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Curt Kastens's avatar

Magnificent article. Magnificent comments as well. I especially connect with the comments that Just Plain Bill made about the Corona Virus. I was actually banned from the web site of the economist John Quiggin for my criticisms of the dominate Corona Virus Narrative.

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JustPlainBill's avatar

I think a lot of the “anti-science” attitude trailing in the wake of COVID is not coming exclusively from the crowd that has never trusted science. Now we have a new group--of which I am one--who have never been skeptical of science in and of itself; in fact, quite the opposite. These are those who have lost much of their formerly considerable trust in our institutions of science and those who turned out to be nothing more than a self-styled scientific priesthood handing the tablets down from on high.

I'm referring to the journalists, censors, and government bureaucrats, and a number of incompetent or 'bent' scientists who were so wrong about so much, sometimes by accident, but often by design. And it is mostly the latter that will not be forgiven.

I need not go into detail about the various ways in which this was done--this ground is already well-covered by others. Suffice it to say that all of this malfeasance is now becoming obvious even to many who didn't want to see it before. As a result, one of the biggest legacies of COVID is going to be a massive weakening in the public’s trust in science. And this is a pity.

I was a young adult in the early 70s, not tapped in to issues of the day that didn’t affect me immediately and directly, too immature to care much about such stuff. I never saw reporting or heard talk about “The Limits to Growth” or the controversies that came along later, and I didn’t read the book until just a few years ago. (I was impressed, and have followed up by reading updates and more, including a couple of your books.) In retrospect, it's pretty strange that I never heard a peep about a book that reportedly sold over a million copies. What is also strange is how hard it is to find a hard copy nowadays. They are relatively rare and expensive.

It IS a good question to wonder what you should say when you appear on TV. Given your own answer, I think you'd find a lot to agree with in the recent book by Dougald Hine, “At Work in the Ruins”, which I can highly recommend. Hine is a committed climate change activist, but he has decided that he will no longer focus on trying to persuade people about what they should do to combat climate change. His book is a magnificent piece of work in my opinion, not least because the reader doesn't have to agree with all his views on climate change (I don’t) to find it compelling. (There is a good review at https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-03-13/we-are-all-modern-now/.

I’ve been following you on Seneca Effect for some time, but Substack works better for me. Thanks for the great work, and I look forward to your future posts.

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