Getting the Truth out there

Getting the Truth out there

The world is awash with misinformation from the Murdoch media et al, especially about Donald Trump and climate change. One can’t sit idly by and watch as idiocy and corruption has its way. 

To quote Bertolt Brecht:

“What kind of times are these, when
To talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?”

I continue to learn more about the natural world and climate change even though trying to convince deniers is a lost cause. Mark Twain summed it up when he said: “All the evidence in the world will not convince an idiot.” Think about the deplorables in Trump’s base who deny all evidence of his impeachable corruption and crimes.  Indeed they jump through hoop after hoop after hoop.

Climate change deniers are followers getting their ideas and opinions from their “leaders” like right-wing shock jocks, columnists and head-in-the-sand politicians. Studies have shown that climate change deniers are only 18% of the population but are well funded, usually by fossil fuel interests, and powerful beyond their numbers. Or the usual suspects with loud strident voices and overinflated opinions, such as Alan Cash-for-Comment Jones and Andrew Bolt. Sadly they are the world over, responding to an inconvenient truth that our lifestyles have to change. It's frustration on steroids dealing with them. 

Like tobacco lobbies in the past, they are the Merchants of Doubt (N Oreskes) of our times muddying the waters with fake experts, logical fallacies, cherry-picking data, and red herrings, impossible expectations and a conspiracy theories galore. (See Denialism 101 Edx course). Well, may one ask, please get your facts straight, but they don’t care about facts only their overinflated opinions? They live in a fact-free universe.

Rule number one is don't give them oxygen and invitations to step in and annoy which is their precise aim. Their minds are locked up tightly and can't be changed through logic and facts. They feed off their fellows' ignorance. Mentally speaking they haven't reached puberty yet and you'd have a better conversation with your dog. 

Many, Cannavan, Kelly, Abbot, Morrison etc, are fixated on coal and fossil fuels as the only way forward despite the rapid rise of renewable energy at lower costs. They refuse to endorse or do so reluctantly, any alternative and circular economy for a cleaner more sustainable future. These politicians are trapped in the past, are totally backward-looking and deserve to be smashed in coming elections, or at least you’d think their fate was sealed after the unprecedented fires Australia has experienced of late. But they keep finding excuses not to act denying the facts as presented by fire experts and scientists. Indeed even the warning of the Governor of Federal Reserve, Philip Lowe. Will they ever take off their blindfolds and sniff the air?  Their behaviour is wilful negligence to be paid for in the future. Charlatans of the world unite under their banner.

I feel the anger of the German poet Hans Magnus Enzenberger when he writes in the end of the owls:

I speak for none of your kind. I speak of the end of the owls.
I speak for the flounder and the whale in their unlighted house,
the seven cornered sea, for the glacier they will have calved too soon
raven and dove, feathery witnesses, for all those who dwell in the sky
And the woods, and the lichen in gravel. For those without paths,
For the colourless bog and the desolate mountains.

There is eco grief in every line. We are trampling over nature in our quest for the almighty dollar.

The good fight is to confront such mindless idiocy, and like Greta Thunberg and the young, to stand up for the planet and the health of future generations. But it isn’t easy as climate change deniers sing from the same song sheets of those who are scientifically illiterate. They quite simply do not debate facts acquired after long periods of study. They just repeat the mantras they are fed by the shock jocks and right-wing commentators. Another song comes to mind. “He’s got the whole world in his hands  ... “

And so on. It’s maddening and wearing, and insane. The ignorant led by the blind, as in Nazi Germany, as in Stalin’s Russia, as in Trump’s America.

I'm on a war footing, though not with guns but with facts my cross to bear.