don’t panic
Friday, September 30th, 2005
Road rally hawks hydrogen cars. It’s not certain that this technology will be the one to replace fossil fuel combustion, but I do feel optimistic that something will. Even the incorrigibly short-sighted and greedy must eventually come to face the reality of an untenable situation, right? Right?
As an aside … if I’m reading this right, the optimistic estimate of recoverable oil in ANWR is 9.2 billion barrels. If I’m reading this right, the US consumes about 20 million barrels of oil a day. Currently. So what the US as a whole would be buying with ANWR drilling is equivalent to a whopping 460 days’ worth of today’s US petrol-energy needs: less than two years. And the operation will come on-line in about 8 years. Hmm.
Now, if that were free oil, it’s possibly a no-brainer, but hey, let’s trying being rational about this. What are the costs? Primary among them — for me — is simply the principle of the wildlife refuge, which would be rendered meaningless by a commerical operation. I don’t care if ANWR looks like the moon, eden, or the underside of your bum. I don’t care if caribou will “like” the drilling operation or be destroyed by it. None of that is the point. That the media concentrate on the “well it’s beautiful” “no, it’s ugly!” aspect is intensely annoying to me.
Well, I do care about the caribou.
But the longer-term effect is that the principle of conservation for its own sake will be weakened. Now the semantics of “wildlife refuge” will be changed to “wildlife refuge, except for the sake of political capital or when a short-term financial gain can be seen by a very few people.” It seems to me that as American values swing right we are increasingly valuing short-term security over everything else. I humbly suggest that this shift is incredibly stupid. Money and security can be means to ends, but not ends in and of themselves. By destroying the meaning of a wildlife refuge, we destroy the ends — quality of life and compassionate, constructive co-existence — for the sake of the means. Oh, or was “compassion” not on your list of goals in life?
No, I’m sure it is. People are just panicking. If ever you needed evidence that we’re related to other mammals, watch people respond to threats. Herds and people will both stampede if given the chance, destroying everything important to them. Take away our rationality and we’re just sheep on two legs.
I can’t remember if I’ve directly blogged this before. Lately I’ve been mentally dividing the world of human motivations into two groups: a search for certainty and a search for truth. It’s a dumb little conceited game, but oh well.
The certainty-seekers are generally content with any certainty, regardless of its rationality or relationship to things encountered in reality. When reality strikes, they ignore it, and/or defend their certainty with great vigor. Certainty is the goal.
On the other hand are those who seek truth. I’m not so happy with that word, actually — truth — but it’s what comes to mind. The truth is that nothing is certain. But that’s okay because truth-seekers don’t need certainty to make decisions or to live fulfilling lives. A baseline of stability is very useful, but that’s pretty easy to come by in the first world. They do the best they can with what they have and understand that progress is made slowly. Towards what, they’re not sure — ’cause you can’t be certain about such things — but it’s recognizable as progress. Messy, impure, flawed progress.
Mistakes happen; that’s okay. Lying about or hiding mistakes is the opposite of progress. That much is … certain. (heh) Reality is the final arbiter of morality.
The former are attached. To institutions, to material possessions, to security, to ideologies. The latter may enjoy material possessions and the benefits of institutions and even indulge in ideologies on occasion, but they recognize the transience of all of these things, their conditional existence, the fact that these are means toward an end, not ends in and of themselves.
The latter is more honest than the former, more developed, by my lights. But of course, both tendencies are useful and necessary at times, and both tendencies exist in everyone to a greater or lesser degree. The tension between those is part of that messy thing called progress.
I’m a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. Don’t panic; everthing will work out in the end.
