I read this letter in our local paper the other week. It made me cross so I emailed this reply:
hello,
I was delighted to read XXX's plea for energy policy realism in Thursday's paper. He's completely correct. We need to ignore the idealists & extremists and prioritise British national interests and low-cost energy.
This means:
1. The rapid development of the cheapest energy to commission, install and supply: wind. An energy technology the UK is uniquely placed to exploit
2. The urgent creation of grid scale batteries to manage this energy, further reduce costs and create British jobs
3. The abandonment of ideological fantasies about uneconomic, unfundable schemes like fracking and the re-exploitation of UK fossil fuels. We can't afford these unrealistic, unpatriotic pipe-dreams
It's not a very good reply. I was mostly just being snarky. That's probably why they've not printed it. But in constructing my snarkasm I realised some of what was making me cross.
I don't think we should allow the forces of fossil fuelism to seize the high ground of pragmatism and being realistic and patriotic. Fracking is idealogical, not sensible. This obviously isn't an original thought but this interview with Lisa Fazio reminded me that it's not enough to rebut misinformation once, you just have to keep at it, again and again and again.
"Unfortunately, memories fade, and current evidence is that debunkings fall into the same category as everything else. A week later, or a couple of weeks later, you’ve forgotten it. You might also forget the false information too, but if you keep seeing it again, then a one-time correction isn’t doing too much for you. A good example was the situation with the Sharpies in Arizona. If one time you read a debunking that it wasn’t actually evidence of election fraud, but then later you see 20 posts talking about it being fraud, that one correction doesn’t have much of a chance."
And this seems to resonate with Cory Doctorow's post about Peak Indifference...
"An activist understanding of peak indifference demands that we work to hasten the moment of peak indifference, by helping people imagine the trauma before they actually experience it. For me, that involves narrative work: spinning utopias ("We can fix this") and dystopias ("We must fix this…or else").
But all the other activist tactics fit in this frame, too: education, organizing conversations, etc.
And the point of that activism isn't just to create partisans. It's to channel the sense or urgency into positive, anti-nihilistic directions: to counter ecofascism with climate justice, land healing, and remediation."
Linking to Cory. Classic blogging.