Some thoughts about the meeting between Anthony Watts and Bill McKibben

(Context: Anthony Watts, former weatherman and proprietor of wattsupwiththat.com, the biggest climate realist blog on the planet, met for a beer on Friday with Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, and – if one may trust Wikipedia – “the lead environmentalist against the proposed Canadian-U.S. Keystone XL pipeline project.” He reported the meeting at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/06/my-one-on-one-meeting-with-bill-mckibben/.

This was my reaction a few hours later).

I find myself worrying that Anthony is being far too kind to Bill McKibben.

It’s all very well for people to make decisions based on feelings and intuitions rather than the facts, if that’s what they want. Even I have done that in the past. And I would never want to stop anyone else doing it, subject to one proviso. That is, that they themselves are the only ones harmed if the decision turns out to have been a bad one.

The issue here is that Bill McKibben is promoting policies that have already harmed many millions of people – including me. And yet, he doesn’t seem to be even interested in examining the possibility that those policies have been based on, at best, misinterpretations of the facts, and at worst, lies.

If you were on trial for murder, would you want someone on the jury who didn’t bother to listen to the facts of the case? Would you want someone who just said to himself something like, “His eyes are too close together. So he must be guilty?”

And this isn’t just a murder case. It isn’t just about whether one individual goes to the electric chair (or whatever other barbarous means you Yanks use these days). It’s the future of human civilization that’s at stake. For those of us who don’t believe the CAGW cant, Bill McKibben and his ilk want to destroy human civilization for the sake of nothing but a pack of lies. And for me at least, however well he can converse, and whatever his opinion of or capacity for craft beer, such an agenda cannot be forgiven.

There’s another problem too; the problem of hypocrisy. Did Bill McKibben fly from his home in Vermont to California? Did he use a car to get from the airport to Chico? Bill McKibben wants to deny to us – to all of us – the very same conveniences that he takes for granted.

Hypocrisy is very typical of collectivists. They don’t understand individual responsibility, so they don’t feel any shame for how they behave. But again, for me, hypocrisy is something that cannot be forgiven.

</rant>