I always see your posts and pictures, declaring war on capitalism, but what would the alternative be? Have you given it much thought? I understand your environmental concerns, but the point that I am making is: how would we continue to live the life which we are currently used to living, without capitalism? I am just uncertain as to your protestations. If there was one thing that you could change about the world, what would it be and how would you do it?My response:
That's a complex and important question, which I'll do my best to answer, although you'll probably have to do your own thinking and come up with your own answers too. For myself, I have thought long and hard about it.
The short answer is, no, we cannot continue to live the life we are currently living. But we can live a good life, and the sooner we change, the better that life can be.
The long answer.
We currently are consuming non-renewable resources on this planet at a rapid, and increasing rate. Those resources, being non-renewable, are by their nature limited, and so our current way of life is also limited. Some have suggested that we would need 3 planets, or 7 planets, or whatever, to maintain our way of life, but even that is missing the point—our current way of life is unsustainable, and so it cannot, and will not, last.
When I say resources, I'm not just talking about rare-earth metals and oil, although both of those are limited. I'm talking about everything that we are using up: pristine forests and lumber supplies, fresh water and river health, ocean ecosystems and pH, atmospheric stability and CO2 levels, soil fertility and agricultural reliability, democratic capital, social services, labour resilience, etc., etc. The list goes on.
Our current trajectory, "business-as-usual", is using up those resources at an alarming rate. If it isn't curbed, it will result in at least a 6ºC global temperature rise by 2100, possibly much sooner. Governments around the world, supported by the best scientific data (as calculated by the worlds' most powerful supercomputers), have recognized that a 2ºC rise in global temperatures is 'dangerous' and to be avoided. Some scientists think that even 2ºC is too generous to allow ourselves. We're currently only at 0.7ºC rise, and we're already seeing superstorms, megadroughts, massive wildfires, 400,000 climate-change-related deaths per year, and a global reduction in GDP by 1.6%. So 400,000 people each year argue with their lives that even 0.7ºC is too much!
Given the risks of a 2ºC rise, the risks of a 6ºC rise are completely unacceptable: certain collapse of the global food production systems, with a resultant collapse of civilization: resource wars, cities left abandoned, starvation in the billions, a massive die-off of human beings. When every person is desperately searching for their next drink of fresh water and next meal, the last thing anyone will be worrying about would be continuing to "live the life which we are currently used to living". On this trajectory, the survival of the human species is put into question, and some predictions even question the possibility of the survival of multi-cellular life. But this is where we're heading.
I'll say again: this is where we are currently heading.
Obviously this is unacceptable. Therefore, we have to find another way of living on this planet that accepts the limitations of the world in which we live. We have to discover a way of living that respects and protects the systems that we rely on to survive.
Does this mean we should all retreat into peasant agriculture and indigenous forest-dwelling? No. I tried that myself, and I'm confident it won't work. Most of us have lost our ability to live in such a way, and most people would cling on to the current (suicidal) system before they give up their comforts anyway. So there has to be a different way. We have to face some difficult questions, and decide which of the current comforts we really want to protect, and which we'd be willing to give up.
An easy example of something we could give up is the waste usage of electricity that many applications use when they're not in use. Commonly called "vampire power", this accounts for ~10% of the electricity used in Western countries. To stop this, we simply need to make laws that prevent vampire power from being allowed. This would mean you would have to turn your TV manually, without the remote, but that's really not that bad. Electronics should also automatically turn off after a time (after a warning). This would prevent the TV-in-the-other-room being left on: it would automatically turn off after a certain amount of time, which could be stopped by a person actively telling it to stay on (this time, with the remote).
Another thing that will need to cease is the long-distance (un-walkable/cyclable) commute. I'm sure most people wouldn't miss it anyway, but stopping the commute requires a different kind of societal planning: integrated communities where people live close to where they work (and play), with electrified public transit for the exceptions. Every job that could be done from home online (probably 95% of office jobs) should be, and service companies that require a commute should have to pay dearly for it. All of this possible, it just requires some changes to laws and zoning, and more planning. Lots of planning.
People will need to eat less meat. They'll have to have less children. They'll have to repair things more, rather than replacing broken household objects. So things will have to be built so that they last, and so that they can be repaired. Currently, it benefits business to build things to become redundant, forcing us to buy a new phone/suit/car/TV every few years. Changing this will require legal changes, changes in resource-exploitation practices, and changes in the mentality of society. All of this is possible.
