take for people to change?” And what person after person said was, “It’s going to take a catastrophe. It’s going to take a catastrophe before people will wake up.”
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It’s too late. It’s too late to get out of catastrophe. There’s no way this civilization is going to grind to a halt, get off the fossil fuel train, reduce the population voluntarily by 3/4 and start growing food sustainably, without catastrophe. We’re in for it. And we don’t even know what we’re in for.
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When James Hansen and Bill McKibben say, “It’s not too late,” are they not supporting all of America to embrace denial?
Are statements that suggest it’s not too late not an example of refusing to accept external reality because that reality seems too threatening?
Are such statements not made to argue against a stimulus that provokes high anxiety: the stimulus being the idea that it IS too late?
Are these statements not used to “resolve” our conflicted emotions by supporting Americans to refuse to perceive or consciously acknowledge these unpleasant aspects of external reality?
Are our best and brightest scientists and journalists, Hansen and McKibben being two representatives of those, caught in denial themselves? Or are they just stumped about what to say, what to do, how to be with all of this?
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Here’s the data I look at: net geothermal, solar, wind, wood and waste electric power went from 195 billion kilowatt hours in 1980 to a whopping 370 billion in 2005.
Wow. Almost double in 25 years. Is there a bright spot here? Those look like big numbers and a large increase. Maybe that’s good. I wonder how those numbers compare with total fossil fuel energy use.
Whoops. Fossil fuels actually provide 93% of the world’s energy use. Renewables provide only about 7%.