What the ruling class says is irrelevant

Eric Schechter
SENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Obama speechifying. (Via BeckyF, flickr)

Obama speechifying. (Via BeckyF, flickr)


[dropcap]I have stopped [/dropcap]listening to the speeches of the ruling class. Anything that they have to say to us is irrelevant. Perhaps the strongest and clearest proof of that was a few years ago, when the Arctic began melting rapidly.

The melting of the Arctic is one of the feedback loops in global warming. A feedback loop is when the consequences are also causes, so the bigger the process gets, the faster it goes. That results in the process accelerating exponentially. There are quite a few feedback loops now running, and so global warming is proceeding faster and faster.

So when the Arctic began melting rapidly, that should have been a wakeup call:

We need to end the use of fossil fuels, and stop our current methane-generating methods of industrial production of meat (maybe just give up meat altogether), and stop cutting down forests, and start planting forests everywhere, and do everything we possibly can to put some brakes on global warming. Most obviously, we need to end the use of fossil fuels, very quickly.

But instead the ruling class said

“oh goody, now it will be so much easier to extract fossil fuels from the Arctic!”

And they were very proud of themselves for the fact that, without going to war over it, they managed to come to an agreement about who would get the fossil fuels from which part of the Arctic.

I don’t think the ruling class is malicious. I think they are simply insane. In some sense, it’s not even their fault.

If they were united, like in the stories of the Illuminati, they could say to one another, “the few of us own this planet, and so it would be stupid of us to destroy it. Let’s phase out fossil fuels.”

But they’re not united. They are driven by the market. It compels them to compete against each other in offering short-term profits to investors, disregarding all consequences. Any big player who ceases to obey the market quickly loses the competition and ceases to be a big player.

Or perhaps they are not even aware that they are destroying the ecosystem. They live in a bubble, in an echo chamber. They have been taught to believe that smart equals rich, and so the only people who the government hires for advisers are the heads of corporations. Not scientists, who don’t seem to be rich.

Did you notice what Obama said, all those years while he was stalling about the KXL Pipeline? He said that he needed to find out whether it posed a real threat to the environment. James Hanson, his best climatologist, had already said “yes, it would be game over for the climate,” but he simply ignored that and asked the State Department (!) to take a while to study the issue. He ignored the scientist and asked the rich and powerful people about the science. And meanwhile he was approving lots of slightly smaller pipelines.

So either Obama was lying, or he was a complete fool. But it doesn’t really matter which, does it. Nothing said by him or any of the other politicians is worth thinking about. The only question remaining is, how long until we can get rid of them, and get rid of the system that generates rulers like them.


 

Eric Schechter serves as a senior contributing editor with The Greanville Post.  A retired professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt, he continues his social activism in the Nashville (TN) area. 


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