A conversation between two people, a climate-change alarmist, Mr. A, who attended COP27, and a climate-change doubter, Miss B.


Mr. A.: Wonderful turnout. That 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) was a great step forward. There were 50,000 attendees at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. And the Ocean Pavilion hosted some 15,000 of those attendees.


Miss B.: Whoa, you’re telling me that some 50,000 people traveled to Egypt to discuss climate change? On whose dime? Various governments? Some private benefactors? Fifty thousand! Could you calculate the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the travel?


Mr. A,: Look, it was important to meet to discuss climate change. And we made great progress. For example, the ocean was included in a separate section (XIII) of the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan. And paragraph 26 declares the need to address systematic observation and information gaps in our knowledge of the ocean and its role in climate change. The COP people agreed that the ocean plays a role in mitigating a climate disaster.


Miss B.: Sorry, I wasn’t listening. Did you say there were 50,000 attendees? Fifty thousand?…Oh! And I assume they all left feeling enthusiastic about their universal agreement that the oceans are important to the climate systems.


Mr. A.: Well, of course. And people agreed that the oceans should be studied more systematically.


Miss B.: You are aware, aren’t you, that since 70% of the planet is covered by water, the oceans play an integral role in climate? Take ocean currents, for example. Have you noticed that where there are cold currents on the western sides of continents, there are deserts on the continents? Have you noticed that where maritime air enters a continent, it spreads moisture over the continent, making a region like the American Gulf Coast a bit humid by comparison with the American Southwest? Have you noticed that the Gulf Stream affects the climate of Ireland? That the Labrador Current affects the climate of New England? Fifty thousand COP attendees. What are they going to do about ENSO to change the world? What did they accomplish beyond adding carbon to the atmosphere and walking away saying, “See, we care”? You’re telling me that they decided the ocean is important? I’m impressed. Who’d a thunk it? 


Mr. A.: It was important to get everybody in agreement. Everyone there said that we should be doing something.


Miss B.: Yeah. Stop flying around the planet unnecessarily. So, COP28 will be the next big conference. COP29 the one after that; COPAdInfinitum after that. And at each conference people will agree that “something must be done,” probably even if the so called climate crisis doesn’t occur. But then, I guess every weather phenomenon will be labeled a climate issue. You will get on a plane next year and go to another conference where you will have drinks and hors d’oeuvres, maybe some caviar, and definitely some steak—when no one is looking because, as you know, cows add methane to the atmosphere.


Mr. A.: Go ahead, mock. We’re getting the world to recognize a problem and find ways to prevent a disaster.


Miss B.: Really? Find ways? Or are you finding ways to set civilization back centuries? You don’t want fossil fuels? I guess you don’t want the advantages they bring to raising lifespans, supplying hospitals with reliable power, heating and air conditioning the very buildings where the COP conferences are held, and providing the most convenient means of travel the world has ever seen. I guess you’ll ride a horse to the next conference.


Mr. A.: You climate deniers…


Miss B.: “Deniers!” Why, because I see the product of your claiming there’s a climate crisis just because the world might have warmed a degree Celsius over the past 150 years though there also seems to be a “pause” in that warming over the last twenty years? Is more carbon dioxide bad for the crops? Is it really possible to associate weather events, even droughts, with overall climate change? Did the Mayans and Anasazi civilizations suffer long-term droughts because they burned fossil fuels? Is there proof that a warming world will not reverse its own warming as it has many times? Warmer oceans? More evaporation. More evaporation more clouds. More clouds, more sunlight reflected to space and cooler temperatures. More sunspots? Fewer sunspots? 


Mr. A.: But we scientists agree that…


Miss B.: Who agrees. Look at the contradictions in the IPCC reports. Look at the IPCC’s own statements. Hold on; wait, I have one here. Here it is. This is your so called “crisis.” One IPCC executive summary says: “For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers…Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.”


Mr. A.: But 97%…


Miss B.: Come on, we all know that figure of “scientists” or scientific consensus has been debunked, that it is based on a flawed and limited survey and that it even includes “nonscientists” who have been convinced that there’s a crisis. And all the while that you COP attendees worry that something must be done and sign away your potential for individual wealth in the grand redistribution scheme, the Chinese and Indians keep burning fossil fuels in an attempt to achieve economic dominance.


Mr. A.: Look at all the good we have done…


​Miss B.: What? What good? Yes, we now have some alternate energy sources. That’s good, but you haven’t changed any world climate by one iota. Twenty-seven conferences and all I have heard is talk, talk, talk. And it’s always the same “We must act now.” Want to act now? Stop going to conferences all over the planet. Follow Jimmy Carter’s advice. In the depth of winter keep your thermostat at 55. Wear a sweater. You’ll be immensely uncomfortable, but you’ll save energy in the short term. You'll "save" the planet. 


