The basis for today's diary is a large portion of a comment I made on a yesterday's diary:

Just as a reminder, here are the primary notions promoted in that diary:

1) "Critical thinking" is a cheap substitute for real critical thinking. It, "critical thinking," involves a) suspicion as a substitute for examination (often leading to notions of conspiracy too large to be real), b) demands for censorship or silencing as substitutes for critical engagement with opposing perspectives, and c) following the wandering eye of the mass media and engaging issues only through stories popular this week. Here I would like to add a fourth manifestation: d) the fetish of surface phenomena as a substitute for investigations of underlying causes.

2) All "critical thinking" contains an engagement with truth, with some truth on some level. This engagement, however, is caught up in bad method , which ultimately aims to sustain mass disempowerment.

3) Media ownership patterns, by themselves, create news which promotes "critical thinking." They have done such a good job of this promotion and of terrorizing people into accepting its premises that the people as a whole can be said to have embraced the fake version, "critical thinking."

4) Real critical thinking necessarily involves comprehensive evaluation, which is:

1) a gathering-up of available information about a topic, 2) an examination of the background against which the available information carries meanings, 3) a reasoning-through of the motives of the various presenters for why they offer opinions upon said topic (maybe true, maybe false), and 4) a conclusion explaining one's position as based upon an examination of competing opinions.

At any rate, here is the comment:

Every year since the Nineties the nation-states have gotten together to plan out strategies for dealing with climate change -- these are called the "COP meetings." You know, so they can take collective responsibility for the Earth's environment. And every year the nation-states have come up with nothing of any consequence. You would think they would get bored with their repeated failures, 28 now and counting, and quit -- yet the call of responsibility beckons. You can see for yourself the substance of these meetings by clicking on the links that will take you to the UN webpages -- they've lavished all sorts of attention on planning them out, proposing "effective" strategies, and so on. The net benefit of all of this activity, year after year after year: zip, zero, zilch, nada. So, gee, maybe something is wrong with the "critical thinking" they use to deal with the problem. You think so?

Fortunately, the wandering eye has been identified. The insertion of "critical thinking" into this whole process occurred at the preparatory meeting in 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit in Brazil. Camila Moreno summarizes the process well: "Instead of changing our economic system to make it fit within the natural limits of the planet, we are redefining nature so that it fits within the economic system." How do they do that? Well, every year we are told that we need to "reduce carbon emissions" without reference to the numerous processes, extraction, refinement, distribution, and so on, which made (and make) the "carbon emissions" possible in the first place. So we send the wandering eye out -- look! Carbon emissions here! Carbon emissions there! Carbon emissions everywhere!

Meanwhile, no effort has been applied to, say, propose a point at which fossil fuel extraction will come to a complete halt, or do anything minimally effective of that sort. Doing so would require displays of real critical thinking. You can tell that it has crossed their minds, in secret. But not in the way we want. Here was a headline from 2010: "Saudi Arabia to seek compensation for climate pact oil losses." In such a way global ecosystems are being cast into ruin for the principle of "he who dies with the most toys wins." But will anyone admit to that? No! We take responsibility! We hold COP meetings every year!

This observation dovetails with the one Greta Thunberg made in her 2018 TED talk: if people really cared about climate change it would be in the news every day. I might add to Greta Thunberg's observation an additional one: climate change will in fact be in the news every day, under the conditions which prevail in the mainstream news media now. That's not a desirable state of affairs.