However, probably the most urgent switch we'll need to make is to change our energy (electricity) source away from carbon-releasing fossil-fuels (coal, oil, gas, fracking) to renewable and carbon-neutral sources (wind and solar seem to be the best options) as soon as possible. To avoid the 2ºC temperature rise, we can only emit 565 gigatonnes more CO2 (as of 2010). Between 2010-2012 we emitted 115Gt. At that rate we'll run out in just 12 years, or by 2025. The rate of consumption is still increasing. So in less than 12 years we'll have used up our entire quota of carbon dioxide emissions—if we continue on our current course. The sooner we change our electricity-production away from the outdated carbon-emission technology of burning fossil-fuels, the more leeway we'll have in other sectors, particularly agriculture and transportation. Those are the other two main contributors to carbon emissions. Transportation can be fairly easily be solved by switching to electrical, although doing so will require massive changes to our infrastructure (and legal structure). Due to emissions, biofuels/ethanol should be avoided, and new nuclear will take too long to come online (minimum 10 years), so these power sources are dead ends.
Agriculture also needs to be moved away from the carbon-intensive, soil-depleting, unsustainable industrial mono-cropping that relies on large amounts of fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and industrial machinery. Livestock is particularly bad for emissions, especially the horrific-yet-common practice of factory farming. Genetically-modified (GM) crops are also proving to be a dead-end, as they increase dependence on carbon-intensive practices like fertilizer and herbicide use. A lot more of us will need to become farmers.
A better world is possible, but we will need to have major societal change to get there. And we'll need to make it happen very, very soon. 12 years is very close. The sooner we start to make the changes, the better.
The world of de-regulated capitalism we live in today is not the only possible world, although the system would like you to believe that it is. But the fact is, we have created this system, decade-by-decade, removing regulation after regulation from polluters and abusers. The gross inequality in the world is no accident—it has been engineered by those seeking short-term profit. But just as we have built this system, we can—and must—unbuild it. We must re-regulate and equalize. We must reign in the abusers and stop the abuse. We must move away from the '1%ers' system of profit and inequality.
What is my one big wish? I want to see the end of ecocide. "Ecocide is the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished." There is a growing movement to make ecocide illegal internationally by 2020. An international law against ecocide would prevent carbon-releasing projects like the Alberta Tar Sands (which contain 240gt of CO2—almost half of the total allowed, and by itself would result in a 1ºC rise!), as well as stopping the (ever-increasing) deforestation of the worlds carbon-sinks: forests. It would also impose a duty-of-care onto land-owners and corporations, which would trump the duty-to-profit, in the same way that today it is illegal to profit from genocide. It would turn "polluter pays (as little as they can get away with)" to "polluter doesn't pollute". In short, it would play a major part in changing the direction of our civilization, towards sustainability. But even this, world-changing though it may be, is just a piece of the puzzle. There are many, many other pieces that I have not mentioned here. This puzzle is the puzzle that we must work on every single day, not stopping until Mother Earth is at least able to tolerate us, and hopefully able to enjoy our species' existence once again.
I hope this helps. There are options, and we need to take them. And to do so, almost every single human being (yourself included) is going to have to become involved in making the change. Without you, we'll fail.
Cheers,
Stu
When I say resources, I'm not just talking about rare-earth metals and oil, although both of those are limited. I'm talking about everything that we are using up: pristine forests and lumber supplies, fresh water and river health, ocean ecosystems and pH, atmospheric stability and CO2 levels, soil fertility and agricultural reliability, democratic capital, social services, labour resilience, etc., etc. The list goes on.
Our current trajectory, "business-as-usual", is using up those resources at an alarming rate. If it isn't curbed, it will result in at least a 6ºC global temperature rise by 2100, possibly much sooner. Governments around the world, supported by the best scientific data (as calculated by the worlds' most powerful supercomputers), have recognized that a 2ºC rise in global temperatures is 'dangerous' and to be avoided. Some scientists think that even 2ºC is too generous to allow ourselves. We're currently only at 0.7ºC rise, and we're already seeing superstorms, megadroughts, massive wildfires, 400,000 climate-change-related deaths per year, and a global reduction in GDP by 1.6%. So 400,000 people each year argue with their lives that even 0.7ºC is too much!
Given the risks of a 2ºC rise, the risks of a 6ºC rise are completely unacceptable: certain collapse of the global food production systems, with a resultant collapse of civilization: resource wars, cities left abandoned, starvation in the billions, a massive die-off of human beings. When every person is desperately searching for their next drink of fresh water and next meal, the last thing anyone will be worrying about would be continuing to "live the life which we are currently used to living". On this trajectory, the survival of the human species is put into question, and some predictions even question the possibility of the survival of multi-cellular life. But this is where we're heading.
I'll say again: this is where we are currently heading.
Obviously this is unacceptable. Therefore, we have to find another way of living on this planet that accepts the limitations of the world in which we live. We have to discover a way of living that respects and protects the systems that we rely on to survive.
