[6.14] Sorry
Well finally someone gave Kiro the real welcome to camp. Smooth.
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Happy belated Earth Day! There may not be much to celebrate right now with all that’s going on the world, but here I am cautiously optimistic that – just maybe – the present shenanigans in the oil industry will nudge our society towards a future with cleaner energy. And perhaps get some people in power to question if economic progress is really worth sacrificing clear skies, clean water, and a livable planet?
(I’m sorry if anyone works in the oil industry and has had their job affected by these events. I can’t believe just a few weeks ago, I thought things were going to go back to normal by now. Thanks, fake news and lack of cohesive government response!)
6.14 Transcript
????: It has been some time since I met one of your sort. A Dubois, too…
Kiro: I’m sorry for being rude.
????: I’m the one, who should be sorry, child. You are here due to me. I am bound by a curse, you see.
????: By now, you probably know of Henri Dubois, your adoptive ancestor?
Kiro: eh
????: I was there when he killed my people. Well, I’ve always been here.
????: I cursed this place… From then on, a Dubois of every generation would find their way here. And once they do, everyone here will die.
????: So I’m sorry, but you’re no exception.
Well, that sucks….
Well that’s a bit of a bugger
Well, shit…..
Dun dun dun!
Hoo, boy… Let’s hope Kiro can break this cycle!
If you want clear skies and clean water, you need economic progress. (Or a drastically smaller and poorer global population, which isn’t a widely popular choice.) It’s only once a society has grown prosperous enough to pull most of its people out of poverty that people start worrying about relatively abstract subjects such as the environment.
On the good news front, the move toward cleaner energy is likely to continue. And as for oil workers, there will still be an oil industry even as we shift away from using it for fuel. Oil is useful for all sorts of things that don’t involve setting it on fire.
Yes, but not economic progress as presently defined. The existing model says: as long as western consumers spend more on goods [manufactured using materials acquired in an environmentally destructive way, paying “wages” that keep 3rd world workers stuck in poverty] than they did last year, then that’s GDP growth! And especially in USA we have no choice but to depend on these cheap goods, as the traditional model – local businesses generating wealth that flows through the community – has long been replaced by corporations sucking that wealth elsewhere.
Moreover, the current model is the equivalent of an economic zombie surviving on ever rising consumer debt. I believe governments should focus on creating stable, sustainable economies at the local level, in rich and poor countries alike. Which means: stronger communities that aren’t utterly reliant on foreign oil, artificially cheap goods, and food shipped from 1000’s of miles away, leaving us all vulnerable to pandemics and disasters.
In summary: growth of GDP and the stock market don’t translate to better lives for the vast majority of people. But a more socially interdependent, safer, cleaner community does.
Well that was a lot and went way off topic. But that’s my view of progress, kind of…
That sounds like rather bad news.
It sounds like bad news, but she dreamed abut the white seal before she became an adopted Dubois, and being of that “sort” sounds like a reference to being a strangely affected child. So whereas she is an adopted Dubois, she is also something else by birth. Whatever that is, it is related to to spiritual world that she now can enter. I place my hope in that. Perhaps she was even chosen by the Dubois family to break the curse. Time will tell. 🙂
What a nice curse….
This is awful boomery of me, but political commentary in webcomics really puts me off.
Happy you’ve got plenty of readers and you won’t miss me. I’ll see myself out.
I’m sorry if anything I said offended you. I make sure to keep politics out of the comic itself, as it exists for its own sake.
Here’s one (aging) boomer that is willing to listen to diverse opinions. (Sound bites: not so much.)
On Rob’s point, I’ve abandoned a website or two for excessive political tirades, but this is so far from being that.
