See
~Max
Indeed, well into the '90s the American Baby Boomers played political second fiddle to GIs and Silents. Even today Silents still occupy some of the top leadership positions. People like Jim Inhofe… aren’t Boomers. All this talk about the '60s and '70s - everything I’ve read indicates that back then Boomers were radicals, outsiders.
~Max
The problem with rule by Council of Sages is of course, who is in charge of selecting the Sages, and you’re going to say “peer review” and congratulations you just switched from populist politics to academic politics.
Some. A very large segment of the Boomers kept their hair neat, wore pressed shirts and shined shoes, got regular jobs, bought a Plymouth Valiant wagon, and voted Republican all along. And yet others did not do anything radical other than radically consume a lot of substances.
But yes: during a huge part of the institutionalization of the wrecking, most of the top final-decision makers were not “Boomers” by the common definition. Heck, Biden is technically “Silent Generation” having been born in 1942.
Though for the last few decades they can’t really slide. For reference: the first nominally “Boomer” US President was Bill Clinton – 1993 after 40 years of the post being held by people who served as officers or midshipmen in WW2. And even the distribution of the Boomer presidents is skewed:
Early Boomers (1946): Clinton, W, Trump
Late Boomer (by the challenged US definition, 1961): Obama
True, and don’t get me started now that my wife finally finished her PhD work and the most recent fights about getting her research published while dodging the ‘female in hard sciences’ issues by using her initials rather than first name.
But I wanted to circle back to Sagan and an earlier point I brought up. While I still feel the inherent smugness of Cecil’s post was not a good look, I want to repeat that while individual boomers in industry, military and government were fully in the know about the long-term damages and risk, that very little filtered down (rather actively prevented from being known) to the general public.
One of the things that made environmentalism more widely known is that popular scientists like Sagan did try to bring it up to a wider audience and over the long term, influenced voters which brough about the limited success we’ve had to date. While we may shake our heads about some of the bad science inherent in early environmentalist works, they still succeeded at the goals of waking up enough people to get past the inertia and obstructionism from the vested interests, even if incompletely.
It reminds me of our own guest star, @neiltyson, who while a fine scientist (in all respect), is almost more important in that his charisma and credentials, along with other skills, allows him to make certain concepts approachable and interesting. As I mentioned in past gun threads, it’s not just the active individuals on the other side of the spectrum that’s a problem, but the large number in the middle that just don’t care.
I’m sorry but it’s just disgusting to watch the same do-nothing faction that advocated for doing nothing about the ozone hole sit there and say “look, it turned out fine”, as if the problem weren’t solved by the exact regulatory intervention that people like you opposed at the time, and that you would oppose if the problem faced us today. As rhetorical tricks go, this is one of the most odious.
If you really want to understand the climate situation you’re going to have to do better than addressing the few issues that were big enough to rate headlines that moved legislation to solve those problems. But somehow I feel like that’s not going to happen.
This column is embarrassing. Whoever’s writing Cecil’s column, maybe stand up and stretch and find an editor who’s willing to tell you hard truths?
It doesn’t answer the question.
It repeats lazy myths without pointing out that they’re myths.
It, astonishingly, conflates Paul Ehrlich and the IPCC, as if the failures of one eloquent nutjob is predictive of the work of the world’s most prestigious gathering of climate scientists.
It acknowledges that the column doesn’t address the question, but bizarrely blames its own failure on the authors of some rando book on which it relies for most of its heavy lifting.
What even is this? Surely Cecil can do better!
In the case of the ozone hole the problem and solution was (comparatively) simple and easy to target: chlorofluorocarbons. These could be phased out, albeit not without a measure of expense and difficulty. To solve global warming civilization has to stop emitting industrial levels of carbon dioxide; “difficult” hardly begins to describe the challenge, since civilization has more or less been based upon emitting carbon dioxide since the 18th century. Forty years ago the only viable way to even try to limit global warming would have been a commitment to completely replacing fossil fuel electricity generation with nuclear, and the political and social obstacles to that would have been ginormous.
I’m reminded of the abortive plot line in Star Trek: The Next Generation, where it was discovered that the use of warp drive was slowly destroying spacetime itself. It was mentioned a time or two in later episodes and then handwaved away as “someone fixed it” because it would have ultimately meant the end of the show’s setting: interstellar civilization. People from the 1970s up to today weren’t blind to the problem of climate change; there simply wasn’t any way to address it that didn’t seem draconian. It’s taken forty years of technological advance to reach the point that renewables are a viable option.
I think it’s usually easy to criticize an academic column. It’s not completely off the mark, just somewhat tone deaf. I look forward to further efforts.
The accomplishments of the Boomers are real, and if one defines prosperity as broader access to goods and services, progress has clearly been made. I like material things. Human ingenuity indeed has found solutions which confound pessimistic philosophies and will again.
But this column is not the first time I have heard of omnipresent greatness; some Boomers talk of little else. Though I have never heard anyone in person blame them for “ruining the planet”, a little more about negligence, willful ignorance and mismanagement - but in fairness they are responsible for starting to address these issues too, sometimes sincerely - generational stereotypes are problematic for many reasons. One must be careful not to condemn the past due to contemporary mores, but there are often reasons to be critical and criticism is often productive.
This column downplays that values are slowly changing, sometimes sincerely so. The parts which seem more smug? Boomers need “take no guff” from younger generations? Responsible for “five decades of human happiness”?
Well, OK boomer. Are people happier now? Material abundance has made people want more, expect more, but that, including technology, has failed to foster robust relationships. The biggest current health crisis? Loneliness. That’s not solved by cheaper aluminum or tungsten or cosmetic surgery. And the popularity of the latter says a great deal about expectations and values and attitudes towards aging and maturity.