Mr. A.: You just don’t understand. We’re in a crisis.


Miss B.: I think I do understand. We have crisis-level hypocrisy and ineptitude. We have a crisis of money spent on unreliable energy systems. We have a crisis born of belief over skepticism. We have a crisis of the wealthy flying everywhere to tell people not to use the cheap, abundant energy that electrified the civilized world and that all the Third World countries desire. Keep those remote villagers in the dark! Keep them hot in summer and cold in winter. Decrease their growing longevity to pre-Industrial times. Limit their carbon footprint to some small cooking fires. In the meantime, you fly to exotic locations and reap all the benefits of a fossil fueled economy. But, hey, you're saving the planet, right? 


Mr. A.: You’re just impossible…


Miss B.: And that’s your scientific assessment? Hey. Enjoy yourself at COP28 in Dubai. I hear there might be as many as 80,000 delegates. Nothing like holding the event in a cheap Motel 6 along an American Interstate! Eventually, at some distant COP as the population of delegates grows exponentially, just about every other person on the planet will be an attendee. Dubai? Give me a break.

When my youngest child was just three years old, we traveled south for a vacation. Packed into our station wagon, the five of us stopped on a Saturday night in North Carolina, where someone asked where we “were from.” The three-year-old said confidently, “We’re from America.” Today, when that three-year-old, who travels widely as a consultant and speaker, is asked to identify “where he is from,” he typically says, “Pittsburgh.” But he’s not; that is, neither he nor we ever lived within the boundaries of Pittsburgh. Yet, what he says is not a lie; we are, as southwestern Pennsylvanians, as much “from Pittsburgh” as are those who live in the urban center. And for various reasons.


First, like so many others who live near, but not in cities, we identify with an economic center. Second, as in much of the country, we identify with sports teams, specifically with the Steelers and Pirates, and also with a major university football team, the Pitt Panthers. Third, many in the area identify by companies located within or on the periphery of the city. At one time, those companies were the massive steel mills that employed tens of thousands. And at the heart of the downtown district in the pre-and post-WWII, lay a central shopping district with three very large department stores that anchored hundreds of other businesses—all, for the most part, now long gone. Fourth, the city houses the local TV stations and major theaters, as well as museums, major hospitals, research universities, revitalized neighborhoods, and traditional bar and restaurant agglomerations: The South Side, the Strip District, and a number of other popular spots from Shadyside to the North Side. Pittsburgh draws the allegiance of western Pennsylvanians. In that sense, my three-year-old now grown up is “from Pittsburgh.”


Anyway, isn’t it just easier to say “I’m from Pittsburgh” instead of saying, “I’m from some town you never heard of that lies in a region generally known as southwestern Pennsylvania”? Dotted by villages and townships plus some actual “towns” and “boroughs,” the region has one overriding identity: Pittsburgh. And the same, I dare say, can be said for other regions: Chicago, Atlanta, Savannah, etc. When the place where one lives has no national significance, then the closest place with such significance becomes the center.


There is a large body of literature that centers on urban centers. The sociology of cities is replete in hypotheses and theories, some of them purely numerical analyses of why cities use the space they confine and house the people they house. Much of that literature is at best esoteric, using statistical models that do not seem to capture the life of those who live in cities or associate their identities with them.


And that makes me think of an argument I once had with a sociologist. He said, following a model of cities he favored, that medieval European cities were walled with a central large structure, the cathedral. It was that wall and that dominant structure that defined the personality of the people: It’s how they identified as being “from” somewhere. He then argued that the modern city was amorphous, the product of suburban development enhanced by commuting that decentralized life that was once limited to the walkable city neighborhoods. No longer, he argued, could one identify with a city center, a major plaza, or a majestic cathedral.


To which I responded with a single word: Steelers. Not that I might put professional football and a stadium at the heart of a city—though the stadium in Pittsburgh is, in fact, a “heart”—but symbolically, the football stadium and the baseball stadium are both “in the heart” of the city. In other words, whereas my friend saw suburban development as a dissolution of the centripetal forces that make a city a “center,” I saw a cathedral replacement in the symbolic center. That one can easily find as many if not more people focused on a Sunday on the Steelers as are focused on a local cathedral, is indicative that a city is more than a walled space with only those contained within labeled as “from Pittsburgh.” And the “cathedral” of sports casts a shadow over communities far and wide: One can find a “Steeler bar” in Reno, Nevada, and fans of the city’s team in other communities both in and outside the country. Pittsburgh isn’t a walled city. It’s a symbolic center. The stadium is, as St. Peters in Rome is for Catholics, a center that holds.