Does this mean we should all retreat into peasant agriculture and indigenous forest-dwelling? No. I tried that myself, and I'm confident it won't work. Most of us have lost our ability to live in such a way, and most people would cling on to the current (suicidal) system before they give up their comforts anyway. So there has to be a different way. We have to face some difficult questions, and decide which of the current comforts we really want to protect, and which we'd be willing to give up.
An easy example of something we could give up is the waste usage of electricity that many applications use when they're not in use. Commonly called "vampire power", this accounts for ~10% of the electricity used in Western countries. To stop this, we simply need to make laws that prevent vampire power from being allowed. This would mean you would have to turn your TV manually, without the remote, but that's really not that bad. Electronics should also automatically turn off after a time (after a warning). This would prevent the TV-in-the-other-room being left on: it would automatically turn off after a certain amount of time, which could be stopped by a person actively telling it to stay on (this time, with the remote).
Another thing that will need to cease is the long-distance (un-walkable/cyclable) commute. I'm sure most people wouldn't miss it anyway, but stopping the commute requires a different kind of societal planning: integrated communities where people live close to where they work (and play), with electrified public transit for the exceptions. Every job that could be done from home online (probably 95% of office jobs) should be, and service companies that require a commute should have to pay dearly for it. All of this possible, it just requires some changes to laws and zoning, and more planning. Lots of planning.
People will need to eat less meat. They'll have to have less children. They'll have to repair things more, rather than replacing broken household objects. So things will have to be built so that they last, and so that they can be repaired. Currently, it benefits business to build things to become redundant, forcing us to buy a new phone/suit/car/TV every few years. Changing this will require legal changes, changes in resource-exploitation practices, and changes in the mentality of society. All of this is possible.
However, probably the most urgent switch we'll need to make is to change our energy (electricity) source away from carbon-releasing fossil-fuels (coal, oil, gas, fracking) to renewable and carbon-neutral sources (wind and solar seem to be the best options) as soon as possible. To avoid the 2ºC temperature rise, we can only emit 565 gigatonnes more CO2 (as of 2010). Between 2010-2012 we emitted 115Gt. At that rate we'll run out in just 12 years, or by 2025. The rate of consumption is still increasing. So in less than 12 years we'll have used up our entire quota of carbon dioxide emissions—if we continue on our current course. The sooner we change our electricity-production away from the outdated carbon-emission technology of burning fossil-fuels, the more leeway we'll have in other sectors, particularly agriculture and transportation. Those are the other two main contributors to carbon emissions. Transportation can be fairly easily be solved by switching to electrical, although doing so will require massive changes to our infrastructure (and legal structure). Due to emissions, biofuels/ethanol should be avoided, and new nuclear will take too long to come online (minimum 10 years), so these power sources are dead ends.
Agriculture also needs to be moved away from the carbon-intensive, soil-depleting, unsustainable industrial mono-cropping that relies on large amounts of fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and industrial machinery. Livestock is particularly bad for emissions, especially the horrific-yet-common practice of factory farming. Genetically-modified (GM) crops are also proving to be a dead-end, as they increase dependence on carbon-intensive practices like fertilizer and herbicide use. A lot more of us will need to become farmers.
A better world is possible, but we will need to have major societal change to get there. And we'll need to make it happen very, very soon. 12 years is very close. The sooner we start to make the changes, the better.
The world of de-regulated capitalism we live in today is not the only possible world, although the system would like you to believe that it is. But the fact is, we have created this system, decade-by-decade, removing regulation after regulation from polluters and abusers. The gross inequality in the world is no accident—it has been engineered by those seeking short-term profit. But just as we have built this system, we can—and must—unbuild it. We must re-regulate and equalize. We must reign in the abusers and stop the abuse. We must move away from the '1%ers' system of profit and inequality.
What is my one big wish? I want to see the end of ecocide. "Ecocide is the extensive damage to, destruction of or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been or will be severely diminished." There is a growing movement to make ecocide illegal internationally by 2020. An international law against ecocide would prevent carbon-releasing projects like the Alberta Tar Sands (which contain 240gt of CO2—almost half of the total allowed, and by itself would result in a 1ºC rise!), as well as stopping the (ever-increasing) deforestation of the worlds carbon-sinks: forests. It would also impose a duty-of-care onto land-owners and corporations, which would trump the duty-to-profit, in the same way that today it is illegal to profit from genocide. It would turn "polluter pays (as little as they can get away with)" to "polluter doesn't pollute". In short, it would play a major part in changing the direction of our civilization, towards sustainability. But even this, world-changing though it may be, is just a piece of the puzzle. There are many, many other pieces that I have not mentioned here. This puzzle is the puzzle that we must work on every single day, not stopping until Mother Earth is at least able to tolerate us, and hopefully able to enjoy our species' existence once again.
