Can You Protest Fossil Fuels... Without Fossil Fuels?
Hypocrats and their Ideologically Cross-Contaminated Causes
Congress hates competition, and the government brooks little, if any, so playing a game that pretends to raise money for something at least ostensibly beyond their control seems unlikely. But each year, Congress holds a charity baseball game. The Charity is assumed to be something other than themselves.
It is almost unnatural. Perhaps that is why the Democrats lost this year, 31 -11. It is less natural for them. What is natural for the left is disruptive protests, so this was probably a welcome respite (the Dems were losing 11-8 at this point in the game).
Climate Cultists decided to impose an unauthorized pre-seventh-inning stretch. They "chanted while holding signs that said 'Stop playing games with our future,' and they wore shirts that said ‘End Fossil Fuels’…”
"We have taken the field at the Congressional Baseball Game + play has FROZEN! Congress sends billions of public $$ to subsidize deadly fossil fuels — but the police are tackling us instead. This Chevron-sponsored game cannot continue. This is unconscionable," the group wrote.
The game was halted while Capitol police corralled and arrested eight of them on the field and then stood guard for the duration to discourage further interruptions (there were some pro-Palestine protesters in the crowd as well).
I think the Democrats - the ideological family of the end fossil fuel (for most of us) folks - should ask critical questions of their unruly climate "children” and themselves, over this shared general disregard for the benefits of cheap, abundant energy.
Questions?
Whenever Climateers do anything, they are nearly always guaranteed to leave something very anti-pro-planet in their wake. Their protests and gatherings are notorious for leaving miles of refuse behind, always for someone else to clean up.
In the instance of the congressional ball game disruption it the mess, at least in my mind, was pre-protest.
How did these protesters get to the stadium? Did they drive, carpool, or take a bus to the event? Were these conveyances using combustion to power their drive systems? Were they originally manufactured or transported using fossil fuels? Were any signs or the marking tools used to create them manufactured or transported, stored, or sold in facilities using fossil fuels, and how were they obtained from the retail outlet and how green is their carbon footprint? How about the clothes the protesters were wearing, their shoes, the cell phones they carried, and the digital infrastructure used to convey their "successful" protest to their online audience?
The answer to nearly all of these questions is that Fossil Fuels were not just involved but essential and, in a few cases, we might find human rights violators using cheap or forced labor as part of the supply chain process.
And there are fixed and unworkable contradictions too. You can’t make steel without coal. Metalwork, machining, storage, assembly, or physical transportation of components or finished products, are all reliant on Fossil Fuels and many of these will never work without them.
In other words, you can’t protest fossil fuels without fossil fuels.
Their Cross Contaminated Ideology
This reminds me of the painfully obvious contradictions created by the money isn’t speech crowd. Most of them are willing mules for a broken narrative, pretending to do business as a movement to get money out of politics (which, ironically, requires a lot of money). The masterminds behind the narrative are not looking to get money out of “speech.” They are looking to control money to control political speech.
Most of their water carriers, on the other hand, have not thought any of that through.
For example, if money isn’t speech, then boycotts shouldn’t work. You can’t fund speech with public money if money isn’t speech. Donations to political candidates make no sense unless money is speech. And one of my favorites, a protest with signs shared online years ago, with many of the same contradictions as the activist incursion at last week’s congressional baseball game. Their point was that the government should regulate speech to keep it free as if the word free (in free speech) meant…at no cost.
Who paid for the poster board, the stick, the staples, and markers (for your signs), the smartphone he is (probably) using to tweet the event (political speech), and the cellular service that carries that speech, and so on?
More importantly, why do any of the people (in this picture) think that by giving the government the power to decide what constitutes a proper expense (for the purpose of exercising speech, or when and how it is acceptable to exercise it), … will limit itself to the expenditures on speech you currently think need to be restricted?
Every leap that gives The State more power or sets new precedents (like prosecuting former presidents) is likely to come back and bite its advocates in the ass.
Free association by individuals can result in the creation of corporations. The people as both individuals and organizations are subject to government force in the form of taxes and regulations. As such, they have a right to express as much interest in that relationship as anyone else. …
If you regulate speech directed at campaigns or near elections, you don’t end the so-called corruption and influence of that money; you help to hide it. You take the outside money and turn it into inside money. Instead of spending money on political speech visible to all in an election, you shift that “influence” underground, outside the everyday scrutiny of the general public.
Any Congressional action that limits spending on speech during campaigns will naturally increase the number of lobbyists in DC needed and the amounts of cash available to ensure those positions are still heard. Not in dollar-for-dollar terms but do you see the point?
Baseball Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Climate Change
Our modern game-disrupting Climate activists suffer from that problem and another one. Who are they to tell us unless and until they’ve “gone first.” Why should they not be perceived the way their crowd represents someone like (say…) Joel Osteen? Joel is not just rich but ostentatiously so. He got that way by delivering the message of Christ, which - at his current level of fiscal prosperity - might be lost on many who would rather see a preacher of simple means (or even barefoot in sackcloth) than arriving at the “Monolithic Super-Church” in the nice car that an hour earlier was parked next to others like it in front of his mansion.
I do not begrudge Osteen's success (he is wroth about 40 million), and I believe he has helped a lot of people survive the increasing psychological demands of the modern world with a genuine belief in Jesus Christ, but doesn’t all the bling distract from his message and presumably the purpose of it? Being saved is great, but so is Wagyu beef, an infinity pool, six bathrooms, and a staff to clean them (No, I don’t know how many bathrooms Joel has). Can Jesus get me both, or does the image of Christ as a means of wealth creation muddy the message of the baptismal Waters?
Perception matters.
There are plenty of reasons why the Congressional ball game Protesters hurt their cause. It was petulant and annoying, like tossing paint on a masterpiece, blocking morning rush hour traffic, or gluing your pathetic self to something in the name of climate justice (while African rivers are polluted by rare earth metal mining needed to create “green” technology). These direct-action displays are stupid and irritating and tend to turn the people you want or need (the mysterious independents) away from your cause and toward your opposition.
Take January 6th. I know people who were there, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them were dumb enough to go into or even near the US Capitol, regardless of how many Capitol Police officers held doors open or offered directions. I’d have cautioned against getting uppity or following the lead of anyone, planted FBI insurgents or not.
To quote one Phil (Conners) to another Phil (Punxsutawney), “Don’t Drive Angry.”
When I ask people to contact representatives or the government, I remind them to be brief and polite. You should also try to live your principles before you expect someone else to take anything you have to say about them seriously.
BLM riots raised billions for a handful of people who are now rich and living in white neighborhoods, so what, five black lives mattered?
The anti-fossil fuel protesters should be at odds with the money isn’t speech people.
They all need to take a step back and volunteer to be the thing they insist everyone else needs to be instead of using money and influence to convince the government to be their hammer and anvil for a cause almost no one else, if left to their own devices, would even think about (climate change), let alone consider a worthy way to waste the trillions of their hard-earned dollars and the complete disruption of their lifestyles for what the math suggests amounts to a fraction of the change the Cultists claim is needed.
Can we expect these protesters to show up at Facebook or Google or wherever else to stop AI, which will require so much energy to sustain there might not be any left for the devices we’d need to use it?
No worries. Congress will take control and everything we’ll be fine—just like the debt, crime, the border, foreign wars, drugs, the economy, and yes … fossil fuels.
Not.