As the steel mills failed in the 1970s and 1980s, Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods also failed. Where pride in the community declined with a declining population, disrepair became the signature feature punctuated by occasional attempts to revitalize. But a bit too late, I might add. The suburbanization of the region had begun. Yes, the region became physically amorphous by comparison to the city of the pre-and-post-war years, but it had retained a loyalty among the suburbanites so much so that they still identify as being, in the eyes of outsiders, “from Pittsburgh.”


And now, especially after a pandemic and the development of cyberspace, the center is changing again for those once located within city boundaries. Is the concept of a “city” undergoing another change? Remember the emigration of New Yorkers during the pandemic? Will they return physically, or will they reconnect to the city via Zoom or some other cyber mechanism? Do those who leave carry their city-identity with them forever? Is a "brand new Floridian" just an "ex-New Yorker"? 


Pittsburgh still attracts suburbanites because it has retained theaters and restaurants, sports teams and universities, museums and boutique shops. It still runs festivals that attract “outsiders.” But it isn’t the city it was of a half century ago. Yet, in its difference, it somehow still centers identities of western Pennsylvanians and emigrants to other parts of the nation. It is a center that “holds.”


This leads me to ask you, “Where are you from?”

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine writes, “The more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” One might think he was foreshadowing problems we experience with our complex technology, but his focus was government. The same notion that “simple is best” lies at the heart of Thomas Jefferson’s thought that “that government that governs least, governs best.”


Of course, a twenty-first century political philosopher might easily argue that the America of Paine and Jefferson differed greatly from America today, so neither expression is applicable to the country—or to any current society. America just has “too many people” for an eighteenth-century ideal. Add globalization, and the notion of a “more simple government” fades to a distant social and political memory as some quaint, but old(e) thought.


Simplicity breeds its own problems, anyway, so its efficacy in the body politic is largely mythical. Thus, the relatively simple American Constitution has undergone tweaking since its inception. And it will continue to undergo nuanced interpretations. I suppose we could also argue that the Ten Commandments also beg reinterpretation in every age and circumstance. Or, take those two Commandments of Christ: Love God; love your neighbor as you love yourself. One need only look at the many Christian denominations, social barriers, and wars to see where those seemingly simple commandments led because of the way they have been interpreted. Neighbor? Yes, but not So-n-So.    


Each of us encounters a struggle between simplicity and complexity in a cycle that makes explaining core values difficult. We might start with a simple ideal only to realize that its manifestation requires a complex of actions based on the realities of daily life. The recent pandemic laid the context for one version of the dilemma that might play out again as wintertime sicknesses spread a shadow over society in 2022 and 2023. Government “officials” are toying again with mandatory masks, for example, and with mandatory isolation and vaccinations. Those solutions bring, as everyone discovered over the past two years, complex responses without guaranteed results and generate their own problems. In a complex world of billions, someone somewhere has to interact with others. Simple rules? Many applications!   


Apparently, though everyone can see a value in simplicity, no one wants to have others impose it. Simplicity is a personal matter, and it lies embedded in our sense of freedom. We can choose to live hermit-like, but we balk at any attempt to impose the hermetic life on us. And whenever we see those “in charge” imposing on others restrictions they do not impose on themselves in blatant hypocrisy, we rebel or we become angry: Why should, for example, a Gavin Newsom have an unmasked dinner at an expensive winery while restaurant patrons around the state have no similar freedom? Why should those who proclaim the evils of fossil fuels and impose restrictions on them be able to jet around the world so proclaiming? Their “simple” solutions apply to you, but not to them. They perceive your life as simple, whereas they perceive their own as complex.


Simplicity is a social ideal whose practice generates contradictions and hypocrisy. When a complex government attempts to impose simplicity on its citizenry, inevitable bad consequences follow. One need only look at the test scores of American students to see how a “simple solution” of widespread “public” homeschooling engendered other problems, complex problems, for individuals.


The threat to individual freedom arises whenever government officials seek simple solutions to complex problems. Their only recourse is reductionism that bespeaks control of the masses—and, with the exceptions of a self-proclaimed “elite class,” the individuals that make up those masses.


Much of the universe appears to run on irony, and that seems especially true of human societies. As governments grew from more simple to more complex, they have sought simple solutions to complex problems. Big government ironically seeks to simplify and in the process makes life more complicated. Look at the number of pages of regulations in any government agency to see how, for example, a simple principle like “clean water” or “clean air” has become encyclopedic in practice, so complex that agencies have multiple “specialists” because no one person or group can handle all in their purview.


