On Pen-l, on environmental blogs, in pundit pronouncements, carbon pricing and massive technological investments dominate the discussion.
Even if any and/or all of that would work to prevent runaway global warming (and it won't) we'd have, most likely, business as usual with clean energy. Why the single perspective on technology? Even carbon pricing depends for results on a technology change. Why do we need more energy? Why do we need as much as the world now uses? A NYTimes essay today, "Sign of the Times | Look Out, It’s Instagram Envy" > Instagram has created a new kind of voyeurism — in which you can look into > the carefully curated windows of the rich, famous and stylish — and a new > kind of lifestyle envy. > “The department store is the last promenade for the flâneur,” wrote Walter > Benjamin, the German critic, whose impossible project — “The Arcades > Project,” more precisely — documented street life in Paris after the > Industrial Revolution. He wrote of gleaming wants, windows gazing back at > him, shoppers and wanderers alike becoming reflections of their desires. “The > crowd,” he wrote, “is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the > flâneur as phantasmagoria — as a landscape, now as a room. Both become > elements of the department store, which makes use of flâneurie itself to sell > goods.” Full article at: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/sign-of-the-times-look-out-its-instagram-envy/?hp&_r=0 Pen'L's own Sandwichman has been on this flaneur thing big time. Green House Gas (GHG) emissions won't be curbed, let alone reduced, until consumption is reduced. Which is to say, income is reduced. Which, if addressed through aggressive reductions in working hours in the North, can be accomplished without hardship and with economic justice. There will be no environmental justice without economic justice and no stopping global warming without both. Gene _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
