Sustaining our climate disaster : 'talkin' about my generation' --- the hyper-active Rogue Boomers ruining our planet, with our passive help

True : we didn't start the fire - blame the beginnings of our carbon burning frenzy on our parents, grandparents and great great great grandparents.

But we are the generation in charge now - in fact the generation in charge when the global (rather than local) dangers of the Big Smoke first became apparent to all but those of closed minds.

So the responsibility for ruining paradise is really upon us, the Boomer Generation - those of us born roughly between the early mid Forties and the early mid Sixties.

We'll be the ones still in charge when the CO2 and elevated temperature levels rise so high they tip us into irreversible disaster.

Most of us - in fairness - believe in human induced climate disaster and worry what can be done.

But we worry and fret so completely passively that we might as well not even show up o to be weighed on the moral scales.

Meanwhile some of us Boomers are moral monsters - hardly sleeping or taking vacations we are so busy thinking of new ways to dig up, transport and burn ever more carbon, ever faster.

These rogue Boomers run countries as Prime Ministers, Presidents and Dictators (pardon my redundancies), run big international corporations, run big international media empires.

But they are a minority - albeit a very active and self confident minority - and they only get away with it because we in the vast Boomer silent majority let them, all because we hold our own convictions so lightly and feebly.

They - the rogue Boomers - privately admit, in their heart of hearts, that human carbon emissions are changing the climate.

But they remain (both publicly - and much more crucially, privately) convinced that real world human engineering can quickly, cheaply, easily overcome any problems that the egghead scientists in their ivory tower labs can detect.

Yet another postwar Manhattan Project will solve any problem.

Telling indeed that the people most convinced of the efficiency of WWII bureaucracy were the ones who never personally suffered through it's chickenshit, to use the words of Paul Fussell, who did know of it first hand.

I would say it was the youngest of the young adults from the WWII - those too junior to know of the mid level real world frustrations - together with all those too young to know much (or anything) personally of WWII.

They are the ones who fell hardest for the carefully cultivated postwar myth of the efficiency of the Manhattan (nuclear) Project's secretive, un-democratic, throw big money at any problem approach.

That meant almost everyone in the  postwar world born after 1920 initially bought into Vannevar Bush's Big Lie.

Over time, personal experiences with postwar bureaucratic failures and revelations about what really went on in WWII converted many us to becoming a Doubting Thomas about the touted advantages of another Manhattan (nuclear) Project type operation to solve anything.

But clearly the rogue Boomers (in terms of personality: action-oriented unreflective, shallow types) never got the memo : because most never ever read a book - or ever changed their mind - after college.

What I think I can bring to the effort to fight to save our climate before it is too late is all the research work I have done on the Manhattan (nuclear) Project's little-known alter ego : the Manhattan (penicillin) Project.

It was everything - in almost every detail - that the nuclear project was not and so it offers, I believe, a way out of our climate dilemma ....

1945 Janus Manhattan gives boomer children a morally muddled legacy

The mixed birthright of The Children of Janus Manhattan '45  : nuclear death/penicillin life

All of us alive are in some sense Children of Janus Manhattan : all seeing our lives potentially shortened or extended by 1945 Manhattan's twin legacies of deadly atomic bombs and freely available life saving penicillin.

But those who felt that Janus tug and pull most intensely I believe were my generation (cohort more accurately) : those of us born between 1940 and 1956.

This is because we few felt the waning of Modernity and the dawning of Postmodernity in our very bones as it all happened during our crucial formative years when our personalities were as plastic as our rapidly growing bodies.

We are starting to die off now and it is time to put into the historical record exactly what it felt like to be the healthiest most scared generation of children ever ....

dear Children of Janus Manhattan '45 : "If CO2 not at 350ppm by 2040, you'll tip us into a runaway disaster"

An Open Letter to my fellow members of the Boomer Generation:

(By 'boomer', I mean roughly all of us born after the initial start of what was to be the Manhattan Project and before the final implementation of the first Test Ban Treaty.)

Some of us, like myself, probably won't be alive when 2040 rolls around - we will never suffer the most severe consequences of our folly.

But we boomers currently rule the world and have done so since news of the 'hockey stick crisis' first hit the public media.

We are the boss in government and in the military, in finance, in intellectual and cultural circles.

We have heard the news, we are intelligent, highly educated people, we rule the world : we have no excuse, no barrier lay before us.

Only our selfish wills.

We are the children of Janus Manhattan '45 .

That janus year in the eternally janus city.

The New York City physicists of the Manhattan nuclear Project claimed that they had successfully bent even the most recalcitrant atoms to do Man's will: the signal triumph of 500 years of the Enlightenment Project.

By contrast, the New York City chemists of the Manhattan penicillin Project had admitted defeat : they had been unable to bend some very recalcitrant atoms into commercially viable synthetic penicillin.

Instead New York City biologists had shown how by working with Nature and not against her, humanity could produce abundant cheap natural penicillin-for-all : postmodern penicillin, Adorno's penicillin.

We boomers were given a choice : on one hand look backwards to the Manhattan nuclear Project with all its top down, anti-democratic secrecy and violence as a model of our relationship with the world and each other.

On the other hand, the Manhattan penicillin Project had involved tiny teams, even single individuals working on kitchen counters, using freely exchanged samples of penicillium spores.

With almost no government monies - often only hostility - they had proven to the rest of a doubting scientific world the clinical and economic value of freely-cooperating humanity and Nature working together around the commensal table.

We boomers had a choice : and some us became the classic boomer image of back to the land environmentalists - we got the message of natural penicillin.

But many others - like Prime Ministers Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott - spurned that trend among boomers, became instead rogue Boomers and drank deep from the tainted Kool-Aid of the myth of the Manhattan nuclear Project.

Now they are driving this planet , like a car with its emission controls removed, off a climatic cliff.

As long as we boomers control most of the world's governments, its wealth and its biggest media outlets, only us can stop them.

My part in this effort - as I see it - is to urge all of us to take a hard look again at the legacy we were left with from Janus Manhattan's twin - warring - Projects in the Fall of 1945 ...

'Rogue Boomers' : Running our world ; ruining our planet

When one thinks of Rogue Boomers, one immediately thinks of people like prime ministers Stephen Harper (born 1959) and Tony Abbott (born 1957) --- and not just because they are currently leading the charge (from the rear) against doing anything substantial about man-made climate disaster.

Rather it is something so unexpected about the vivid contrast between their still-baby faces and their totally Old School ways of thinking that humans can control the natural world - thinking we'd might expect more from their grandfathers, let alone their fathers.

Yes, those I call Noir's Children , the most vocal (and regrettably the smallest) segment of the Boomer kids got it, successfully absorbed the dire lessons (on all sides) from WWII , and adjusted their thinking.

But the Rogue Boomers ( the silent majority of my Boomer generation) carried right on as if nothing had changed, still believing in the simplistic old pre-war ways , despite Science (reluctantly) revealing an ever more complicated world.

It was as if they were to be frozen in aspic, forever locked into a time warp with the first generation of comic book super heroes.

Entombed forever within WWII's golden age of superheroes, superpowers, super-weapons and super-easy solutions to controlling unpleasant reality....