An article posted Thursday in Counterpunch, "Climate Options are Available Now, Nuclear Power Isn’t One of Them," is basically about the Biden administration's approval of oil and gas drilling in Arctic Alaska.

On March 12, 2023, the Biden administration announced that it had approved oil and gas drilling in Arctic Alaska, retaining the United States’s vaunted position, alongside China and India, as one of the world’s leading arsonists.

Of course, nobody really cares at this time, what with the Biden administration gambling away Ukraine while the banks start to fail. Though it must be added that the "nobody really cares at this time" phenomenon is media generated:

This lack of urgency is compounded by a failure in the media to put the climate emergency on the front page with regularity. The given reason is that it’s not what their readers are interested in, a complete abdication of responsibility to inform, educate, and in the case of the climate crisis, to inflame passion and a demand for action.

Kyle Paoletta has a piece in Harper's about "The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday," about how climate change reporting has switched from pessimism to optimism. Leading the reversal, apparently, is David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (published a mere three years ago), who is now allegedly putting out a different sentiment:

The sea change culminated last October, in the form of the New York Times Magazine’s annual climate issue, which featured comic-book-style depictions of “The New World” that climate change would create, illustrated by Anuj Shrestha and annotated by David Wallace-Wells. “Not very long ago,” Wallace-Wells wrote, some scientists believed that emissions “could cause four or five degrees Celsius of warming, giving rise to existential fears about apocalyptic futures.” Now a two-to-three-degree range was more likely, “thanks to a global political awakening, an astonishing decline in the price of clean energy, a rise in global policy ambition and revisions to some basic modeling assumptions.”

Is he now saying that a solar panel or two, and the problem will go away by itself? If Wallace-Wells is not a climate optimist at this point, I would greatly appreciate a correction. At any rate, readers of Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilpert's Bright Green Lies and viewers of Jeff Gibbs' Planet of the Humans will be rightfully skeptical of any such claims. It might be worth noting that the Gibbs webpage, given its rather prominent domain-name, hasn't been updated in awhile. Why not? Certainly Gibbs has received enough revenue from his film to update his page. No?

Of course they haven't gotten Greta Thunberg to shut up. The biggest news of the past six months is that Thunberg has a book out! Actually she's had the book out since October 25th of last year. Thunberg's book is a collection of basic ideas about climate change. There are sections on "How Climate Works," "How Our Planet Is Changing," "How It Affects Us," "What We've Done About It," and "What We Must Do Now," by a great variety of different authors. Some of the authors are really fun to read; Margaret Atwood is in there. Of course the book has been out for awhile, but it's hard to know, now, if anyone has noticed. Gaia Vince's review in The Guardian calls the book "powerful but uneven" (as if a book reflecting basic ideas of climate change could possibly be "even"). Vince complains further of certain ideas that were left out of Thunberg's book:

In a book of more than 400 pages, just one and a half are given over to technologies aimed at reducing global heating by reflecting sunlight back into space. That particular essay can be summed up in a quote: “Geoengineering is not an option.” The idea of withdrawing emitted carbon from the atmosphere gets a little more (reluctant) attention, because “we’ve left Greta’s generation little choice”. Nuclear power is barely mentioned even though decarbonising energy systems is fundamental to this effort.

There was a quote of Thunberg in the Counterpunch article which I cited at the top. "Greta Thunberg, then only 16, warned the audience in a quiet and measured voice that addressing the climate crisis involved a solution 'so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop the emissions of greenhouse gases.'” I guess that we are supposed to ask why, if the solution is "so simple," why is nothing of consequence being done? Greatly complicating this "so simple" picture are vast clouds of information pollution, because, under capitalism, everyone wants to SELL you their proposed solution. We of course have been trained to be skeptical of arguments that proclaim that all we need to do is buy someone's product, make them rich, and the problem will be solved. In this regard we can see the necessity of clearing away the numerous smokescreens put forth by overzealous sales reps for the "clean" energy business, for "carbon capture and storage," and for other such ideas.

Examples of "green" capitalism which need to be dialed back a bit abound. To name just two: Solar power is cheap now, so buy some panels! (Oh well, it's not really so cheap. And where are the minerals coming from to make all the panels that will be needed to remake civilization?) Nuclear power is totally safe! (Of course, what happens when you have a Fukushima, in this era of history, is buck-passing between corporations and the government as regards who's going to clean it up. Thus nuclear power might be possibly safe, but under the current system I wouldn't bet on it being actually safe. By the same token, under the Soviet system it also wasn't safe.)

The proposal of Vince's which I liked the best was the one about "reflecting sunlight back into space." I'm sure it will be tried, the biggest problem being cleaning up near-earth orbit so that the sun-shield isn't destroyed by the great quantities of space junk the billionaires have thrown (and continue to throw) up there.

Appearing prominently in the Google search on reviews of Thunberg's book is this piece of information pollution: "Greta Thunberg’s book shows just how empty the climate celebrity is." This is purely nonsensical anti-woke propaganda, direct from CPAC scriptwriters. Its ascribed author is "The Rev. Calvin Robinson," who "is an Anglican Deacon in the Free Church of England (REC, GAFCON) and TV/radio presenter on GB News." Does this person really exist? I'm imagining New York Post editors ruminating a decision: "hey, we need a review. I know! Let's ask an Anglican Deacon!" Yeah, that's the ticket. Also possible is that "Calvin Robinson" is an invented person, to cover for people who don't want to show their faces in public.

Most recently, Bill McKibben's Substack blog gets routinely dumped into my mailbox, and in the link is his most recent entry. Fortunately, McKibben isn't buying into the happy talk, as he complains about the "rapid decline of the planet’s physical health." The Antarctic is melting, and that ought to reduce Earth's albedo a bunch. McKibben also reports on how the corporations, government in tow, keep selling the world out to the fossil fuel interests. Too bad McKibben won't recommend ending capitalism, though I suppose the corporations which control his foundation grants would stop supporting him if he did that.