I hope this helps. There are options, and we need to take them. And to do so, almost every single human being (yourself included) is going to have to become involved in making the change. Without you, we'll fail.
Cheers,
Stu
Awesome article Stu. Amazing. We should put it in the 350 wordpress blog :)
ReplyDeleteAh, the usual delusional green dogma and bossing people around. That has always failed in the past and will continue to fail in the future. http://youtu.be/vttpM2O65BM
ReplyDelete1.) The problem with energy efficiency: We should be all in favor of energy efficiency. Energy is the ability to do work, and so if we can use our energy more efficiently, we can get more done in a crowded world. But there is always a cost to energy efficiency: a financial cost (variable: some easy, some hard), a political cost, a societal cost and also an energetic cost. Let's also not forget that the majority of the world's population does not have an energy waste problem, they have an energy poverty problem. Billions of people in China, India, Indonesia and elsewhere still lack affordable energy, with all the health and social problems that this leads to. We have to balance those problems against other considerations, such as problems resulting from the production and use of energy. Energy is bigger than electricity. And yet bigger is the challenge before us, which also includes pulling billions of people out of poverty and illiteracy, stopping deforestation, biodiversity loss, overfishing, etc. To solve these problems, is absolutely essential that we increase prosperity in the world. The way to do that is to make energy cheap and abundant and certainly efficient.
2.) "Nuclear energy takes too long and is too costly". This is true only under the current regulatory environment. Obscene amounts of money are being spent on "safety" regulations that do not make nuclear power any safer but just much more expensive than it should be. Instead, our climate situation now demands that we modernize regulation of nuclear energy to make it more in line with actual scientific evidence about radiation. Current regulation is still based on a scientifically obsolete idea called LNT ("linear-no-threshold"). A large "radiation protection" industry and lobby is now all too interested in cementing the status quo that fattens it. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/01/11/like-weve-been-saying-radiation-is-not-a-big-deal/ . We also need to build nuclear power plants that are much smaller than those of the past - the concept of the SMR: small modular reactor. This will allow assembly-line factory mass production similar to how airplanes are produced. This is where the nuclear industry went wrong. The reactors became too big and too complicated.
3.) Let's put a price on carbon at the source (coal mine, shale formation, oil well). The fossil fuels that we already know about need to stay in the ground where they belong. The excess carbon waste that is floating all around us needs to go back into the ground.
ReplyDelete4.) Let's stop drinking the "renewables can do it all" coolaid. Anyone who doesn't yet know yet that this is wishful thinking need only look at Germany and the chaos it is experiencing in its energy sector. The conflict between environment and renewable energy is getting worse.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-renewable-energy-policy-takes-toll-on-nature-conservation-a-888094.html
What ultimately matters is the answer to this question: is this stuff actually exportable to the world (incl. to developing countries like India and China), and is it cheaper than coal ? I think the answer will be a very clear no. Countries around the world will be looking at Germany and see "corn deserts" (monocultures to feed the biogas plants) with its out-of control wild boar populations, ugly landscapes full of wind tubines and large solar farms, new transmission lines for which old-growth forests had to be cut down, pumped storage that nobody wants in their backyards. And all that at a cost that nobody can afford.
"Thanks, but NO THANKS !" ... And they will all walk away.
It's not that the energy transition CAN'T be done. Given enough money, political will and R&D, I don't doubt that it's possible in Germany. But that won't matter in the end if it's not also exportable to Indonesia. That is why renewable energy is so dangerous. It has real risks. We need to ask the question: how can we make energy cheaper than coal ? All energy, mind you, not just electricity. How we can achieve that was outlined by Robert Hargraves in the talk he gave in Shanghai in late 2012. http://youtu.be/ayIyiVua8cY
5.) Are GMOs really evil ? Clearly not, if we follow the evidence ( http://academicsreview.org/ ). They represent an increase in the efficiency of environmental use, and should be welcomed by all who are interested in saving the environment. Here is just one example, the "NUE thing": nitrogen use efficiency can be dramatically increased with new strains of plants. That means that less nitrogen is needed as fertilizer, which means less energy needed in making this fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer comes from fossil natural gas. We can eliminate that. That's how we reduce use of fossil fuels. http://www.economist.com/node/14742733
My bottom line is, let's stop being irrational and let's follow the scientific evidence. Green dogma is clearly failing.
I have a lot of reading to do. As always! Will work my way through this and reply as I can.
ReplyDelete