There is some merit to Sam Stone’s opinion on housing. It is broadly true that people were willing to move and live in places where housing was affordable. But this is hardly the full solution to a complex issue and is much tied in with jobs, available infrastructure (both physical and digital) and politics - rural places tend to be conservative places, which has both good and bad effects, but one can understand why abortion issues, for example, may be important to some people.
A lot of what the health problems we see which seem to be increasing - allergies, autism, anxiety, attention - have occurred too quickly to be just genetic. We know now many are epigenetic. In other words, environment matters hugely. So young people are right to be concerned about environment.
As for the environmental Pangloss, the Great Lakes may be cleaner and the ozone hole may be in good shape by 2050, but the loss of huge numbers of plant and animal species has important health implications and is not a mere tragedy of the commons. I am not personally directly affected by square miles of plastic garbage floating in the mid Pacific. But this is hard to describe as an improvement. I am concerned by extreme weather, melting ice, changes in climate we do not really understand once we admit they exist. And it is concerning that many politicians do not. I do support nuclear power, but it is not without problems. The truth? No one knows what effects these things will have. They are too complicated. There are likely important factors we do not even know about. What we do know is cause for concern, and this angst on the part of younger people is likely both appropriate and necessary.
In the United States “fossil gas” is called natural gas in contrast to the older “town gas” or coal gas produced from coal. The name isn’t an attempt at green branding. And while it’s not perfect it emits far less carbon dioxide per BTU produced than either petroleum or coal. ETA: plus, with the invention of fracking, gas production has nearly single-handedly rescued civilization from a Peak oil - Wikipedia crisis, giving us time to develop alternatives to a fossil-fuel civilization.
Each country would have representative scientists, their numbers based on population. How each country chooses its representatives is up to them. Bad ones can be voted out.
Will there still be some clunkers? Sure, but like a jury of 12 jurists usually makes the right decisions in a court of law, I believe the consensus of a board of dozens/hundreds of scientists would make the right decisions in the court of environmental health.
Besides, I’d rather rest the fate of Earth in the hands of a bunch of mediocre scientists, than a gaggle of fair to middling politicians.
The Kryptonian Science Council denounced Jor-El’s crackpot and alarmist geological theories, and was moving to ban his research into spaceflight. 
You just defined the selection as an entirely political process.
And if the “bad ones can be voted out” means that the Council itself can override individual countries’ elections, then guess what, you just lost most of the world.
But hey, it’s your proposal for how you’d like things, that’s fine. Yes, there would be better results if individual nations bound their branches of government to have to follow the recommendations of an independent science evaluation. Not holding my breath.
For example, in a section about China’s now-regretted one-child policy, they make the remarkable claim that “without China’s birth limit, global resources would be almost twice as abundant today.” This gets into some math only a longtermist could love, but the implication is that the solution to any resource crisis = make more babies, an assertion we’ll quietly pass by.
When you “quietly pass by” a great honking red flag that ought to lead you to the conclusion that the author’s research and judgment are simply not to be trusted, it leads the rest of us to suspect that your own research and judgment is of the same caliber.
I think you’re delving into minutia. Surely, there’s a way to collect a well-rounded board of scientists who have the best interests of our one-and-only planet in mind. How will they be chosen? I don’t know. I’m a lover, not a fighter an idea guy, not an implementation guy.
Think NATO, only bigger…and much better.
I’m pretty sure self-appointed elites and invited experts are well represented at international conferences and influential meetings. I’m less sure that, although worthwhile, it guarantees good decisions. Their record on Covid was a mixed bag.
Showing my age, perhaps, I am reminded of a dated Doonesbury comic where the gang dresses up for Hallowe’en as McNamara and other luminous 60s politicians (paraphrased).
Doonesbury: “So, what are you dressed up as?”
Group: “We’re the best and brightest!”
Doonesbury: “Say something to prove it!”
Group: “We can win the war in Vietnam!”
Even forty years ago we could have used a lot more conservation measures.
Of course, a lot of Boomers were advocating for them. And we did get some of them; but not enough.
Are your figures including the production process?
Granted, the production process is also damaging for petroleum and coal; but natural gas (which is indeed the standard term for it here), while it may still come out ahead, doesn’t look as pretty when what’s looked at is the areas it’s taken out of, not just the areas where it’s burned.
Well, something needs to be done, or we’ll soon be hearing this from Greenland and glaciers everywhere.
There certainly are plenty of symposia of qualified scientists around the globe. The problem is, they have no authority to institute change. Like Sagan at the congressional hearing, they can tell politicians what needs to be done, only to have politicians put it on the back burner. My main point is to take the politicians out of the equation and give the scientists authority to affect change. Let them speak loudly and carry a big stick (or a long rod of biodegradable material).
It’s called that here too. City busses had giant stickers on them up to a few years ago: “100 natural gas”
But the name, albeit not intended as such, is insidious:
You think guys like Gates and Google don’t seek out smart people? Sure, some of this is for financial reasons more than charity. But scientists do influence the influencers who wish to be influenced. I’ll bet Gates could get high level government officials on the phone in 200 countries. That’s a far cry from getting stuff done, of course. You can’t get 200 different people to agree on much. Few countries would be willing to give much real power to “technocrats” (q.v. Dr. Strangelove, q.v. Bill Bryson’s amusing discussion of the European Union during his trip to Belgium). The politicians don’t want to be taken out of the equation, though you can’t divide by zero.
Ed Zotti is the editor, presumably.
~Max