I keep meaning to get back to writing here. I’ve been feeling discouraged, frustrated, and angry, and it’s been a reason not to write, because what could I offer besides bitching and moaning? But on the other hand, perhaps I would feel less defeated if I were to send my little electronic packets of words out to the cyber-ether, where not many will read them but at least they won’t be sitting around here at home, festering and smelling like sour milk.

Did you know that there are people — reasonably intelligent and normal people — who think that global warming is not real? Sure, I knew that was the Bush administration’s position for some time, but even they had to give it up in the face of the overwhelming consensus of the world’s climate scientists. Yet there are those who insist that environmentalists have a self-interested agenda. And it’s not just environmentalism they look on with skepticism, though that’s the most glaring position it would seem very difficult to justify being against: how can you be against the preservation of clean air and water, open natural spaces, plant and animal species, and a reasonably stable climate? It makes sense for corporations to be against all that is good, of course: they have a financial interest in engaging in practices that harm the environment. Yet they’ve successfully taken average citizens onto their platform, citizens who will happily spew venom on those who would dare speak out for the air, water, and soil.

How can this be? I know that power and money provide access to all sorts of means of persuasion, but have people simply taken leave of their senses?

I always hear this mantra that there are two sides to every issue, that each side’s viewpoint is only a matter of personal opinion, and that furthermore each side is, of course, biased. Where do I begin to poke holes in this theory? First of all, there are frequently more than two sides to any given issue. There is the matter of which goals are considered most pressing and which strategies are likely to be most successful in achieving them. Some of those considerations may in fact be a matter of opinion, but fundamentally those opinions come down to: do you think that humanity should be shit on or do you think it should be saved? If you think that humanity should be shit on so that someone — who is not even you — can get rich, then frankly your opinion sucks.

And bias? Does no one understand what bias is anymore? For a statement to be biased, meaning it cannot be trusted at face value, there has to be a reason for the person making the statement to want to lie. There has to be self-interest. A corporation that wants to continue selling cars or oil, and the politicians who are supported by that corporation or own substantial stock in it, have a great deal of self-interest in saying that the corporation’s products do not harm the environment, so their statements cannot be accepted at face value as true. They have to be verified, or at the very least approached with skepticism. On the other hand, a poor shmuck who is trying to get you to recycle doesn’t have anything to gain personally or financially, so when she tells you that recycling your newspaper will help spare a couple of trees, she has no hidden agenda. She could be wrong, but not intentionally, because she has no reason to lie; therefore she has no bias.

And if you think she’s simply mistaken, then you can consult the empirical evidence collected by the world’s environmental scientists to verify her claims. If you don’t trust the scientific consensus because you think the scientists are just plain lying, what could possibly be their motive? What self interest do they have in making up false claims? None.

The self interest test is especially easy to apply in today’s grim political climate: since there are almost no left-leaning politicians or parties in the U.S., any private citizen who speaks out strongly for environmental protection or social justice cannot be parroting or supporting anyone’s political agenda, since almost no one who is in power or has any hope of getting into a position of power is relying on those views as their political platform. Only former politicians who are safely out of the running will touch these issues. It’s political suicide to care about what happens to humanity, or even to talk about it. And we the people are the ones who are letting it happen: people in power are not going to suddenly decide to do what is right, we have to collectively make it impossible for them not to.