groupthink 101

It’s Climate Emergency Week (actually 2 weeks) at UBC and exciting events are going off under the school’s official banner, including anti-mining demonstrations and a mega climate action rally at City Hall. Back in the 70s, a time when we were told that the earth was cooling, activism was something the Student Union took on. Now, apparently the university itself coordinates the social/environmental protests directly.

Undergraduates, still distancing themselves from ignorant parents, are easy prey when UBC hypes-out: We are confronted with overwhelming evidence that our world in hurtling towards a future with irreversible and catastrophic consequences. (emphasis added)

​The list of events this week is completely one-sided, including a talk by The Sixth Extinction author, Elizabeth Kolbert, whose bleak vision of the future is offset a little by the Psychology Workshop: Happy Climate Action where you learn to replace negative phrases such as “eat less meat” with positive “eat more plants” ones. In another presentation it is asked: Can TikTok Help Solve The Climate Crisis? Maybe … twerking does generate a certain energy.

Where the Ivory Tower really shows its political lean is their partnership with West Coast Environmental Law's Sue Big Oil campaign (too bad they flunked grade 3 spelling though - Feburary):
​

​Without getting into why this is totally ridiculous, those who purport to be responsible for truth-seeking-education at the highest level should always act as moderator, not assistant prosecutor, in any discussion around such an alleged tort.

And why don’t we sue all universities, colleges and technology schools while we’re at it? After all they educated the people responsible for extracting the oil. Tenured professors and benefit-rich UBC administration enjoy an elite Point Grey lifestyle while obviously aware that their graduates were going to cause surging CO2 emissions. Surely those knowledgeable educators are at greater fault than the Engineering and Commerce students who are now the face of Big Oil and who have simply been applying the methodologies they were taught.
​
Sideshows like Climate Emergency Week are an academic embarrassment for a once-respectable institution that has sunk to indoctrination of their impressionable young audience. The UBC motto, Tuum Est, means It Is Yours … no it’s not.
​