"Awash in primordial guilt, primed for sacrifice,' baseball fans are easy target for climate profiteers and thought police"

"On opening day of the 2007 baseball season, the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays stood in front of the giant jumbotron, an electronic extravaganza, encircled by a ring of dancing corporate logos and advertising,

• and exhorted every person in the crowd, preposterously, to go out and

• buy an energy-efficient light bulb.

• They applauded."...

"If the corporate climate change campaign has fuelled a fevered popular preoccupation with global warming, it has also accomplished much more. Having arisen

• in the midst of the world-wide global justice movement,

• it has restored confidence in those very faiths and forces which that movement had worked so hard to expose and challenge: globe-straddling profit-maximizing corporations and
• their myriad agencies and agendas;

the unquestioned authority of science and the corollary belief in deliverance through technology, and the beneficence of the self-regulating market with its panacea of prosperity through free trade,

• and its magical powers which transforms into commodities all that it touches, even life.

All the glaring truths revealed by that movement about the injustices, injuries, and inequalities sowed and sustained by these powers and beliefs have now been buried, brushed aside in the apocalyptic rush to fight global warming.

• Explicitly likened to a war,

this epic challenge requires single-minded attention and total commitment, without any such distractions. Now is not the time, nor is there any need,

• to question a deformed society or re-examine its
• underlying myths.

The blame and the burden has been shifted back again to the individual, awash in primordial guilt, the familiar sinner facing punishment for his sins, his excesses,

• predisposed by his pious culture and primed now for discipline and sacrifice.

On opening day of the 2007 baseball season, the owner of the Toronto Blue Jays stood in front of the giant jumbotron, an electronic extravaganza, encircled by a ring of dancing corporate logos and advertising, and exhorted every person in the crowd, preposterously, to go out and buy an energy-efficient light bulb. They applauded."...

• From "Opposing Views on Global Warming: The Corporate Climate Climate Coup," by Prof. David F. Noble, 5/4/07, Toronto

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