Morton links to my “carbon footprint” point

HERE. He entitles his post “carbon footprint b.s.,” but of course he and I are not saying that the concept is b.s. We’re saying, instead, that the quiz I took, which gave no advice and simply wanted to make you feel like crap, is b.s.

Two-and-a-half years ago, I attended an extremely grim climate change lecture in Dublin, given by James Lovelock. My summary of that lecture is HERE. But one of the other things I loved about the lecture is that there was no moralizing. Lovelock said something to the effect of, “there are good historical reasons why cities and industry developed the way they did, and I’m not interested in blaming us for being bad people. We simply face a devastating problem that will probably reduce the earth to 1 billion humans by the year 2100.”

What Tim and I seem to share is a hatred of “beautiful soulism.” Despite the fact that I rarely agree with Žižek on politics, I always agree with him here. In the Age of Critique, in which believing in less is always supposed to correlate with intelligence or enlightenment, we have: (a) the useless critiques of the troll, who plays poker with imaginary money against the real money of the other players; (b) the moral posturing of those who merely denounce whatever… capitalism, the United States, selfish consumers…

I’m not the world’s biggest Foucault fan, but I also find Foucault refreshing in this respect. What I’m referring to is his insistence that he only wanted to get involved in causes where he could make an actual practical difference. That’s great. But the constant maneuvering for an ever loftier critical stance on everything, whether it takes the form of hyper-reductionist hyper-critiques or Sex Pistols nihilism, is something that, in my view, has long since run its historical course.

I much prefer Lovelock’s attitude: we’re probably very much screwed and 80% of our population will be gone in 90 years– but we’re a tough species and will make it through, and there’s no point moralizing about it anymore.