Part 4 was meant to be a look at “Develop Local Exchange Trading System currency and expand sub-regionally as it catches on’ but I’ll return to it once I cover climate disruption a little more. I have had several comments over the past 4 years about why, if I am an such an ardent environmentalist and sustainability proponent, I am not also Gung Ho with all the international ‘Save-The-Planet’ hype from the dreaded Climate Change. I’ll make my point clearly. The planet is not dying and will not die regardless of what we humans do. It will, and already is, changing a lot in response to our human activities. I keep hearing Mainstream Media (MSM) covering all the pundits predicting eco-catastrophe, but what is happening is that climate disruption is occurring and relatively stable climate that propagated current human society is changing such that humanity will not be able to live the dream it has for several millennia. We can avert the crisis point and adapt, but the change has already been set in motion and may not settle down for another 1000 years or more. I already overviewed our fear of CO2 briefly in a recent post (Becoming different – Part 13: Reviewing the Basics again – Part 2 {September 2022}).
The MSM hype we are overwhelmed with is from pundits that want the current status quo (i.e., globalized consumerism) to continue unabated and use a simple metric (CO2) as the driving narrative to solve the problem. Only it’s not a simple problem, it’s a highly complex issue with most of the factors being ignored as grandiose proposals from groups such as the United Nations, the WEF, and global corporate and political elites push the simple solution agenda – curb CO2 emissions. Climate disruption is one of many symptoms (admittedly, a really bad symptom) that result from our consumer lifestyle. Curbing CO2 may ease the changes for a few years but unless we act on all the root causes, we are merely throwing money at grandiose geoengineering projects that will themselves create even more global problems. Economic sanctions and or incentives to curb CO2 (e.g., The Green Deals) will merely benefit the industrialized countries for a while and do nothing for the developing countries except keep them economically colonialized and in continued poverty. Even the industrialized countries will eventually collapse, and if Klaus Schwab and his WEF ideas are to be used (The Great Reset – see posts, A New Beginning – Part 4: The Great Reset, but which one? {January 2021} and A New Beginning – Part 7: The Great Reset, Part 2 {February 2021}) we will find ourselves in a hunger games scenario being ruled by a small group of elites. For all the global warming fear, the one that scares me more is putting the monied elites in charge of the situation for a one world government in which we, the people, have no option but lose our personal sovereignty.
In a machine we build we put together a lot of individual parts to get a working system – every part is predictable in what it does, even if the machine is highly complicated. If any part breaks or fails we can analyze the machine and replace that broken part to get the machine functioning again. In a biological system, all the parts interact in a highly complex (and hard to fully predict way) but not linearly as they do in a simple way as a machine. If any part fails then it usually creates a cascade of adaptations throughout the system to try and reach homeostasis (a self-regulating process by which biological systems maintain stability while adjusting to changing external conditions).
We are obsessed with CO2 and not with the planet’s health, which means the health of all life and its interactions with the natural systems (biotic and abiotic) that sustain everything. We have been so busy compartmentalizing the world, through a reductionist and mechanistic paradigm, to maintain our business practices that we have lost the idea that the earth itself is a self-regulating system that responds, just as we do individually, to changes occurring within the whole system. Simply cutting out fossil fuels to reduce CO2 is no answer, and certainly not when it is to be controlled by corporate and political systems intent on keeping the human status quo for profits and the consumerist society. The science and the politics are now conflicted with the mainstream narrative reduced to one single variable – carbon dioxide. I used to teach this model and explain to student how it was a factor (radiative forcing (RF) – The difference between incoming and outgoing radiation on the planet) that seems to correlate somewhat to temperature rise. But this is a flaw with western human thinking in which we strive to reduce things to mechanicalistic and linear thinking. What we fail to acknowledge, even though we give it lip-service, is the extremely complex Bio-Geo interactions that are also responding to human activities. We do not talk much about pollution yet it is a primary factor in much of the issue. But consider what causes pollution? – the way we live, manufacture, and grow crops with an industrial agricultural system, within a consumer society.
Some basics. Most of the carbon in fossil fuels was once in the atmosphere and in those ancient era’s (e.g., Carboniferous period) the global temperatures were much hotter (up to 10-14oC hotter) and as I pointed out recently, current temperatures we consider normal are only around for another 100 million years or so until the continents tectonically shift enough for equatorial currents to start up again, when the planet will warm up slowly. The big question we have now is about CO2. Is it a cause of warming, as the MSM narrative would state, or merely a symptom of the six root causes – we really do not know. We do know that pollution is a major contributor to most of the ecological problems we face. Our goal should be to reduce pollution to zero or as low as possible, not attack one factor (CO2) in the hope that it will resolve climate disruption. We look at how ecosystems uptake CO2 but not how pollution degrades the integrity of complex ecosystems. For instance, a forest is much more than the lumber of the trees. A monoculture of trees planted by lumber companies does not replace an old-growth forest, even if the exchange of CO2 were similar.
Since my solution is a grass roots solution, I will cover why we should not fear the CO2 problem. In my root causes slide, Climate Change is just one of the several Air pollution problems, and the many problems arise out of the six primary root causes. And as I go along, I will discuss generally how we can adapt to climate disruption by addressing these six root causes. First, we might be able to artificially lower planetary temperatures with geoengineering but our technology, as good as it can be, I doubt will function well when scaled up to global terraforming levels – we are just not technological enough, or wise enough, to understand the complexities of global ecological feedback systems.
The six Root Causes are broken down to three physical and three psychological, which should make clear why I spend as much time discussing the social-psychological side of sustainability as the technological ones. The Physical root causes are simply we consume too much per capita (while physical it is based on a psychological root), there are too many of us to maintain the consumer lifestyle, and we use a finite and extremely polluting energy system. Changing our lifestyle to a sustainable one is of paramount importance. Reducing the population can happen naturally if we develop a sustainable lifestyle since there will be more than enough resources for more than the current nearly 8 billion. No need for Eugenics or mass kill-offs as proposed by many of the monied elites! And then the fossil fuel dependence problem. We need the oil for its non-energy uses, and we need to stop the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels by rethinking how we use and create energy (conservation and greener sources) that is more localized (see recent post, Creating Sustainable Community – Part 1: Localizing Energy {October 2022})
The three psychological root causes are Inefficiency that is driven by economic dictates to be a cheap as possible to maximize profits as our sole measure of success. Then linearity in which we insist on viewing everything as a problem with a set starting point that follows a linear sequence of logical steps that ultimately leads to a solution (e.g., cause effect). We need to be more systems thinkers that look at problems by defining their elements, interconnections, and functions and not just on symptoms. Frontier-mentality is the age-old problem of simply thinking that we can go somewhere else to find resources rather than working with what is already available and increasing the efficiency of its use based on material need and not financial dictates. If we do not do something about our way of thinking on how we live, then most of humanity will not be around to witness the rebirth of a new global ecology that springs from the ashes of our current lifestyle folly.
To Be Continued …….
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