‘Liberated Carbon, It’ll Turn Your Night to Day’

Op-Ed by Andrew Revkin, New York Times, August 16, 2013

Via Climate Nexus and Daniel M.N. Turner, here’s video of my performance of “Liberated Carbon,” my short musical history of humanity’s love affair with fossil fuels, at the ScienceOnline Climate conference in Washington, D.C., yesterday.

Video of my full talk, “Is the Internet Good for the Climate,” is now online. I think you’ll find value in the full suite of sessions (the meeting continues through today). The best way to track the flow is by following the #ScioClimate tag on Twitter.

This morning saw a particularly fascinating discussion of “Credibility, Trust, Goodwill, and Persuasion” (video link) involving Dan Kahan, the Yale scholar focused on the cultural filters that shape people’s responses to scientific findings, the Pennsylvania State University climatologist Michael E. Mann, and Thomas Armstrong, the director of national coordination for the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

For those who missed earlier posts about my carbon song, here are the annotated lyrics:

It took a thousand generations for our species to rise.
But gathering and hunting was no way to get by.
We yearned to burn more than dung and sticks.
Then someone [1] came along and said, “Hey, try lighting this.”
He opened up the ground and showed us coal and oil.
He said, “Come liberate some carbon. It’ll make your blood boil.”

Liberated carbon, it’ll spin your wheels.
Liberated carbon it’ll nuke your meals.
Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.
Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.

Now I got peat swamp fossils running my TV.
BP’s black label burns in my S.U.V.
We can light up the planet like a Christmas tree.
They say that things are getting hot but, hey, we’ve got A.C.

Liberated carbon, it’ll spin your wheels.
Liberated carbon it’ll nuke your meals.
Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.
Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.

Pump those electrons and that gasoline.
No sweat or hurry, just turn on a machine.
We sent an army to the desert to keep this country free,
And to liberate some carbon, baby, for you and me…

Liberated carbon it’ll spin your wheels.
Liberated carbon, it’ll nuke your meals.
Liberated carbon, it’ll turn your night to day.
Come on and liberate some carbon, babe, it’s the American way.

___
1 ) When I first wrote the tune, I used “Satan” here. I explained my decision to change it to “someone” in a recent interview with Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review.

Here’s the full “music video”:  Here.

And here’s a link to some of my other songs on YouTube.

Photo:  Andrew Revkin and legendary Pete Seeger.