Cynical Reason Is Gonna Hate Me for This, But...

Hardly is the ink dry on these things when people feel this compulsive need, amplified by twitter speed, to have an opinion--a negative one.

This is what the climate deal at COP21 in Paris is gonna do. Will it solve everything? Will buying all my electricity from wind next year (which is now happening) gonna solve everything?

I feel like Obama and other spokespeople for the much more together (this time) USA got it right when they talked about working with time. As you'll see from the infographic, and as you know from thinking about hyperobjects, time is deeply involved in thinking about and acting on climate issues.

No sooner had the thing opened, and Obama given a pretty awesome speech, all things considered, than Naomi Klein had opined that “Of course, he doesn't really mean it.”

The trouble with this rhetoric is that it involves a law of diminishing returns. How many times can you say something sucks before people just switch off? And how many inventive ways can you come up with to barf your disgust in public?

And now pretty much everyone--except Mr. Dark Ecology, maybe--is that ironic?--is lining up to say something nasty about a deal that includes, shock horror, compromises that avoid the US Senate killing the whole thing, on behalf of all lifeforms and all nations on Earth, next week.

I still really, really like what Fredric Jameson's stance towards 9/11, just one week later: “It hasn't happened yet.” You have to have some guts to play with time to that extent.