It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair
My news sources for a few years, perhaps even for the last half a decade, have been the BBC and CNN.
And whatever turns up on social media.
I was quite excited, then, to discover that the library made it possible to read newspapers from around the world.
I thought I’d get thoughtful, interesting, and balanced information from experienced journalists.
There is a lot of that.
And then there is stuff that makes you think.
Take the Wall Street Journal. You’d think that it’s going to focus on business, tell you what you need to know.
And it does. I shouldn’t be unfair. There are a number of excellent articles.
And then there are some downright bizarre opinion pieces, the sort of stuff you’d normally see on social media rather than in a reputable paper.
Quite a lot of them are angry about the renewables business – and the shift away from gas.
The argument goes something like this – renewables need lots of minerals, that’s a lot of mining, plus they get subsidies so they are bad and we should keep burning gas.
Which sounds reasonable, except that there’s no balance to the opinion.
Presumably the gas infrastructure was built with lots of subsidies and it still gets them.
Yes mining is bad. So is climate change.
The bad news is that if we really want to do something we need to stop consuming so much and live within planetary resources.
But that’s tricky because the reason we can make such powerful and sophisticated weapons is because the economies with the capability are rich because their consumers make and buy the kind of things that require powerful and sophisticated technology.
An agrarian society that is happy growing rice is going to be good for the environment – but will also struggle to defend itself.
These are complicated areas where it’s hard to figure out what to do and I suppose these baying opinion pieces are shouting about what they think is needed.
The reaction from government is to do what will get people to vote for them, and that acts as something of a check mechanism. Go too far one way and you’ll alienate everyone else.
You can get in power by being extreme. Staying in power, in a democracy anyway, requires compromise.
The extreme nature of social media and political discourse suggests that compromise is never an option.
In public anyway.
Away from scrutiny, the people that matter probably get on with making deals, and those deals rely on hammering out a compromise.
That’s the way the world really works.
And if anything is going to make things better, it’s continuing to work towards finding a compromise between competing priorities.
At least, while I’m reading this news and wondering what I’m getting out of it, I’m also strolling along on a treadmill.
The world might be complicated, but targeting calories needn’t be.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 