I would accept as a gift if you tell me whether I’m at least grappling with, if not grasping, your point that ” those revisions shift the bounds of our uncertainty (in a bad direction) without narrowing them very much.”
Are you suggesting that this bad sort of uncertainty likely makes forming and executing solutions to Climate problems difficult ?
Recently, I’ve begun to wonder whether modern civilization is so dependent on fossil fuels that there is no way to wean ourselves off of them so as to address Climate Change, without causing our civilization to collapse.
I am beginning to think that the people who question the ‘green economy’ are not just right-wing shills for the fossil fuel industry. When they say that various efforts to address climate change may damage or destroy our economy, they may be right. But they may not be thinking of it as the lesser or least of two or more evils.
And I am beginning to question the left-wing or progressive explanation that the world would solve the climate problem with a new ‘green economy’, and with relatively little change to our current way of life, if only we’d loosen the grip the greedy fossil fuel industry has on our governments and our culture.
But I am not sure about this, I have not yet given up on true grass roots activism which at least mitigates ecological and social problems by decentralizing both governmental and corporate power over food, transportation, finance, water, media, and so on. What do you think ?
Having said all of this, there seems to be credible data indicating that modern civilization may collapse regardless of whether or not countries around the world choose to implement programs for cutting carbon emissions.
In other words, even if the world says “Climate Change be damned !” oil, natural gas, and even coal may become scarce, thereby wreaking havoc. Yet, at the same time, genuine efforts to reduce carbon emissions–and not just play lip service to this issue–could have harsh political and economic consequences.
Damned if we do, damned if we don’t ? I don’t necessarily completely agree with Richard Heinberg, but one approach he articulates is a conscious choice–at the macro and micro level—to try to manage a collapse (or ‘contraction’) of modern civilization.
In the hopes of clarifying my point, I will try to use an example. Imagine you have three options : (1) death; (2) lose both or your legs; or (3) lose both of your arms.
You might say that all three options are bad, but that option (2) is the least bad. I am exploring the idea regarding whether the approach of drastically disrupting modern civilization so as to address climate change and Peak Oil is the lessor evil, when compared with the problems we may allow to occur if we choose to ignore those issues.
I am presenting these ideas so as to get input from people who may not necessarily agree with me. I haven’t come to a conclusion about this yet.
Leave a Reply