You certainly have strong opinions — and you might give mental whiplash to readers without a background similar to yours. I mean, the norm for anyone not at or fresh out of university is pretty much “what I heard at work” and “what I saw on my phone & tv.” Entertainment eats the rest, and most of the “news” on the phone & tv is more entertainment masquerading as relevant info. ( So, daily exposure to real ideas: close to zero. ) Even assuming we fans of your comic are a cut above the ordinary, you’re still stomping the accelerator pretty hard with an academic “maybe we should reshape society.”
But man, what good is fame (however modest!) if it muzzles you? I say go for it; I enjoy reading your thoughts.
Don’t feel obliged to answer here, but I wonder if you can envision a route to your goals that doesn’t require trusting a vast new bureaucracy, or that somehow includes China as a willing participant.
Thanks for the comment. I’ve given it some thought and figured (as I should) that people come here to read a comic, not to engage in political debate.
But since you ask – I believe that in regards to the energy industry, it’s a free market problem. As in, the market isn’t free enough. Many countries subsidize fossil fuels in various ways. In the US, this ranges all the way from allowing private companies to lease federal lands for drilling at far-below-market prices, to the billions spent on wars in the Middle East to protect the flow of oil. The cost of wind and solar energy is already lower than fossil fuels in many places, and the difference would be even bigger in a free market. (Texas, the heart of the American oil industry, generates five times more wind power than green, progressive California.) If the US government stopped subsidizing oil, then renewable energy would suddenly have a price advantage. I believe this would also be true for countries that don’t have large, easily accessible oil resources of their own.
In the US, the interstate highway system itself was built ‘for national security purposes’, but the effect was to mostly kill passenger railroads, and the subsidization of road trips and trucking. Air and road travel, and the movement of tourists in general, get a lot of easy breaks in North America that come at the expense of more energy-efficient, traditional modes of transportation… and the bottom half of the population.
So, I agree, but the focus of my concern is more on how government infrastructure encourages us to burn more oil to do less work, rather than their efforts to make it easier to produce cheap oil. Even as things are, only subsidized rail and sea travel (or busses) can give freedom of movement to everyone, or even most of everyone. Cars, planes, and cruise ships are a privilege of the middle class.
Ooh boy, do I have a lot to say about “car culture”…
I haven’t traveled overseas in several years, but I used to visit relatives in Taiwan a lot, and every time coming back to the US felt like going to a third world country. Being able to travel all over Taipei on a safe, clean metro system, beats the hell out of having to drive everywhere (on roads that are falling apart because we’ve built way more roads than can be maintained by gas tax revenues). And as for intercity rail?
Taipei to Kaohsiung via High-speed Rail: 220 miles. 1 hour, 45 minutes. 70 trains/day.
San Jose to Los Angeles via Amtrak: 340 miles. 10 hours, 53 minutes. 1 train/day.
And while it’s true that much of the US is not dense enough for public transit to work, many cities and a few states certainly are, they just need the investment.
I recognize this attitude might offend some, but I find the notion that “cars=freedom” to be hilarious. How can the world’s wealthiest country not afford an alternative to forcing its people to sit in traffic every day?
That’s a new spin on the ancient virgin sacrifice.
“And once they do, everyone here will die.”
Every Dubois, or everyone at camp?
Pretty sure that means every human in the camp – note the evidence of several previous die-offs, and that it only requires one Dubois per generation to be here
This curse, as curses generally do, seems to accomplish very little. It seems to just be repeating the bad history that triggered it. What’s the point of that?
Maybe one reason some people aren’t paying attention to climate change is because they don’t beleiv that the things thet care about will be affected. Convincing them might work better if they were told about the things they care about it being affected.
Ooh, interesting. She seems to have some regrets, but not enough yet to lift the curse. Feels like they need to find some way to break it before things fall apart…
The interesting thing here is that she is technically in an antagonistic role by virtue of being the one to create (and perpetuate?) the curse, but at the same time, even that descriptor feels a bit too harsh for her, compared to characters like Mom and the council. She’s more like a force of nature, like the ocean in The Old Man And The Sea, not malicious, but dangerous nonetheless. I really like this portrayal.