Driving to the Fossil Fuel Protest

At a recent public hearing in Longview, Washington construction workers, businessmen, and multinational corporations showed their allegiance to each other in the latest effort to further degrade the biosphere by all wearing white scarves.

I hope they keep their scarves. I hope they hand them down generation to generation. Those scarves will be an interesting artifact of our consumer civilization as desertification takes hold.

An assortment of environmentalists, gray hairs, and professionals were at the hearing to speak against yet another proposed chunk of fossil fuel infrastructure, this time a methanol plant. They wore red shirts.

White Scarfs vs Red Shirts in a battle for life on earth-- scene set.

Again and again, the white scarf bedecked Corporatocracy, mostly speaking through the mouths of union men, scolded 'the red shirts' for driving cars to the hearing, calling out the hypocrisy of using fossil fuels to protest fossil fuels.

Oh, it was righteous indignation, indeed.

'How could you?' again, and again, from the Corporatocracy's willing chorus.

It bugged me. It irked me. It pissed me off. Why? There is a niggling grain of truth in this call out.

In my case, it's more than a grain, maybe a rock, or let's just call it a boulder. My vehicle is as big as a boulder.

My Ford van was purchased before my cognitive dissonance imploded--life choices vs destruction of the biosphere. Considering costs to finances, embodied CO2, and CO2e, trading the van for a more environmentally friendly vehicle is not an option.

(I dream of putting a steam engine in it, growing the wood in my backyard and using a super efficient rocket stove to fire the boiler. Oh, I dream.)

I could have ridden my bicycle to the hearing. It would have taken me the better part of five hours in total, but I could have done it.

I wanted to respond during the public comment period, but the hearing closed before my number came up so I left just smarting over the facile logic of the Corporatocracy. There's always a justification, isn't there, to further degrade the atmosphere we depend on?

The best answer would have been to take public transportation to the hearing. But in the United States public transportation doesn't exist in any useful way.

That's because the Corporatocracy has done everything in its power to destroy public transportation and alternative sources of energy for over a hundred years.

Yes, it is hypocritical to use fossil fuels to protest fossil fuels. But, because of the power of the fossil fuel industry, there is no alternative.

Hypocrisy, rather like global warming, is inescapable. It is baked into the fossil fuel system. To wield accusations of hypocrisy to thwart our attempts to save a living planet, that's an irony on par with Union dudes championing multi-national corporate causes.

The all dominating Corporatocracy now tells me I can't use fossil fuels to protest the Corporatocracy built on fossil fuels. That's rich.

These are the same multi-national corporate interests which attack worker's rights, the very same multinational corporations the Unions reliably champion, all the while denigrating a patchwork of mostly old folks who have the time and inclination to show up at public meetings to try and literally save the f'n biosphere.