Somebody please do a root cause analysis of the failure of this civilization to understand its birthright.
Perhaps then we might realize the most effective immediate actions are right under our noses.
(Not insignificantly, in the Guardian comment section were enough negative posts about windmills to remind me where the Guardian is located. If Scottish windmills are so expensive, what then is the cost a umbrellas in space?)
Lovelock is around the bend most of the time lately, exactly as TBG points out, but i don't find anything untoward in this piece.
Regardless, the simplicity of the immediate necessary steps belies the hard courage necessary for society to change direction. Hard courage as in a politician standing up and saying our culture is not sustainable. Now.
Why do things have to blow up before people are willing to listen to the need for changing our civilization? "Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin
we have to lead from the bottom up.
they all would like nothing more than us sucking on a very dirtily expensive pair of energy tits (nuclear & coal) anyway. thanks to J and CH at al, this is being balanced a bit.
my fear is that it's borderline token, my hope is that public pressure will be so irresistible for cleaner, more harmonic solutions, that governments will cave before the proof that sol/wind works, and doesnt need repressive thug lockdowns of society to force the people to accept the Great Change that's round the next bend.
right now they're finally getting round to serious electric car manufacture, but if we shift from petrogas transport to all electric, we're going to need scads of nuke plants scattered around to feed our happy motoring.
power to the people. not just sold to the people.
as energy goes, so will the rest of what we know as civilisation. we need somehow to pull up a heavy airliner full of belligerent drunks out of a nose dive in fog, and i don't know what it's going to take before people wake up and take a good look around, and realise how tenuous our normality is, and what a shaky foundation it's rocking on.
we still have a tiny slice of time to change, and we're wasting it going like this. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Somebody please do a root cause analysis of the failure of this civilization...
We don't want to do any of it.
These days I am getting interested in low-tech personal survival techniques--organic gardening, closing nutrient cycles, and the like--things that can be carried out by small groups of people, on the assumption that humans may survive in North America.
Then again we may not.
Certainly, one way or the other, the thing we call Western civilization will disappear. Even a decade ago I would have been looking for ways to correct our errors, but actually our errors are built in: As we say in the computer world, they are features not bugs. They will not be corrected, in defiance of any theoretical possibility of doing so.
Our main scenerio is Infinite Downward Spiral--a.k.a. Easter Island. This is the scenerio our civilization is actively trying for. It is rooted in the obsession to continue Business As Usual, even after BAU has blatantly failed. In this scenerio we use up today what we will need to have on hand tomorrow in an ever-going, progressive destruction of human life support. It ends when desertification is so extreme humans can no longer muster the resources for further destruction. Obviously, most of the population will have died off along the way.
Despite our best efforts to destroy ourselves, we may fail at this if our political economy disintegrates in a rapid disorderly fashion. For example, the one thing most likely to slow global warming is the collapse in oil demand that has followed hitting the wall of peak oil production. If our economies can continue to fall apart, then global warming will be substantially mitigated.
This example shows how disorderly (and unpredicted) collapse may render us unable to further destroy our life support and essential life systems. Thus other scenerios besides Easter Island become possibilities. The Fates are kind.
