Today, I'm quite excited about being able to watch England play cricket. Live streaming TV online, via P2P application. The quality's not 100%, and the line falls out sometimes, but it's like the old days. It's the first thing for years that has reminded me what it was like online 10 years ago or more. That feeling of being in early on something very big kicking off. And of course I'm not in the first wave, but this is fairly new all the same. I don't yet know why, but it's mostly Chinese so far. Very cool, there's lots of sports out there. Which is a difference from a decade back: the geek quotient is high, but the uptakers are almost normal. Are geeks getting cooler? Are jocks getting geekier? Or - are we all nerds now?
Lots in the news these days about climate change. Or, as the Yanks insist on calling it, Global Warming. I think I shall have to start hanging out on http://www.realclimate.org/ a bit more.
I can't shake some mistrust of this sudden adoption of the issue by the media, by the politicians. Even Bush getting on the bandwagon, and meanwhile signing a treaty with Brazil for ethanol takeup - which is potentially the deathknell for the Amazon. That photo of Lula hugging Dubya was sickening.
And I suppose the worry is that the talk is not about how we change society, but how we get round the issue of our environmental activities. It's not addressing fundamentals, but looking for workarounds. As an IT bod, I'm used to workarounds, but I'm all too aware that they're only postponing the ineviatble day of dealing with a failed system.
And I don't really trust much of the eco lobby. Lots of them are not my cup of tea. Others are essentially criticising one part of the system and not looking at it as an integral whole. I don't like the way the discussion about climate change is being divorced from the discussion about Peak Oil. I understand the point a mate made that politically speaking, the environmental impact of our society would not be made clear if predictions about climate change took into account the effects of the Peak Oil scenario. But I don't really go along with that point.
Apart from the fact that politics makes poor science, and poor science causes all sorts of problems, I also tend not to believe that two disasters cancel each other out. I think Climate Change and Peak Oil are going to be compound disasters, at least from the point of view of human society, at least from a Western point of view, and doging debate and rigging the political agenda isn't helpful, because then we're allowing the politicians to set the agenda and take over the debate and the realities are going to get obscured in bullshit about ethanol and Iranian nuclear capabilities and all the other bollocks that passes for justification and action.
I don't trust neoCons talking about alternative energy and I don't trust middle class eco lobbyists talking about changing the world. And I don't trust the RCP talking about Great Global Warming Swindle.
In fact, I don't really trust any of those groups talking about anything.
I wonder what's going on with the magnetic poles? Maybe it's time to reread Ken Kesey's Sailor Song...
