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The arrogance associated with “Saving the Planet”

The arrogance associated with “Saving the Planet”

George Carlin’s prescience and why we should really be focused on saving comedy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

Yesterday, I was fuming that my son’s school participated in the abysmal #ClimateStrike.

Fortunately, student participation in it was optional, and my boy gave the event a hard pass. As a parent, I would prefer students learn actual science and mathematics. If teachers are going to pursue climate-related activities, instead of promoting protests, they should review such concepts as the Milankovitch Cycles, Maunder Minimums, and the geologic record of major extinction level events.

Another reason for my ire is that pushing this doom and gloom agenda creates needless fear and worry. How many students already have anxiety or depression due to the realities of their life circumstances, which is then made worse by the “climate crisis” drama?

Finally, promoting this nonsense instills a sense of arrogance and self-righteousness in those who have succumbed to the indoctrination. Do politicians really believe restricting straws, meat, and cars will significantly change the global temperature?

I am reminded of the late comedian and social critic George Carlin’s wonderful routine “Saving the Planet.” Carlin stresses the uselessness of “arrogant meddling” and the arrogance of “self-righteous environmentalists.”

The video is truly a palate cleanser if, like me, you need a break from #ClimateStrike, #ClimateCrisis, and #ClimateStupidity.

LANGUAGE WARNING

Perhaps my favorite moment is when Carlin goes into the subject of plastics. The comedian humorously ponders whether the reason for humans is that Earth wanted us to create plastic. Here’s a partial transcript:

“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos.

Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.

The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!

We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”

Plastic… asshole.”

As I watched the video, published in 2007 only a year before his death, I wondered how Carlin’s routine would be viewed a dozen years later. When he goes into the segment on man’s attempts to “save the planet” when the planet wipes out cities with volcanoes and earthquakes, I can’t help but think that there would be shouts to silence him today, for being insensitive to Pompeians, Mexicans, and Hawaiians who build next to volcanoes.

What we really need today is a movement to save comedy.

During this routine, Carlin mentioned that we can’t take care of each other much less the planet. This isn’t entirely true, though to actually clean the streets instead of virtue-signal over them at a banquet requires a quality many celebrities and politicians lack: Humility.

Perhaps the best example of a true climate warrior is citizen activist, Scott Presler (aka “The Persistence”). He is in Los Angeles today leading a clean-up that California’s state and local politicians have neglected to do.

Presler and his team of volunteers will have accomplished more in one afternoon to save the environment with their humility and service than any arrogant, self-righteous celebrity or political activist accomplishes in a lifetime.

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Comments

they should review such concepts as the Milankovitch Cycles, Maunder Minimums, and the geologic record of major extinction level events.

Actually, what makes something “science” is measuring it. Sometimes merely observing it will do. The whole idea behind modern scientific method (“modern” meaning, say, post-A.D. 1600) is that answers about the workings and nature of the physical universe come from examination of the universe itself, not from authority figures, human “experts” or Jeanne d’Arc’s “voices”.

Milankovitch cycles are quite inventive but don’t by themselves say if anything is actually happening.

I’m a bit nostalgic for the days when elementary school teachers merely had their students nearly frantic about the imaginary fate of elephants. I recall a school committee person once bitching to me about how criminal it was to dump stuff like that on young children.

    Tom Servo in reply to tom_swift. | September 22, 2019 at 8:14 am

    “Actually, what makes something “science” is measuring it.”

    I am continually reminded of the climate “researcher” a couple of years ago who, quite seriously, proposed that we should all stop using instrument measured temperatures, since they often showed ups and downs that were hard to explain, and instead we should only use computer generated temperatures, since they always agreed with the models perfectly.

    Would Archimedes and the Greeks of his time be considered as having engaged in “modern science”?

And half of that trash they were cleaning up was left behind by the #ClimateStrike lunatics.

I saw a kid with her hippy dippy dad and I briefly considered telling them that Cascadia was a far bigger and credible threat to their existence.

Maybe we should be offering guest lectures at high schools on the theory of sunspots and ice ages.

Also about how CO2 isn’t much of a greenhouse gas.

It won’t stop the craziness but it could produce a few thinkers. I attended a lecture when I was in college about cholesterol in the body. One thing I certainly didn’t hear is that by eating animal cholesterol one retains more cholesterol in the body or on the arteries. Not at all; the body’s equilibrium level was independent of that.

This was in the 1970’s. Then came all the “statin” era in modern medicine, where they did more and more stringent tests for cholesterol and eventually managed to prescribe statins. The cholesterol didn’t kill you, the statins do a fair job of it though.

Now they say oops they were wrong. But they knew it was wrong 40 years ago. At least the scientists did. Do the doctors ever talk to scientists? They probably do, but “standards of care” are enacted and they must all follow along. They must, but you don’t have to. But you have to really think about things, because your doctor won’t and is not even allowed to tell you some things.

