Tags
Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, Earth, Environment, Global warming, Inequility, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.
(Ten -minute read)
It’s time to cut out the bullshit and get a grip when it comes to climate change.
The effects of human activities on Earth’s climate to date are now irreversible on the timescale of human lifetimes.
So the key question is, what will our emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants be in the years to come?
The simple reason for this is that it is impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy just how much greenhouse gases are going to be released in the next few centuries, and just how much this is going to affect the climate.
Electrical Cars, Solar Panels, Wind turbines, and technology might all help reductions in carbon emissions but they are all products. They all use the earth’s finite resources to produce profit for companies that created the world of Profit for Profit’s sake that has to lead us down the slippery path to climate change.
In my opinion, any new normal ( which is going to be far from normal ) has to hold fossil burning industries accountable or nationalizing them till we reach a point where sustainable energy generates higher financial returns than coal and oil.
The harsh reality of climate change is now playing out in real-time before our very eyes, with some of the negative changes already locked into the climate system, while global efforts to reduce carbon emissions are not moving fast enough to avoid irreversible damage to the planet.
Any solutions are going to take years to have any effect so we need to adapt: or, in other words, get used to the realities of this new, heated-up, wet, violent, world.
We all know that the climate challenges we are facing on the planet transcend national boundaries.
At present we being told that’s, it’s not too late to stop the forthcoming climate changes totally making our planet unlivable if we move to clean energy.
However clean energy is only one part of the challenge because the inequalities in the world demand a fundamental overhaul of existing social, political, and economic norms.
It is this new perception that needs to be contagious so it is adopted globally.
The shocking truth is that climate change has only just begun.
In other words, whatever the mitigation efforts of future civilizations, climate change is here to stay. Regardless of future emission trends, the CO2 footprint from our brief passage on Earth is going to remain in the climate system and impact the well-being of all terrestrial life forms for what could almost be considered an eternity.
In the last year, we are seeing with the current Covid pandemic that we live in a world where HARMONIZATION of any actions is impossible.
We will witness this in the forthcoming Cop-out / Cop26 summit.
The above perception is highly unlikely to happen.
Why?
Because the climate change problems will probably worsen before — or indeed if — it gets better, no one wants to bear costs of change that will fall on – the poor.
Long before this ever happens, humanity must prepare itself for an inland retreat and a constant battle against rising seawater that will continue for hundreds and hundreds of years into the future.
We are incredibly adaptable, but at the psychological level, there’s going to be tremendous disruption among families, societies, nations, etc. when change occurs.
Anything that helps an organism survives in its environment is an adaptation.
Adaptation is an acknowledgment that this.
Some of that change is a given, but not all of it.
For example:
Loss of traditions, habitat, and cultural heritage, and the distress that comes with moving away from the land where your ancestors are buried, where you’ve lived all your life. Not to mention the extinction of species, animals and plants, and coral reefs, and all kinds of living things, those we depend on and those with which we simply share ecosystems.
None of the solutions so far even begin to address the possibility of an impending mental health crisis due to the upheaval associated with managed retreat and other forms of climate migration.
How do you convince a community that their home will not be habitable?
How do you make room for rural refugees to live in a crowded city?
Climate mitigation is hard, and we are running out of time to do it, but I would argue that adaptation in its absence will actually be a million times harder.
Without substantial cuts to our collective carbon imprint, many more lives will be lost trying to adapt to a changing environment, and countless more will be made meaningfully worse.
Why wouldn’t we do what we can to avoid that?
The long course of human evolution shows that climate disruption, which is what we’re going through right now and in the foreseeable future, is associated with the demise of ways of life.
As difficult as it may be, there is a vast scale of loss associated with climate change that one has to try to comprehend and accept in order to understand the urgency of the situation.
THE NEED FOR HARMONIZATION to anticipate the actual and expected effects of climate change and take appropriate action to prevent or minimize the impacts.
How will we feel when the air inside feels tinny and canned when all of this feels like our future?
The two main responses so far to climate change are Mitigation and Adaptation – they must go hand in hand.
Adaptation can be planned in advance but it must go beyond just development to include the global food system, which encompasses production, and post-farm process such as processing, and distribution is also a key contributor to emissions. And it’s a problem for which we don’t yet have viable technological solutions.
Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions. So we will need a menu of solutions: changes to diets; food waste reduction; improvements in agricultural efficiency; and technologies that make low-carbon food alternatives scalable and affordable.
Methane warms the world twenty times faster than carbon.
Junk-food chains, including KFC and Pizza Hut, McDonald’s have spread around the world.
Take McDonald’s.
- It has about 28,000 restaurants worldwide, opening around 2,000 new ones each year
The food industry spends billions a year in advertising and promotion to persuade people to eat more food.
In short, then, this is another example of wasted wealth, wasted capital, wasted labor, and wasted resources.
On top of all this while the earth warms up it has the capability of releasing 1.5 trillion tons of organic carbon twice as much as Earths, atmosphere currently holds.
The planet is the ultimate ‘global commons’. It belongs to neither a particular individual nor a particular nation. Nor does it belong to a single generation such as us, our children, or our grandchildren.
Instead, it belongs to all living creatures both alive now and in the future. Just as all of humanity is connected ‘horizontally’ across the globe, so too are all past and future life forms bound ‘vertically’ in a continual unfolding of the story of life.
So when you buy something, you buy something that lasts; you buy it because you really need it and want to take care of it. It is none other than this consideration for future human beings and other life forms that should form the yardstick by which we set our mitigation targets — not merely what is politically and economically feasible for the industrialized world today.
Yet the political and economic institutions of our civilization are fixated on enjoying the present and unable to account for the consequences of our actions on tomorrow.
Corporations and governments are forever borrowing from the future in order to improve the present.
All human comments are appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.
All of them are presenting overwhelming challenges ahead.
(A Banshee is an Irish female spirit who wails outside a home to warn of the imminent death of a family member. Often heard before she is seen, her wailing is that high-pitched that nobody willingly dares to attempt to witness this terrifying spirit.)
