On Personal Hypocrisy

"The price of admission to the climate-change battle is hypocrisy."

I interpret those words, as best as I remember them from a book on climate change I recently read, as the stark admission that we all fall short in the battle against climate change. They are offered, however, not as excuse, but rather as prologue to a personal admission I would like to express in my first blog post since my hiatus. More about that momentarily.

The reason for the hiatus was twofold: I was (and still am to a large extent) feeling burnt out, my hope for any constructive change in the world at this point pretty low. In light of that, I had to ask myself whether it was right to continue posting, a question which forced me to analyse why I have been writing this blog for so long. I concluded that the following are my reasons:

1. To serve as a personal catharsis. Throughout my life I have found that writing about something over which I have little or no control serves as a kind of safety valve, in that it lessens ever so slightly my sense of powerlessness in particular situations.

2. To keep my mind and my writing skills sharp (although some might questions the efficacy of the latter given my sometimes opaque, even convoluted, style).

3. To share with readers my own commentary on aggregated material. We live in a very busy world, and I like to think that some of the things I have found in my reading of newspapers, books, online publications, etc. might be of interest or value to those who might not have the time to read as much as I can, given my status as a retiree.

The second reason that covers part of the time the blog was on hiatus is that I was out of the country.

Out of respect to readers, I have always tried to be honest in what I write. I have made no secret of the fact that I still fly once or twice a year, despite the well-known greenhouse gas costs of such an activity. My personal admisssion today is that I did it again; we went to England, a very socially troubled country (although the people we encountered were very kind) which I may write about in a future post. The fact that I do still fly makes me uncomfortable, forcing me as it does to question how seriously I can really be taken when I post about the impending catastrophe we call climate change. Even though I try to drive as little as possible and take other measures to limit my carbon footprint, I know that those efforts pall in comparison to taking even one flight. Hence my hypocrisy.

This has been an obviously brief piece, but one I thought important to publish. I will likely still continue to post about issues involving our rapidly-deteriorating environment, but only readers themselves can decide whether or not, in light of my own hypocrisy, they are worthy of consideration.