Same with “climate science”, it’s such nonsense now and even the President of MIT now wants to “decarbonize everything”, that’s a quote from his recent email, just before he started getting slammed for knowing about more Epstein donations to MIT than were being reported. There’s big money and influence behind the current stupidities.

    redc1c4 in reply to artichoke. | September 21, 2019 at 9:38 pm

    the VA is still pushing statins… i saw my primary quack the other day and we argued about my meds. his residents tried to sell me on statins as well, when my only elevated cholesterol is the good one (apparently the algorithm can’t tell the difference between the two, and, also apparently, they hadn’t really looked at my labs). i say that because they were simply asking me stuff that came up on the screen.

    patient centered care my ass.

    anyway, they offered, i laughed and said, even if you could talk me into it, my pharmacist wife would stop me. you can keep that garbage in the pharmacy, where it belongs.

    metformin is another shit drug they had out by the car load, but heaven fore-fend you ask for 10 Norco, with no refills, or a single Lomotil a day, so you can function.

    you might get addicted to the stuff.

      artichoke in reply to redc1c4. | September 21, 2019 at 9:47 pm

      Serrapeptase is good for cleaning out the arteries and simultaneously reducing inflammation, which is probably the real cause of less flexible (“hardened”) arterial walls.

      Within a day my balance was better. I guess the first thing that got cleaned out was my inner ear.

      Available for cheep from swanson.com .

I remember a survey from the 1980’s, more than half the public elementary school kids didn’t think they’d survive to adulthood – Ronald Reagan was going to get them killed in a nuclear war. I wonder if they wised up as adults or just became parents of these scared kids.

    artichoke in reply to jlronning. | September 21, 2019 at 9:19 pm

    In school in the 1960’s we had “duck and cover” under the desks. To protect us from nuclear explosions or something. Yeah it was bad, we weren’t being born into a perfect world.

    But we didn’t despise the adults for it. During the Vietnam War there were understandable protests because kids might actually get drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed. But we weren’t making up reasons to protest.

    Now it’s all so phony. And from these little brats who don’t even think about their own consumption.

George would be “canceled” before he ever became known, let alone famous, these sorry days.

I heard something the other day that goes right along with this “save the planet” meme.
Bill Gates sponsored genetically altering mosquitoes in areas that have high mosquito populations and high amounts of malaria cases. Despite warnings of don’t do this, Gates went ahead. Now, instead of the mosquito population decreasing, as was the intent of this genetic mutation they introduced, it was meant to eventually kill off all the mosquitoes where it was deployed, it did the opposite. Or nearly so. The population did contract for a period of time, but now it has grown larger, and the real kicker is the newly genetically changed mosquitoes are immune to the insecticides that were used to curtail the mosquito population in the past, and helped contain the diseases they carry and spread to a decent degree.
This action by Gates made me think of his one time saying we should look at means of depopulating the planet of people. When that had been his stated goal, it makes me wonder if the mosquitoes he mutated was purposefully done as a means to spread diseases in those areas, effectively killing off some of the population.
I have agreed with Carlin about the arrogance displayed by people who think they will save the planet. Save it from what? How arrogant these climate idiots are to think we are destroying this planet to where we only have a decade left. Never mind that the things they have said for decades have not come to pass. They pretend that it was the efforts made in back then which held off the immanent destruction till now.
Talk about narcissism, these twerps who make these claims, and have indoctrinated the children for decades are extreme narcissists.
These are the ones who are systematically destroying religion by such things as having seminary students gather to pray to and ask forgiveness of their sins to plants/ weeds… If I were a student at that place I would have been asking how the heck are they justifying changing God into plants now?
It is things like this, which makes me worship on my own, in my own ways, as organized religion has become corrupted by the secular world. And the religious leaders either don’t see it, or just don’t care because they are politically motivated over being followers of God.

Clearly, if these people believe this is the moral equivalent of war, we should treat it that way.
Put in a “windfall profits” tax with severe penalties.

This moral equivalent of war will end in days.

“I am only 16 years old.”

We know, you think like a 16 year old…

Gaia’s gonna get you for that, to paraphrase Maude Findley.
Bacchus is much more fun and just as real.

But these kids probably read a book, I think it was the “Gorax” about a failed fuzzy politician who lives in a big mansion with heated swimming pool except when he jets to his beachfront home or to a conference where he explains we will all be dead in 10 years if we don’t give up fossil fuels today.

That piece was so spot-on at the time and it remains priceless. I think of it while hiking on St Helens where there are signs everywhere reminding people to stay on the trail to protect the fragile alpine tundra, apparently, completely ignorant of what happened on that spot 39 years ago. I guess maybe I like volcanos so much because it is a reminder of who is really in control. The rest are posers. Perhaps I can distract them with a passionate plea to reunite Pangaea. I bet half would go for it.

I’ve long said that it takes a lot of arrogance and ignorance to believe that man has, or can change the climate