I wrapped up “Don’t Even Think About It” by George Marshall and I want to write my notes up before I go off and kill myself to do my bit to reduce our carbon debt.
Yep, it’s that kind of book, I just finished chapter 37 “Degrees of Separation – How Climate Experts Live With What They Know,” and it shows that they cope by traveling by jets to exotic vacations or fly to another round of meetings on climate change.
The subtitle of the book is “Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change,” and Marshall does a pretty good job completing the survey of these reasons, some highlights:
- We don’t see the future – 20 years from now is a blank for most people.
- We don’t see the changes happening despite the evidence, talk of a lack of sea ice is really meaningless to 99.9% of people.
- We don’t want to be inconvenienced.
- We really can’t fathom a viable alternative to a high carbon life.
In other words, we’re stupid and will go down soon to where we came from as most of the behavior we live with now was learned by a long time in the pack, hunting and living as best we could before civilization changed everything. This short, but productive period (civilization) is killing us and most people don’t even know it. Even concern for our children and grandchildren is overridden by the fact that we’ll be dead before the shit hits the fan.
I recommend this book, Marshall writes well and he is very good at fooling you into thinking by using wit and good story telling. He may make you a pariah at your next social gathering.
I found my copy at our local county library.
