Today’s piece in the WSJ’s Climate and Energy section is called “The Problem With Stuff.”
It begins:
A Glass-Half-Full Look at the Gargantuan Carbon Footprint of Making Stuff
Every year, America gets through roughly 700 pounds of cement, nearly as much steel, 300 pounds of plastic and 25 pounds of aluminum per person. Providing the raw materials of modern life with far less emissions is starting to look tantalizingly possible, but the making-stuff business remains a laggard in its response to climate change.
“Making less stuff” is akin to morphing away from our consumer society, and it’s refreshing to see the WSJ talk about that, even obliquely.
IMO, what we are seeing here is the WSJ’s trying to position itself as dead-on “centrist” in their journalism. This is a distinct more to the left from their earlier conservative leaning; it would have fanciful to think of anything associated with climate change even a few years ago.
The Wall Street Journal’s Climate & Energy Column Doesn’t Mince Words
The mural here reminds us of what Tom Joad famously tells his mother at the end of in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, in response to her asking Tom where he’s going:
Wherever people are fighting for their rights, where kids are hungry and crying, and where folks are struggling to be free. Everywhere in the dark, wherever there is a fight so hungry people can eat or a cop beating up a guy.
What the late Frank Zappa said here about atheism is what I began predicting when I was in my teens, but I’m not so optimistic today.
In fact, there seems to be a trend towards the rejection of science, fear, brutality, and tribalism–each one a pillar of religion and the fanaticism that so often surrounds it.
As shown at left, “communism” and “socialism” have been used to scare American idiots for almost a century.
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