“…As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, people are going to keep burning them and going to find them, to dig them up wherever they can find them. …what we need to do is add a gradually rising fee to the fossil fuels, which you would collect from the fossil fuel companies at the source... And that money should be distributed to - all legal residents of the country.
That way the person who does better than average in limiting his carbon footprint will make money, and it will be a big incentive for them to pay attention to their carbon footprint. It will be a big incentive for entrepreneurs to develop no carbon and low carbon energy sources and products. And the economic studies that have been done show that this actually stimulates the economy. So it doesn't cost anything.”
— James Hansen, from an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria on July 26, 2015
This is a short addendum to Monday's "destroy the town" post.
To be clear, if I thought there was a way to unwind global civilization which minimizes human suffering and preserves a livable Earth, I would be all for it. But I don't see any way to do that. There's going to be a train wreck one way or the other. This Margaret Atwood quote is apropos here.
Can we change our energy system? Can we change it fast enough to avoid being destroyed by it? Are we clever enough to come up with some viable plans? Do we have the political will to carry out such plans? Are we capable of thinking about longer-term issues, or, like the lobster in a pot full of water that’s being brought slowly to the boil, will we fail to realize the danger we’re in until it’s too late?
Not that the lobster can do anything about it, once in the pot. But we might. We’re supposed to be smarter than lobsters. We’ve committed some very stupid acts over the course of our history, but our stupidity isn’t inevitable. Here are three smart things we’ve managed to do...
Atwood lists a few examples of our non-stupidity, but none of them compares to the predicament humankind now finds itself in. "We're supposed to smarter than lobsters," but apparently we're not. Every large-scale trend of the last few centuries backs that conclusion up.
If I had a magic button which would wake humans up, I would press that button. Maybe, as a result, we would stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere at ≤450 ppm. But there is no button, and virtually everything humans do, if you follow the chain of events back far enough, results in more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (or results in more species extinctions, etc.). The global food system? More CO2 every time we eat. That's just the way it is.
As far as I'm concerned, it is inexcusable for humans to cling to hopeless fantasies about replacing the fossil energy which maintains our global civilization, but that's what Human Nature dictates. (Global industrial civilization must get smaller as quickly as possible.) I guess that's their "excuse" in this case and countless others. Such fantasies conveniently divide the world up into "good guys" and "bad guys", and in so doing give meaning and purpose to the lives of those harboring those fantasies. Anthropocentric sociality and physical reality need not be at odds, but sometimes are. Mitigating climate change is a case in point.
By the way, I should ask is the global economy still supposed to growing as we cut emissions 6%/year?
Probably, but to find out I would have to explore more dark regions of Jim Hansen's mind. Screw that.
But, really, my purpose in exposing these optimistic stories is to demonstrate (once again, sigh) that humans are prone to hopeful fantasies when faced with threatening realities (my "bad news" rule in the original Flatland essay). This is clearly true of the BAU people too (the vast majority). It is a generalized human characteristic.
The realist's lament is that he/she is actually trying to show humans the door they must walk through to fix their self-created problems. That's what I've tried to do on this blog over and over again. The first step is to take an unblinking look at the problems humanity is facing. It's like generalizing the first rule of Alcoholics Anonymous.
We admitted we were powerless over X - that our lives had become unmanageable.
X = {money, oil, trinkets, social status, etc.}
It is clear in the 21st century that our lives have become unmanageable. Unfortunately, AA being a human belief system, the second rule alludes to some "higher power" which will restore us to sanity. Things go badly wrong after that because there isn't any higher power to get us off the hook.
The second step for humans is to fully acknowledge (without qualification) that humans themselves are the cause of their most serious problems.
Unfortunately, the realist also knows that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. The realist knows there is no magic button. The realist then begins to wonder whether we are indeed smarter than lobsters.
"We're supposed to be smarter than lobsters". Why? Says who? How so?
Are we talking about whether we can defeat a lobster in a game of chess?
And who is "we"? Is this an individual comparison? Can person X get a higher score on the SAT than lobster Y?
Or is this a species "we"? Comparing the long term sum of individual lobster "decisions" to the long term sum of individual human "decisions", I'm pretty sure the objective observer would go with the lobsters. While lobsters, as a whole, may not have added much in the way of art and music, they also haven't warmed the climate, destroyed global ecosystems, instigated global extinctions, etc. I'm sure I'm not qualified to net that out, but simply as a layman's gut reaction it sure feels like maybe the lobsters have the superior track record, all things considered.
Maybe we (humans) are setting our sights too high. Maybe lobsters are out of our league. Perhaps the appropriate goal should be something like bacteria or viruses or rodents or mosquitos?
Or maybe it wouldn't matter at all because, at a species level, we all basically behave the same. We are all trying to maximize our consumption of accessible energy. Doing that produces waste. It just happens that humans figured out how to do it in such a way and at such a scale that it produces enormously more waste and destruction (especially when you include the increased population allowed by the ways we get access to energy). Perhaps we, the lobsters, and the rest are all just playing the same game. Maybe it has nothing to do with smart, just everything to do with life.
Still, in the positive impact bet between humans and lobsters.... take the crustacean. ;-)
Posted by: Brian | 07/29/2015 at 12:29 PM