I have been worried about the climate change forever. I grew up on
science magazines and it was made clear to me that we are ruining
the planet for future generations. I have examined my complicity
in destroying our future quite thoroughly. I have felt the guilt.
I have seen myself as a faulty person who tries their best in
the confines set by the societal pressures.
Now, if you happen to be a green consultant who is brought
to my workplace to preach me about what I am doing wrong, I will
tear you down. I have no patience for Tesla driving elitists
telling me how they can still find ways to condemn me.
The reason for my anger is this: I have been at it since I was a
minor. I have seen the politicians beat around the bush for 30
years. I have seen the car industry not do shit before Elon
appears and rips them off their asses.
Tesla is not the solution. You know how long you can drive an old
car before your greenhouse gas output is equal to the amount of
greenhouse gases generated by producing the parts to build the
new car? A long time. And then there's the fact that when you buy
a Tesla, you don't actually remove your old car from circulation,
do you? So now your old car continues to pollute, driven by
someone else while you feel your green guilt lessened by
purchasing the Tesla.
The best way you fight this shit is by not buying stuff. Not
investing into the cycle. Buy second hand and give your old stuff
to second hand or charity. That way your money is not feeding the
system. This is dead simple, but it's a taboo to say this out
loud.
What the elitist will not talk about is the structural commitment
to destroying the planet, mainly through orthodox economic theory.
Instead they try to engage my green guilt. I am not sure if this
is a conscious move or not. It seems that what may not be
achievable through rational discussion might yet be possible
by guilt tripping everyone, perverse as this is.
There are these green propaganda posters at my office. In the
picture they are comparing the amount of CO2 that is generated
by taking a bus vs a car to work. The amount was something like
1,5 times more with the car. The way they have decided to depict
this is by drawing balloons (think of a hot air balloon) above
the picture of the bus and the car. The height of the balloon
over the car is 1,5 times the height of the one over the bus.
You see what that means as to the relative area of the balloons?
It makes it seem like the area is actually about 2 times more
than the bus. But what's more, when you have a picture of a hot
air balloon, you think of a 3D-object, so that accentuates the
lie even more, to something like 3 times more space inside
that balloon.
Why am I angry? To lie in order to take a good cause forward
is to undermine the project. To use guilt tripping as a tactic
is to undermine the project. Out of the movements in recent
years, Occupy was the one with the right target. The elites
are our enemy, not each other.
"But couldn't you have done more?"
Sure I could have done more. I could still do more. When being
hampered by the lack of honesty in the official propaganda it
is quite hard for an individual to keep up an ideological
fervor for several decades while the economists will not
mention any other alternative than the perpetual growth model.
Is it guilt? It's not really guilt on my part. Not anymore.
It is a deep well of powerlessness and frustration. It's not
fragility either, quite the opposite. It is years of resistance
to being bent by the greenwashing of technological progress.
It's ideological fatigue beginning to show.
By focusing on the individual instead of the system a company
can divert the attention and spend a lot of time talking about
the psychological shortcomings of their employees rather than
the fact that the company is being sustained by Chinese slave
labor and environmental crimes.
