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No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2 QUOTES

No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2 QUOTES

1 " Once again I choose to quote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (If somebody were to ask why I believe that organization instead of one that made opposing claims, I suppose I would say: About scientific matters a scientist is more credible than a non-scientist. A large panel of peer-reviewed scientists, expressing a common judgment, with the caveats and qualifications denoting honesty, increases this credibility from the beginning, while I start by distrusting a lobbyist who was paid to say a certain thing. Scientists may be as corruptible as anybody else, but why was it that the regulated community, with all the money at its disposal, found so few individuals in lab coats who would oppose the climate change Cassandras?—To which a true believer could always say: "I don't care about that, Bill. I rest easy. You'll see how wonderful it will be once God steps in.") "

― William T. Vollmann , No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2

2 " As long as Death keeps himself out of sight in our hot dark future, we need not face facts. "

― William T. Vollmann , No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2

3 " [I]f I can be sure of any aspect of your character, it is that you are not as I. Since all I can do here is imagine you in my image, of course I have failed. I was as fossil fuels made me. They kept my lights on. Hence I who imagine myself to be open-minded will appear to you as deservedly dead, fossilized in the stratum of my own period’s prejudices. "

― William T. Vollmann , No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2

4 " A less negative carbon ideologue then I might interpret the lonely wariness of Mr. Winkler and of Sharon Carlisle as proof of wrongheaded irrelevance. Socrates was equally irrelevant once the Athenians had served him his hemlock. The insipidities of the hollowed out Greeley Tribune, the no comment of most people to whom I “reached out,” and the typical anomie of an American metropolis, whose citizens I rarely saw except in their cars, in retail establishments or at the Fourth of July parade, operated synergistically to create the usual hot wide silence—about fracking, climate change, democracy and every other thing. A certain form of economic development held sway, and that was that. "

― William T. Vollmann , No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies: 2