NY Times: A liberal female gets in a fight with her boyfriend over...a kerosene lamp?

A day after the indictment of a former president, we interrupt the analysis of big world-threatening problems to see what some people are arguing about:

The piece below--published by the NY Times, so they love it--is about an ardent female greenie who gets into an argument with her similarly-green boyfriend because he has the climate-denying audacity to use a real, classic, flame-burning lantern for light in his sailboat.  

Seriously.  I've edited it to remove a ton of padding.

We'd been dating for six months when we had a big fight--over the carbon footprint of a kerosene lamp.

We'd finished dinner in the cozy cabin of his sailboat when Doug stood up and banged his head on the kerosene lantern that dangled from the ceiling.

I teased him because he did this almost every night, and then I told him about a book I had been reading that listed kerosene as one of the dirtiest fossil fuels.

“I guess we should probably get a different lantern,” I said. “Maybe LED.”

“I love this lamp,” he said, relighting it. The lamp's warm, yellow light filled the cabin.

Reading by the light of that kerosene lamp felt like going back in time.  But I often wished I had a headlamp when reading, my already poor eyesight undoubtedly worsening as I squinted under the dull glow.  But it did make everything feel romantic.

Still, I told him what I'd read, how kerosene burns dirtier than almost any other fossil fuel and releases carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, both terrible for indoor air quality.

I stumbled over some of the facts. I had listened to the book on tape, and though I had come away convinced that the lantern was bad, I was fuzzy on the details.

“This really doesn’t seem dirty," he said. "There’s no soot, no smell. I think it’s fine.”

“It’s one of the dirtiest fossil fuels you could possibly burn. And it would be so easy to switch. You probably wouldn’t even notice, other than maybe we’d actually be able to see at night. Why are you so resistant to doing something that’s undeniably better for the earth?”

“I don’t care about the carbon footprint of one measly lantern,” he said. “I like it and I’m not going to get rid of it.”

“I hate that you’re so apathetic,” I said.

“You’re being ridiculous,” he said. There was a sharp, loud quality to his voice that I’d never heard before.

At that point, I uttered some sweeping generalization about privileged men and their lack of empathy, which made him furious that I was turning this into a judgment on his character and had gotten all worked up over nothing.

I tried to explain in six different ways why this was important to me and why the impending collapse of the natural world should be explanation enough for why I was upset, but I was doing it with rage in my voice and it was coming out all wrong.

He just kept repeating that he couldn’t understand why we were fighting over this, which made me even more frustrated that he wasn’t listening.

After an hour of fruitless back-and-forth, I was on the verge of tears. The situation felt entirely irreconcilable.  I knew I had taken it too far, yet I couldn’t stop.

Doug is certainly pro-environment. He's spent most of his adult life in the marine conservation field  Still, I worried that the big issues of the world didn’t seem to affect Doug the same way that they affected me.

Our political leanings were more or less aligned, and we shared similar dreams for the future, so I didn’t understand how he managed to go about his life without succumbing to the same existential dread and anger that plagued me.

There's more, and you can click here if you're curious.  One of the amusing things is that after all her bitching, it turns out that what he's using in the lantern is NOT kerosene.  But the real point is how this female writer seems to perfectly represent your average OMG-we're-all-gonna-DIE eco-freak.  

That is, she eagerly jumps into what she describes as the worst argument of their half-year relationship over something she admits she doesn't know much about.  I suspect she actually doesn't know anything about atmospheric physics or global warming (simply because she passed on a great chance to educate Times readers), yet she's totally passionate about arguing for ending the use of a fuel about which she knows nothing but the emotional, non-scientific drivel she's read in the Times and The Atlantic and Vogue.

If you asked her why the push to end carbon fuels is NOT seen in the largest user of coal--China--and she'll have no idea about either point.  She won't believe China burns more coal than any other country, or that it opens an average of two new coal-fired generating plants every WEEK.

She also won't believe there is NO public or government pressure in China to do away with carbon fuels--because the Chinese know coal is a great way to make low-cost, abundant electricity, which makes life more productive. Killing carbon fuels makes life harder.  The people of China haven't been propagandized by their media and government to hate such a valuable thing as energy.  

So while your rulers here passed laws to charge consumers more to pay to build bird-killing, unreliable wind turbines, the Chinese build reliable, long-lived coal-fired generating plants.  Hmmm...

But the gal writing this piece for the liberal/Democrat Times knows nothing of this.  All she "knows" is that the level of CO2 in the air is higher than at any time in history!  Oh wait...that's a brazen lie.

My bet is she has no idea what percentage of the atmosphere is CO2--not within a factor of ten.  She also doesn't know that a few thousand years ago CO2 levels were 20 times higher than now, and yet the world didn't burn up.  Didn't even get much warmer than today.  Yet the theory by the "warmies" is that rising CO2 will turn the Earth into a big desert and flood all the coastal cities.

I routinely ask my college students what gas is the largest component of air.  Nine out of ten say CO2.  When I tell them air is actually 79% nitrogen and 19% oxygen, you can see the confusion in their eyes.  They realize that means CO2 can't be over one percent.

When I tell 'em CO2 actually comprises just four one-hundredths of one percent of the air, and that plants grow better with higher CO2 than we have now, you can really see the wheels starting to spin.

Finally, when I tell 'em moronic politicians ruling the EU is passing "rules" to limit the amount of fertilizer farmers can use, and that pols ruling Europe's biggest food exporter (the Netherlands) are buying up farmland and shutting down farms, all to limit a so-called greenhouse gas claimed to be "worse than CO2," they start to open their eyes.