And the irony extends to millions who prefer by their vote a more complex government over a more simple one—again in the ironic belief that the Big Government will offer simple solutions. They freely exchange their individual complexity and its freedoms for imposed simplicity that results in an unwanted complexity. In every instance, government-imposed simplicity lies on a path to totalitarianism and greater personal debt with only the “elite” enjoying the freedoms denied the masses. That path is paved with future earnings, as the recently passed “Inflation Reduction Act” will reveal in the payroll of 87,000 new IRS agents that will grow over the next decades and beyond, especially as their eventual pensions mount astronomically. If over the next two decades those agents achieve the current $62,000 average IRS salary, the bill will be at least $100 billion. The complexity of tax collection now includes at least nine categories of government employees whose ranks will swell with the new additions. *


Jefferson and Paine envisioned a government Aeolus, the god of the winds who gave Odysseus a bag that contained unfavorable breezes. With all but a favorable wind bound up, Odysseus could continue his journey home. His crew, thinking that the bag held some treasure they could share, opened it and released the unfavorable winds that blew the ship off course. Big government is out of the bag and blowing the ship of state in whatever direction the many agencies desire, many of them at cross purposes or in redundancies. It’s too late to put the winds back in the bag. What Jefferson and Paine proposed cannot be achieved.


*The Office of Personnel Management lists the following IRS positions:

1. Tax Examining
2. Internal Revenue Agent
3. Information Technology Management
4. Miscellaneous Clerk And Assistant
5. Financial Administration And Program
6. Management And Program Analysis
7. Internal Revenue Officer
8. Criminal Investigation
9. Financial Clerical And Assistance

   

Bill: If I had been in charge of the B-21 rollout today, I would have done the whole event differently.


Sam: You’re talking about America’s sixth-generation bomber, right? 


Bill: Yep. It’s supposed to be the most stealthy plane ever. If I wanted to frighten America’s enemies, I would have shown an empty hangar. And I would have had a crowd of actors oohing and ahhing as they looked on an empty space. Imagine the enemy military generals saying, “It’s impossible to see!”

Old theme: Choose your wishes wisely.


VERSION ONE


Characters:     Comrade Mephistovsky
        Contract soldiers
        Conscripts


ACT ONE
Scene: RUSSIA—All of it, that is, plus some allied places


Comrade Mephistovsky: Sign this temporary contract to fight in Ukraine, and you will receive…
Contract Soldier 1: Where do we sign? Can we keep what we take from the dead? Will we be home in time to plant the potatoes?
C M: Sign here. And Yes, and Yes. And there will be women to rape and houses to plunder. The Ukrainians will run from our military thunder.


ACT TWO
Scene: Ukraine—eastern


Contract Soldier 1: Where is Comrade Mephistovsky?
Contract Soldier 2: He said he was going back for more supplies, but that was a month ago. I want to go home, but the Wagner Group has guns trained on us if we turn to flee.
Contract Soldier 1: My wife says we have never received a payment on my contract.
Contract Soldier 2: Look, here come some conscripts. Finally! Some help…Where are your weapons? You can’t fight without weapons!
Conscripts: They said we would get them from the dead.


ACT THREE;
Scene: Hell


Contract Soldier 1: I’m hit. Take me to the medics.
Contract Soldier 2: Sorry, Comrade, but like me, you signed up voluntarily. We can’t turn to go back, or we’ll be shot. Blyat!
Contract Soldier 1: Hello! Aunt. Tell my family to get me out. What? No, I can’t bring you something from Ukraine. It’s Hell here.
Contract Soldier 2: Look! It’s Mephistovsky. What’s he doing?
Contract Soldier 1: He’s robbing our own dead.




VERSION TWO


Characters:     Adam
                       Eve


IN ONE ACT
Scene: The West—meaning western culture, most of it, from Europe through the Americas to the western-thinking land called Australia
        
Adam: There’s really not much one can do to change things. Big Money, Big Press, and Big Government make decisions that affect large portions of the planet. What can the little people do?


Eve:  You can stand up like the Chinese who are rebelling over oppressive shutdowns, like the Russians who are rebelling over conscription into a senseless war, or like the Iranians who are rebelling against a brutal theocracy.


