Compromise

Just posted: a Darwin video about global warming and soil, with a mole joke at the end...

And now more about global warming.

I would like to think myself a scientific and ethical purist, offering no compromise regarding what the right thing to do is. So with regard to something like global warming, I would like to think that there should be no compromise between the forces of greed, which almost seem to rejoice in pouring extra carbon into the atmosphere, and the forces of altruism, which rejoice in leaving a better world for the future.

But we live in a world of compromise. We can hardly avoid it, if we are on the grid and participants in the national and world economy.

I was reminded of this recently when I was reading articles from an environmental news website. The ENN website (recently defunct, it appears) constantly posted articles about the dangers of global warming, and the ways in which the Keystone XL pipeline will accelerate it by bringing large amounts of high-carbon oil from Canada down into Texas, where much of it will be processed for export. At the top of the web page there was an advertisement from none other than Trans Canada, the sponsor of the pipeline. The ad claimed that the pipeline was environmentally safe and would promote energy independence. That is, the advertisement and the content from this website contradicted one another.

But Trans Canada was willing to pay for the advertising, without which ENN might not be able to continue operation. There are plenty of ads from sources with legitimate environmental credentials (several environmental MBA programs, for example), but apparently not enough.

I cannot pretend to know whether ENN should accept money from the very corporations it consistently condemns. This blog costs and earns nothing, so I do not have to answer this question for myself.