Sounds fair to me.
The director of “The Avengers” took to Twitter on Wednesday to deride lawmakers who are skeptical of climate change, saying they shouldn’t be able to partake in scientific breakthroughs.“Policy makers who deny basic scientific truth should also be denied penicillin, horseless carriages, air time on the magic box of shadows,” Joss Whedon tweeted on Earth Day.Whedon is the man behind 2012’s titular Marvel Comics superhero film franchise. Its sequel, “The Avengers: Age of Ultron” opens May 1 nationwide.“The climate is changing — if we can’t, that makes us dumber than weather,” Whedon also tweeted, with the hash tag #ClimateChangeIsReal.
Newest Avengers Trailer Below:
and forced to communicate by carrier pigeon
I saw one by a pop-media critic and social engineer that said:
‘This #EarthDay remember that your personal individual choices in consumer products will do exactly zero to solve our environmental crisis.’
and
‘This #EarthDay remember that your personal consumer choices are pointless. Our planet can only be saved by collective institutional action.’
I guess he didn’t hear about the $5 LED light bulbs at Home Depot. Or the closing of several coal plants partly from lack of demand secondary to efficiency measures (TN Valley Authority, &c.)
I tried to engage him on the topic of individual efficiency investment, but he wouldn’t bite. A carbon tax drives people to make more efficient choices, but those choices are presently available to make, even in the absence of such tax. That people aren’t maximizing their individual income by investing in the most efficient (i.e. money saving) products available, shows that market systems do not perfectly create maximized value, and this is secondary to either lack of information, individual apathy, disinformation & distraction (advertizing), or cultural barriers (Republicans don’t want to drive Priuses or by LED bulbs that have the word ‘efficient’ on their packaging).
Anyway, the idea that we have to sit around and wait for the government to get motivated before we start tackling the problem seemed counterproductive to me, especially since the guy has a big following of gullible teens and twenty-somethings and is well situated mouthpiece of the radical-left’s echo chamber.
*buy LED bulbs
BTW, you left off this tweet from him on the same day:
“This #EarthDay remember if you want to make real change work towards a ban on coal and fracking and a ban on production of all disposables.”
Andrew, the guy is an social justice and environmental activist. He believes that the market and government as it currently functions WON’T be enough to solve “our environmental crisis”, and please tell me how he’s wrong. You suggest $5 LED bulbs will somehow be a magic bullet, which you then say most people won’t go out and buy for several reasons, anyway.
“Anyway, the idea that we have to sit around and wait for the government to get motivated before we start tackling the problem seemed counterproductive to me, especially since the guy has a big following of gullible teens and twenty-somethings and is well situated mouthpiece of the radical-left’s echo chamber.”
1) He’s not arguing for the GOVERNMENT to solve it, he’s arguing for people to be engaged and force government to solve it, and 2) you sound like a Republican here.
=“This #EarthDay remember if you want to make real change work towards a ban on coal and fracking and a ban on production of all disposables.”=
I’m on the same page as him here. I have no problem with his mountaintop removal videos.
=please tell me how he’s wrong.=
I’ve already stated why I thought his statement was wrong in my first comment. I believe the aggregate of individual choices does affect the outcome of a system. [So does McIntosh, as he advocates for video game industry self-censorship.] I believe in cooperation between government, private industry, and individuals, all working for the same goal, and that there is a roll to play for each subset along the graduated scale of organization. I believe you’re more likely to become a vegan if your girlfriend is a vegan, than if the government tells you that you have to become a vegan. I believe there is a market for informed people wanting to lessen their footprint upon the earth without rejecting modernity. I believe if you confront someone, or rather ‘somepublic’, with a problem, but have no fleshed out solution for them to grab hold of, there is a significant probability that they will fail to react; and that the fleshed out solution in our case is that Iowa gets 25% of its energy from wind power, and that market driven competition in the solar and battery tech fields is going to push the price of these things down to ‘reasonable’.
People could have rejected the Toyota Prius to the point of it being decommissioned and instead subscribed fully to the notion that the government should do something about gas prices by way of increasing supply. Such a thing may have caused other manufactures to be shy on developing hybrids or EV’s. After all if the largest manufacture in the world can’t pull it off, then who could? But we’ve instead embraced this new technology. I could be wrong, but it makes sense to me that because this tech existed significantly at the point in which the government decided on raising fuel standards, such emboldened decision makers to get aggressive with the 40mpg fleet avg. by 2025. It’s speculative, but such is the butterfly effect.
*role to play
To be clear, I don’t know the guy. I just looked up his Twitter feed and briefly read his website after your comment here.
Separate the issues here. Most people can be very wrong about one thing and very right about another thing.
The question is, do climate change and other environmental problems get addressed by consumer choice, or by policy?