Adam: You know how all that will turn out. Xi will send in the military, and the Russians and Iranians will use their secret police and regular police to suppress the rebels. The protesters are as doomed to fail as were the Hungarians in 1956, the Chinese in 1989 in Tiananmen Square, and the Tibetans in 2008. Those in power will not relinquish their power. Their brutality knows no bounds because they do not personally carry out their orders. They remain indifferent to the plight of those they rule.


Eve: I know that most people don’t have the bravery to protest against powerful governments. I also know that once the Press is a controlled agent of a political party, there is little one can do to defend against relentless attacks unless…unless one is Big Money. Big Money can provide itself an immunity. But the little guy is pretty much helpless, especially when Big Money supports Big Government that controls Big Press.


Adam: Yes, I have seen the scenario play out repeatedly over the past decades, getting worse as the Bigs grow bigger. And the irony is that the little guy keeps the Bigs in power by voting for Big Government, listening to Big Press, and supporting the products of Big Money. Modern people are very much caught in the same kind of endless cycle that trapped coal miners in the early twentieth century. The coal companies owned the land, owned the houses on them, owned the company store, and they kept their workers in a cyclic impoverishment. Workers lived in company houses as long as they worked for the company; they had to buy from the company store that simply gave the profits back to the company; and when a mining accident took the life of a miner, his family had to provide another worker or move out. Miners and their families found escaping the cycle nearly impossible. That seems to be the story of today’s population: Work for Big Money; buy Big Money’s products; pay Big Money’s bills; stay in relative impoverishment through Big Government’s taxes and innumerable regulations; and take in all the propaganda from Big Press that argues things could never be better.
    It just dawned on me that most Americans, Europeans, and Canadians who pay attention to the news, probably think the propaganda behind the Russian media’s support for Putin’s war is obvious, but for some reason cannot see the propaganda to which the Bigs subject them. The exertion of control over the little guy is a relentless process that wears down those who protest. The little guy’s own obeisance to the Bigs occurs in the context of no reciprocation.


Eve: As in Big Government’s control over education?


Adam: Not just Big Gov’s control, but Big Union’s control. Look at the manipulation of young minds by a select few with an indoctrination agenda. I can’t imagine how we’ll get past the last few years of teaching people what to think rather than how to think.


Eve: But look at what the two of us are doing? We’re simply repeating the obvious. Who cannot see how the Bigs control the masses? The question still becomes one about personal action: What are you going to do about it, Adam?


Adam: You’re right. Morning diner talk at best. Your questions are rhetorical. We’re not different from the retirees meeting in the local coffee shop, the barber shop, or the diner making the same complaints daily while taking no measurable action. Those who discover the entrapment by the Bigs usually do so without recourse. They dwell in the company houses, buy at the company store, and renew the cycle of feckless futility.


Eve: I guess we are, that is, many of us are, modern versions of Faust. We’ve sold our soul for the promises of Big Mephistopheles. Big M has bought our individual integrity, or rather, has allowed us to purchase our integrity at his profit. I think of those Russians who were told they could earn some money if they signed a contract to fight in Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine. Then, finding themselves in a Hell they hadn’t envisioned when they signed, the soldiers discover that the promise was empty.


Adam: I like the analogy. If we look around, we see the rotten fruit of our choice to sign. I think of the Mephistophelean educators who have lured hundreds of thousands into academic pursuits that will lead to a life of servitude or impoverishment, or to a life in “the company village.” And tied to a socialist-leaning government that holds up the carrot of loan forgiveness, the young give away their future freedoms so that Big Party can stay in control. They see the loan forgiveness in the context of their present, and not in the context of a bill that will come due in increased taxes. Egged on by a complicit Press comprised of reporters who also have college loans to pay, the young see themselves in an eternal present and believe Mephistopheles will never show up to collect his due. Trust me. We’ve both seen this promise before, back when we lived in The Garden. Damned Snake Mephisto!


Eve: I remember reading William A. Henry III’s In Defense of Elitism. In it he argues that a long-standing battle between striving for excellence and striving for equity was being won by forces of the latter for the purpose of population control. In equity, only those who already have get more. The Bigs stay big. He also writes about Margaret Mead’s speculation that the United States was entering a new Dark Ages of medieval mysticism and mumbo-jumbo, of belief based on self-interest, mob politics, and fear rather than research and open-minded inquiry.” (3)* Like those Russians who will be shot by other Russians if they try to flee, we people in the West will be endlessly harassed by the minions of the Bigs if we attempt to reverse the trend.


Adam: Mead was right. We’re living in that Hell now. Way back in The Garden, we signed a contract with Mephisto for a life of ease, thinking that it was an eternal contract. And now we find the contract is coming to an end. We’ve given up much to gain little.   


*New York. Anchor Books. 1994.