People love bad news. Why don't they love environmental news?

Amongst the many gems from Peep show come these lines

Jez: There's only so much happiness in the world and they're hoarding it all!

Mark: That's not how happiness works! (sotto voce ~ It completely is.)

Even the most optimistic amongst us think like this at times. And if things are going too well for too long it must mean that someone somewhere is pushing a piano to the top of a cliff and waiting to shove it onto your head.

Reading newspaper comments on the impending cuts I wonder if this is why the populace at large is so willing to placidly accept them. If labour kept saying that they would increase spending it must mean that we'll have to pay it off at some point.

There is a mixture here of the ease with which we can compare our household accounts with those of a nation and our general feeling that if there were good times we are due some bad times. If the bad times don't come then we probably need a spanking of some sort.

It is on one hand a shame that we aren't able to tell that our household accounts have about as much similarity to a nations accounts as a kite does to a F-16 fighter. But more interesting is a broad willingness and perhaps even an eagerness to face hardship when it comes in the right packaging.

I wonder how this could be harnessed to encourage people to stop buying quite so much crap!

screw it I'm drinking

There's no point. It really is all fucked. sometimes you think maybe if we're clever enough we can change things and then you see Republicans screaming blue murder because some people are trying to provide some health care for disadvantaged people. If there are significant numbers who aren't even willing to go that far for the common good we're all fucked and there are too many people like that and even I don't do nearly enough and I actually care.

Just accept that changing enough people's minds to make any real difference is essentially impossible. All the concessions gained so far will be worthless when the oil starts to run out. Then famine, war, pestilence. Billions dead.

Many many decades of horror. Most of the books and information will last I hope. Then the smaller remaining human population will be trapped in some spots across the globe. I think things might start to get better then.

But for now. Right now. May as well have fun and wait. Hopefully I'll be about 60 when it gets really bad. Not dead but plenty of time to enjoy myself.

Does that sound adolescent and petulant? I'm not sure. I'm not sure I can paint a different picture that I can actually believe.

left of left of centre

I like screaming into the wind like this. Perhaps one day I will try to attract readers.

Droid will be largely uninterested in the observations here-in. But HELLO if you came to look

Anyway

Last night the fat bloke sat next to Rawnsley said that he thought ed had done what William Hague had done.

Hague positioned himself *just* a smidgen to the right of the actual centre ground and so became unelectable. Ed, he believed, had positioned himself *just* to the left of the electable centre.

I mention this because I think political commentators will in the coming years frequently leave out the looming new voting system from their calculus.

"Fat bloke" as I will call him, was talking about Hague under FPTP not Miliband under AV.

The interesting part of this post is that blog and opinion junkies ought to look out for this mistake and consider it in their appraisal of the columns they read.

To illustrate here:

1) We know that labour voters are less likely to "waste" their vote. Under AV a vote would not be wasted and the full labour vote can be mobilised. This provides an incentive to shift a little further to the left.

2) The liklihood of a coalition makes small diversions from the centre ground less important and makes it more important to tart oneself up for the Liberal Democrats. Which suits me because I can't stand the authoritarian streak in the labour party and if it means we get good public services and appropriate levels of private sector freedom without big brother I'm all for it.

SO I suppose my conclusion is that Ed is actually being fantastically clever. We don't have to beat the tories we just have to let the lib dems know that where the tories are frigid control freaks we are cute little super freaks who will at least give them a hand job on our first date. Probably before we even get out of the car.

Come on Nick you filthy little boy you know you want it.

direct action YAWN

I just skimmed a video by the un-arguably energetic and impressive young "Climate Rush" founder Tamson Ormond.

I am a lazy environmentalist in many ways and love that she works so hard but I found myself annoyed by everything about her approach.

Firstly I never really understand, "Women's environmentalism" in the same way that I don't understand "Catholic environmental" groups. There are certainly policy differences between environmental groups but these aren't along the lines of sex or religion. Anyway I won't get into that.

I don't blog EVER and I suppose that is because in my time learning to be an academic I have come to dislike hastily blocked together arguments. Lets see if I can get over that here.

My main problem came with her argument that the Iraq war protests "didn't work" and so protest is basically useless and democracy is somehow failed in that way.

I hate that argument. It suggests that a big protest is the equivalent of a vote and that the people that shout the loudest ought to be listened to the most. If there had been a referendum on the Iraq war before we went I am in no way sure that we would not have voted in favour.

Check the Polls here for dates just before the war http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/iraq they are pretty inconclusive. Where the no's have it there is a significant number of undecideds.

But that isn't really the point. The point is that a large protest does not equal a majority and a small protest does not mean that nobody cares. The size of a protest is as much about the political activism of the interested parties as anything else. Very few scientists are likely to march in the Science is Vital campaign (and it is by the way) not because it isn't important or correct or because it wouldn't win a referendum. Scientists just aren't that political. Organising them at all is like herding the proverbial. If they were politically active they would be paid better have better/some job security and.... I'm off the point

She then decides that civil disobedience is the only way forward.

Well... i'm not AGAINST civil disobedience. i think protests are important... But I suppose I can't help but notice how much fun it all looks. The guys who are boarding boats for greenpeace strut around like eco-commandoes they love it....

How much of what they do gets into the news? How many of their direct action campaigns actually cause serious damage to energy companies. in short who give a crap? I hadn't even heard of the Climate rush which took 1000 people to shove some police rather gently for a little while outside parliament.

I don't fault their energy but I suspect that they choose the path they consider the most fun rather than the path which would actually change things the most.

If you really want to help the job isn't to scream at government. What should be happening is far more individual and boring. We should be getting activists to learn as much as they can and then go out to convince the people... House by house.. school by school...

I love abseiling and shoving people around. I just save that for the climbing wall and rugby pitch.

If you want to save the world I'd start with your next door neighbour. Not that I will. But I'm lazy and will stick to doing sums for t'environment.