The answer to that question says a lot about a person’s true political and economic beliefs. How our global society collectively answers that question will have major influence towards our destiny as well.
=You suggest $5 LED bulbs will somehow be a magic bullet.=
I suggested that $5 LED’s are one piece of the puzzle. A piece that we can start coloring in without waiting for Exxon to wink at Inhofe, when they’re ready to try a carbon tax, as a means of grabbing coal’s market share of electricity production.
“The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that in 2014, about 412 billion kilowatthours (kWh) of electricity were used for lighting by the residential sector and the commercial sector in the United States. This was about 15% of the total electricity consumed by both of these sectors and about 11% of total U.S. electricity consumption.
Residential lighting consumption was about 150 billion kWh or about 14% of total residential electricity consumption.
The commercial sector, which includes commercial and institutional buildings, and public street and highway lighting, consumed about 262 billion kWh for lighting or about 19% of commercial sector electricity consumption in 2014. EIA does not have an estimate specifically for public street and highway lighting.”
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=99&t=3
=He’s not arguing for the GOVERNMENT to solve it, he’s arguing for people to be engaged and force government to solve it=
I hope that’s what he means. I think he’s still ignoring puzzle pieces in the way that he worded his tweets. And in the manner in which he aligns himself in the current gender wars (i.e. on the position of the extremists’ side), and in which his side plays dirty (often using McCarthyism style tactics, representing individual social studies as consensus in public forums, misinterpreting conclusions of studies, presenting statistics in a cooked manner to influence policy, &c.), I wasn’t inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I have a bias against him.
=you sound like a Republican here=
I don’t have any political affiliations. I believe for any discrete point in time, a customized solution must be created to solve a particular political problem, void of incumbent ideology. I voted for Jill Stein last election.
My carbon becomes everyone’s carbon in approximately the CO2 diffusion time scale; weeks for the whole globe. So individual choices were never LESS meaningful than in human greenhouse climate change. There aren’t enough self-sacrificing Marvel hero’s in the world to make a hill of beans difference to climate. Policy is the only hope, legally enforced on all. I don’t care how inspiring you are in putting on your hair shirt and climbing onto your old bike – it won’t make any difference… you have to think about how many people do NOT live in your ecologically conscious micro-environment, but instead desperately want your American lifestyle and carbon footprints be damned.
Thank you.
Ditto on the “thank you” to indy. I have come late to this thread and have tried with little success to digest such wishful thinking as:
“I believe in cooperation between government, private industry, and individuals, all working for the same goal, and that there is a roll (sic) to play for each subset along the graduated scale of organization”.
That almost rates a directed-to-Omno type “WHAT?”
And as for “=you sound like a Republican here= I don’t have any political affiliations. I voted for Jill Stein last election”, that DOES call for a “WHAT?”.
Those who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 “affiliated” with the Repugs by contributing to Gore’s loss (and perhaps even denying him a victory margin), and anyone who throws a vote away on Stein may as well be a Republican. Actually, Andrew’s fixation on stocks, capitalism, and markets often sounds quite “Republican”. Please, Andrew! Step back from the edge of the flat earth! There be dragons lurking out there!
“Please, Andrew! Step back from the edge of the flat earth! There be dragons lurking out there!”
Yeah, I see that, too. But frankly, I think so much Republican ideology has bled into mainstream culture that most Americans are Republicans whatever they mark on a ballot.
The point that Indy made was about how resources get used in another part of the system despite conservation, efficiency, etc. It’s true that particular resources can fall in and out of favor due to forces in the market, but barring some sudden crash, most resources will continue to be used at very high rates, especially fossil fuels. The only way to stop it is to ban, or put heavy limits, on their exploitation. We didn’t “save the whales” by allowing the market to run its course.
Individual consumer choice isn’t an effective means of addressing “our environmental crisis”, and ONLY Republican ideology could consider it an effective means in lieu of top down mandates (bans, enforced quotas, etc.).
Of course our current government won’t enact these mandates on its own. It requires massive democratic participation, and the notion of “voting with our wallets” is a nice thought, but it fails to both stem the tide here and it diffuses individual participation with people thinking they’ve done their part for climate change by buying a few LED lights.
That’s what the “social engineer” (a VERY Republican style demonization) that Andrew thinks is catering to “gullible teens” in a “radical left echo chamber” is suggesting in his tweets – that maybe a bit more is needed here.
Woah, so radical.
What does Joss think about vaccinations? I’d really like to hear a tweet from him on the topic – my kids are due at the doctor on Monday.
Probably should evaluate Jenny McCarthy’s take on AGW as well. I guess to be scientific about, tho, we definitely should hear from Betty White, as a sort of generational control. Maybe Clint Eastwood too.
Actually, Joss has a lot of cred with the younger generation, who will likely take notice.