For those who are bemoaning the low quality of offerings of TV Series over the past few seasons, here's one that in my mind measures up well to some of the golden oldies of yesteryear: LANDMAN with Billy Bob Thornton in the starring role as a West Texas Oilman.
The series has the audacity to present an environmentally touchy subject from a perspective that most people strenuously avoid considering. As an example, have a look at the coolly delivered analysis of the role of BigOil in our day and age in the following excerpt from Episode 10:
Good 'n' bad don't factor into this, Rebecca. Our great-grandparents built the world that runs on this shit right here. Until it starts runnin' on somethin' else, we gotta' feed it, or the world stops.
Hey! There is an alternative: you can throw that phone away and trade that Mercedes in for a bicycle or a horse and start huntin' for your own food and livin' in a tent. But you'll be the only one, and it won't make a damn bit of difference. Plus I hear the moral high ground gets real windy at night.
As in much fiction, when it is good, we come away with an understanding of some situation that a more literal explanation fails to deliver. This first season of LANDMAN features several more potent monologues, and the story is just getting tough here in Episode 10, the last of Season 1. So far the tale has not been unduly stretched and diluted, but I wonder how far it can go. Eagerly looking forward to Season 2 however!
So who, exactly, are the bad guys here? Surely not Tommy Norris (Billy Bob). You'd be doing just what he's doing but with probably a lot less honesty and (even) humility. The new lawyer, Rebecca Falcone, who thinks that perhaps fracking should be outlawed but decides to keep her new job anyway?
Are the bad guys offstage? All the oil-sucking nations that burn up Megatons of the stuff just in sending delegations to big meetings of hypocrites promising much but fully knowing they will be delivering little?
Amazonian Rainforest Obliterated To Make Way For COP30
By Sallust
As any level-headed sceptic knows, a great deal of climate change activism is about posturing and virtue-signalling. No surprise then that part of an Amazonian rainforest has been obliterated to accommodate the upcoming COP30 summit. The BBC has the story (so it must be true):
A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.
It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people – including world leaders – at the conference in November.
…Or the President who withdraws from the 2015 Paris Agreement calling it a wasteful undertaking that won't contribute to MAGA?
…The BigMoney Men whose "investments" allow little else than business-as-usual?
…The BigOil Trans-Nationals whose research on Greenhouse Gases predicted — in the 1970s — the disaster that would ensue from business-as-usual:
In 1968, a research institute at Stanford concluded: “There seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.” Its findings, however, were delivered in private to the American Petroleum Institute.
According to recent revelations, in 1978 researchers working for the Italian oil major Eni predicted accurately global emission trends and their likely impact. Eni’s in-house magazine made repeated references to climate change even as the company publicly championed its fuels as “clean”.
By 1982, the best minds on climate science had plotted the future course of global warming for ExxonMobil.
They predicted the critical moment would arrive 37 years hence – in 2019 – when carbon dioxide levels would reach 415 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere. That would result in a dangerous rise in mean global temperatures of 0.9C.
Within a year, by 2020, they warned, it would no longer be possible for the oil corporations to dissimulate by dismissing climate change as simply normal weather fluctuations.
As we now know, their predictions were bang on target. The threshold of 415ppm was breached in May 2019. And in the past few years it has become ever harder to ignore the unprecedented nature of weather events.
The scientists’ only error was to be slightly conservative about when the resulting temperature rise would cross the threshold of 0.9C: it occurred two years earlier than they had forecast….
The above quoted from Jonathan Cook’s substack essay
Are bad guys really bad when they are following the rules of the game? Perhaps the bad guy is the system itself?
For me there are some very obvious and vocal "bad guys" who, one would think, could easily be otherwise were they actually to study the many facets of this problem. But for some strange psychological reasons - almost a collective social pathology - when once someone gets smitten with the climate change hoax meme and the expert-provided claim that CO2 is not only harmless but the more the better...
The bad guys include a Duke's Mixture of miscellaneous disreputables who sneer and cast insults at some of the genuinely concerned citizens of this deteriorating planet.
The climate and ecological crisis cannot be solved within today's political and economic systems.
That isn't an opinion. That's a fact. - Greta Thunberg
Why not dare to read some of The Harder Stuff?
How an Early Oil Industry Study Became Key in Climate Lawsuits
For decades, 1960s research for the American Petroleum Institute warning of the risks of burning fossil fuels had been forgotten. But two papers discovered in libraries are now playing a key role in lawsuits aimed at holding oil companies accountable for climate change.
A brief history of climate change discoveries
Instead many read:
1900 Scientists Say ‘Climate Change Not Caused by CO2’
If you should be tempted to believe one of those 1900 authorities, you owe it to your own self-credibility to check out who they are, what institutions they are associated with, where they get their funds, etc. Online research often turns up some results that might provide some doubt about their credibility. I have done this for a few instances in my Substack essays on the subject.
Then go online and check out a climate scientist who has been in the game from the very beginning. Read his book.
It has been said: "If you can't change your mind you can't change anything."