Thursday, August 15, 2013

Revkin just sang "Liberated Carbon" at scioClimate: He's removed the references to Satan and replaced them with "someone" and "BP" (I believe)

2008: Q&A: Andrew Revkin : Columbia Journalism Review
CB: In your Chancellor speech you mentioned that one thing isn’t the same, though. You wrote a song called, “Liberated Carbon,” but recently changed some of the words?

AR: Well, folk music is a plastic and evolutionary process. Originally, it said, “Satan came along and said, ‘Hey, try lighting this.’ He opened the ground and showed us coal and oil.” And, you know, I thought a lot about that. I probably approached the song initially in the voice of your traditional, Bob Dylan rabble-rouser. And now I look back, and I think, you know, it’s not Satan; it’s normal. It’s just us.

So I changed it to, “Someone came along and said, ‘Hey, try lighting this,’” which is much more human and real. And as many of my free-market, blog-commenter friends would say, look at all the benefits that have come from burning fossil fuels. So I evolved the song. And I don’t see it as an apologist saying, “Oh yeah, that was bad.” I do think it’s correct, so I changed it. And someone can say, “Oh, Revkin, you’re caving to fossil fuels.” I don’t think I’m caving; I think it’s true. And it’s been blogged on before by climate contrarians who thought they had a big ‘gotcha’ thing.
2006 Flashback:  Revkin suggested that coal and oil are Tools of Satan
Then Satan came along and said, 'Hey, try lighting this.'
...
Note that the video includes the lines:

"Satan's Black Label burns in my SUV" and "they say things are getting hotter, but hey, we've got AC".

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