Also, they change little about the sociopolitical tragedy of automobilization, its flattening and shattering of nearly all human and other habitats in such a way that the former humans become subordinate to it, products of it.
Also, they're manufactured with "fumes," as a distinguished moron noted recently in technically correct fashion, and represent all the familiar atrocities of large consumer goods overladen with electronic nervous systems, in terms of ecological and labor impacts. Generally more than 90% of the total-product-cycle measure of destruction and death represented by each four-wheeled beast was accomplished in its manufacture, before anyone owned it as their own or needed to buy fuel, with the lion's share coming already in the extraction of the raw materials.
Is that (1) an inevitability built into all industrial endeavors regardless of economic system, as certain deep ecologists would argue? Or is it (2) mainly the product of capitalist incentive systems that don't regulate such impacts, or fail to price them to the producer/owner/organizer/financer of the "value creation chain," instead allowing their near-complete externalization from the perspective or incentive-matrix of decision-makers, also keeping most of the blood and burnt flesh outside the borders of the primary consumer nations?
We don't know the first for sure either way, because the second guarantees it happens without allowing a clean empirical test of the first. In any credible scenario for change not involving post-apocalyptic retries a thousand years hence or global mass human die-offs, the capitalist incentive system has to be replaced.
Regardless, in every scenario so far there have been too many four-wheeled beasts and infrastructures given over to them, and reduction/avoidance/reorganization of settled spaces to minimize their use/alt-transit will always beat mere reinvention of the drive mechanism.
All that being said, the analogous stuff about Greta and the boat does not generally speak to Greta and what she says when she speaks, or to who she is: whether she's legit personally or acts independently, whether she's the product of a theater or a genuine article surrounded by exactly the theater one would expect, given the Society of the Spectacle.
And it doesn't matter. The attacks on the young woman who happens to be a kind of lightning rod and Rohrschach test would be a distraction, just another excuse not to deal with reality, even if they were true! (Which, I believe firmly, they are not.)
True that the boat is rich people showing off the options you don't have, or, to use the current right-wing lingo, "virtue signalling." (Interesting that "virtue" became such a vice to those who would inherit the mantle of its original upholders and signalers, those republican conservative fathers of yore.)
Also possible that it may be rich people showing prototypes of ways to cross the ocean that may one day be more sustainable and practical than current ones. Experimentation in this sphere does not rise to the level of crime.
Also true that even if solar sea transport were to work and achieve sustainability, it would be no more than a millionth-fraction of a solution for what faces civilization and its humans (and no one's claiming otherwise, afaik) in the face of the
anthropogenic global ecocatastrophe and planetary extinction event brought on by habitat destruction, burning of hydrocarbons for energy, privatization and hyperexploitation of commons, relentless indifference to financially externalized poisoning and other externalized impacts, arranged or forced overconsumption-for-private-profit of absolutely every conceivably-exploitable iota within the cycles of production and consumption, and other terminal and automatic political-economic programming with a lot of historical momentum that is not only incentivized but rendered necessary and inevitable by the present corporatocratic-financialized iterations of the capitalist system (a description of that thing that is sometimes harmlessly rendered as "climate change," so that optimists can bullshit themselves about its susceptibility to solution via bullshit tech-fixes or carbon taxes; and so that eco-opportunists can opportune on the sidelines and cause Sounders to go tut-tut at the imagined globalists perpetrating the scam; and so that doofus-denialists in that vein and whore-armies of lobbyists and think-tankers and pundits and fakers receiving billions in oil-and-gas PR money can construct dismissible strawmen, or otherwise bog down the discussion in legalist and sophistic minutiae while their owners/clients tear open whole new vast vistas of peoples to displace from lands and waters to despoliate within years for a brief energy-and-profit boost via cartoonishly destructive explosive extractive methods; although I have to admit my alternate term is a bit bulky).
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Meanwhile...
In my home state of Iowa,
WOW! THAT IS INTERESTING!!!I've been thinking about Iowa a lot lately, and here you say that. Here on RI. Have you ever mentioned it before, or is it just magical TIMING?
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by Elvis » Sun Dec 29, 2019 10:29 pm 
You get home and you plug it in. That's it.
