Bcc: FYI
rkm website: http://cyberjournal.org
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Greetings,
I’ve added a new section at the end of Part 1. Some people got the impression that I am recommending business as usual, by undermining belief in human-caused global warming. Nothing could be further from the truth.
rkm
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Lack of CO2 heating: does this mean business-as-usual is OK?
Modern global society is unsustainable. Non-renewable resources are being depleted at a reckless rate, and renewable resources are declining due to environmental degradation, including topsoil loss and water table depletion. Meanwhile developing countries like China are increasing their rate of resource consumption. We are not facing a threat of runaway warming, but we are facing an equally great danger – societal collapse and mass starvation – as we rapidly approach the tipping point of resource consumption vs. resource availability.
“We are entering a new era of rising food prices and spreading hunger. Food supplies are tightening everywhere and land is becoming the most sought-after commodity as the world shifts from an age of food abundance to one of scarcity,” says Brown. “The geopolitics of food is fast overshadowing the geopolitics of oil.”UN warns of looming worldwide food crisis in 2013
Business as usual is a path that can only end in disaster for global society. If we don’t change the way that we – as a society – use and manage our planetary resources, we will continue down this path toward inevitable disaster. If sustainability is to be achieved, we would need to be pursuing major programs of macro-level change.
We would need to transform our transportation infrastructure, displacing car and air travel – to the extent feasible – with a comprehensive, energy-efficient network of high-speed rail and light rail. We would need to abandon petroleum-intensive, soil-depleting, water-wasting, agribusiness practices, replacing them by labor-intensive organic methods, which would lead to de-urbanization, the renaissance of small-scale farming, sustainable food production, and the re-vitalization of rural communities.
We would need to abandon growth as the basis for economics, and find some new economic paradigm that is compatible with sustainability. All of this would be made easier by moving toward decentralization, as regards both economic activity and resource management. As every region can be made sustainable, then the global society will sustainable.
I’m not trying to offer here a plan for social transformation; my point is simply that achieving sustainability would require major infrastructural changes. It would need to become a national project, almost like a war effort, with all levels of government working together, and with the support and participation of civil society.
In the time since the release of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, fear of human-caused global warming has become the primary focus of environmental concern. Most viewers didn’t realize that his long-term charts actually demonstrated that warming causes CO2 levels to rise, rather than CO2 causing warming.
This narrowing of environmental focus distracts us from the real challenges of achieving sustainability. Carbon credits and carbon taxes are not a solution. Indeed, we would need to use lots of energy, on a one-time basis, in order to build the new infrastructures that could make us sustainable in the long run.
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