Adding 50,000 huffing-and-puffing joggers to a smattering of capable athletes would be a questionable tradition even if every entrant rode a bicycle to the start
Can we believe both that global warming is serious and human caused and that the proposed fixes are also bad and amenable to grifting and rent seeking?
Oh man, this is an important and vexing topic. You are absolutely correct about the nanny class, who are so full of directions for others to save the planet, yet somehow sidestep those directions when they interfere with sundry, FOMO-fueled plans, e.g. busting out a 5 hour marathon in Chicago or wherever just to say they (the nanny's preferred pronoun) did it.
While flights are a big deal, so too are the quotidian daily solo and group runs that, due to America's sprawling layout, usually involve multiple cars driving 20-30 minutes each way just to knock out a nonevent run. This phenomenon really struck me coming to Boulder from NYC. In NYC, people almost always start their runs from their homes, rendezvousing for group runs at nearby parks or landmarks. When I got to Boulder, I witnessed runners from all over the area (including Denver) driving alone to and from the Res, Mags, or wherever just to knock out a nonevent run. My guess is the majority of said Boulder runners consider themselves environmentalists and/or have at least some awareness of the climate crisis. But that environmentalism and/or awareness is insufficient to dissuade them from flying and driving everywhere they want.
In the 80s and I 90s I worked in mental health clinics in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The programs I worked in were funded by each state's Department of Mental Health and the stated goal was to help people affected by severe mental health issues live more normally and independently than if the programs weren't paying people like me to do that kind of work. And after a couple years of doing that kind of work I figured out that there would never be a time when our work would be "successful," i.e. improving the mental health of our clientele so that they could in fact live normally and independently because institutions had been created to deal with the problem and once you create an institution you insure that the issue the institution is there to fix can never be fixed. If that problem is fixed there would be no need for the institution's continued existence and in any introductory sociology course you learn that the top priority for any institution is to insure its own continued existence. What those of us who worked in those programs were really supposed to do was to expand our case loads, to find more people who could be considered mentally unstable and enlist them in treatment and to convince people who were already in treatment but were thinking that maybe they were better and didn't need treatment anymore that leaving would be a mistake because without treatment they could well relapse.. Of course this is never stated directly.
Now fighting and worrying about climate change has largely become institutionalized. In some cases it's been formally institutionalized e.g. with government programs to develop renewable energy sources and make houses, cars, etc., more energy efficient. And this is a good thing for the most part. But there also seems to be an informal institution here as well and people who write articles about the problems of climate change and what we all need to do to correct it are at the heart of it. Does it surprise anyone that Al Gore is flying all over the world giving talks about climate change? That Swedish kid, Greta, Thunberg is a big time celebrity. What becomes to either of their careers if we learn definitively in the next couple years that climate change is mostly due to increased solar activity and has almost nothing to do with air travel or farting cattle?
None of this is to say that we shouldn't make our energy sources as renewable as is practically possible or make ourselves more conscious of using energy more efficiently. It bothers me a lot to see people driving pickup trucks that look bigger than some apartments I've had that show no evidence of being used for hauling things that won't fit into the trunk of an Elantra. But as long as there are entities whose existence depends on reminding us that the world seems to be getting too hot there will be an ongoing stream of such messages.
Can we believe both that global warming is serious and human caused and that the proposed fixes are also bad and amenable to grifting and rent seeking?
Oh man, this is an important and vexing topic. You are absolutely correct about the nanny class, who are so full of directions for others to save the planet, yet somehow sidestep those directions when they interfere with sundry, FOMO-fueled plans, e.g. busting out a 5 hour marathon in Chicago or wherever just to say they (the nanny's preferred pronoun) did it.
While flights are a big deal, so too are the quotidian daily solo and group runs that, due to America's sprawling layout, usually involve multiple cars driving 20-30 minutes each way just to knock out a nonevent run. This phenomenon really struck me coming to Boulder from NYC. In NYC, people almost always start their runs from their homes, rendezvousing for group runs at nearby parks or landmarks. When I got to Boulder, I witnessed runners from all over the area (including Denver) driving alone to and from the Res, Mags, or wherever just to knock out a nonevent run. My guess is the majority of said Boulder runners consider themselves environmentalists and/or have at least some awareness of the climate crisis. But that environmentalism and/or awareness is insufficient to dissuade them from flying and driving everywhere they want.
In the 80s and I 90s I worked in mental health clinics in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The programs I worked in were funded by each state's Department of Mental Health and the stated goal was to help people affected by severe mental health issues live more normally and independently than if the programs weren't paying people like me to do that kind of work. And after a couple years of doing that kind of work I figured out that there would never be a time when our work would be "successful," i.e. improving the mental health of our clientele so that they could in fact live normally and independently because institutions had been created to deal with the problem and once you create an institution you insure that the issue the institution is there to fix can never be fixed. If that problem is fixed there would be no need for the institution's continued existence and in any introductory sociology course you learn that the top priority for any institution is to insure its own continued existence. What those of us who worked in those programs were really supposed to do was to expand our case loads, to find more people who could be considered mentally unstable and enlist them in treatment and to convince people who were already in treatment but were thinking that maybe they were better and didn't need treatment anymore that leaving would be a mistake because without treatment they could well relapse.. Of course this is never stated directly.
Now fighting and worrying about climate change has largely become institutionalized. In some cases it's been formally institutionalized e.g. with government programs to develop renewable energy sources and make houses, cars, etc., more energy efficient. And this is a good thing for the most part. But there also seems to be an informal institution here as well and people who write articles about the problems of climate change and what we all need to do to correct it are at the heart of it. Does it surprise anyone that Al Gore is flying all over the world giving talks about climate change? That Swedish kid, Greta, Thunberg is a big time celebrity. What becomes to either of their careers if we learn definitively in the next couple years that climate change is mostly due to increased solar activity and has almost nothing to do with air travel or farting cattle?
None of this is to say that we shouldn't make our energy sources as renewable as is practically possible or make ourselves more conscious of using energy more efficiently. It bothers me a lot to see people driving pickup trucks that look bigger than some apartments I've had that show no evidence of being used for hauling things that won't fit into the trunk of an Elantra. But as long as there are entities whose existence depends on reminding us that the world seems to be getting too hot there will be an ongoing stream of such messages.