Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
NYWT & Sun Newspaper Fire in oil storage tanks, Texas City, Texas April 17, 1947
The latest IPCC report is out, and as predictable as clockwork the reactions are the same old same old lip service, and only that. ‘There is no time to lose’, ‘if we don’t act now, we’re too late’, yada yada. Go do some digging and look for quotes from 10, 20, 40 years ago and you won’t be able to tell the difference. And just like back in those days, nothing real or serious will actually be done to stop the planet from going down the bottomless pit in a handbasket.
At some point, instead of insisting on repeating those same stale quotes over and over again, it may be a wise thing to try and figure out why we are, as a species, acting the way we are. I think that the essence is quite simple, though we might want to take the detour of noting that man is an expert at discounting the future and anything that lies far enough away into the future simply doesn’t attract our attention other than perhaps in theory. And since for any theory, as long as there’s a nanometer of doubt about it, there’s always an alternative, so it’s been remarkable simple for people from several different angles to cast doubt on the issue of climate change as a whole.
But to get back to the essence: we destroy the planet because there’s a profit in it. The vast majority of people in the west have gotten a bit of that profit, while some have gotten a lot, and lately other parts of the world have gotten their taste of what has been labeled progress. Today, our entire societies have been firmly built on destroying the world they are based in. And the choice between a society and a planet is never going to be an easy one. Certainly not when the destruction of the planet is a slower process whose worst consequences are at least perceived as being relatively far into the future, and the further something is away, the more it is discounted. By everyone, mind you, not just by doubters or deniers; it’s a basic human quality, and that means you have it too.
The discounting mechanism is also at the heart of the entire model we’ve built our societies on, and that’s something we can really blame ourselves for. 150 years ago, Mark Twain wrote about the Mississippi that the river cleans itself every 10 miles. That had been true for time immemorial, but was for only a few more years after. Then we started dumping acid in it, and anything else we wanted to get rid of. We’ve limited the dumping of toxins and other materials somewhat since, but our rivers haven’t been clean since, and it seems like a crazy idea to even suggest that they ever will be again. And even then, we may not be dumping acid in our own rivers anymore, but we all know our corporations have no problem doing it in far away lands. So that’s all just reshuffling chairs.
We’ve done some commendable things, like halt CTFCs, but those are just incidents in an unstoppable tidal wave of increasing use of energy that won’t stop until we simply run out. Today’s “answer” to less oil and gas of the conventional kind is to either start digging harder and deeper for energy that costs far more energy to harvest, or to start waxing futuristic about wind turbines and solar panels. It’s very rare to see ideas and policies be raised that are based on drastically reducing the use of energy, period. We’re addicted to the use of ever greater amounts of energy, and we’re as much in denial as any addict you’ll ever meet.
The politicians in charge of this doomed undertaking are either firmly on the payroll of the people who profit most from the damage done, or, in 99% of cases, they’re simply not intelligent and educated enough to understand. Since our education system has been turned into a machine that only churns out pawns for the big game instead of encouraging independent and critical thought, that shouldn’t be surprising. Without a complete and sweeping overhaul of what is still called education that’s not going to change. But then there’s so much that solidly engrained and inert in our world that will need to go before we can make ourselves stop doing what we do. It seems obvious by now that most of us won’t live to see that do.
At any single point in the process that brought us where we are, we had, and we still have, the ability to think things over and make adjustments. But all we ever do is things that are aimed at inducing maximum feel good factors and, even more importantly, minimum cost. Our economic, and societal, systems, know no limits, no checks and balances, and no feedback mechanisms other than runaway ones. We dig and haul first and look at the damage done later. We could first assess the damage we might do, beforehand, but it’s a generally accepted practice to not do that.
We are therefore literally going for broke, and broke we will be. It’s a built in and foregone conclusion. And neither we nor our schooling systems have any excuse: the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics has been known for a very long time. It’s just that for the sake of making a few bucks we’re more than willing to ignore it. The 2nd Law tells us that the use of energy has grave consequences. In the words of Herman Daly and Kenneth Townsend, those consequences are defined thusly: “A corollary of this statement is that an organism cannot live in a medium of its own waste products“. We’re not going to escape the laws of physics, but it won’t be for a lack of trying.
All of this is based in our economic systems, that once had limits, checks and balances, but those have been thrown out because they got in the way of potential profits. No more debt jubilees, no more gold standard, no more Glass Steagall. And no more limits to what treasury departments and central banks will do to make sure a nation’s biggest banks will survive and prosper. Necessarily at the cost of domestic populations, though these are for now kept quiet by both ignorance and the dream of better days just around the corner.
But for the planet, it’s obvious, and has been for decades, that no such thing as better days are coming. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics dictates that, whether people understand it or not. For the economic system, there is still more brewing in the spirit of denial, but there too a variation on the 2nd law will eventually be found to rule the day. A healthy planet needs space and good living conditions for 99.9% of the life it hosts, and a healthy economic system simply needs to provide a living for the vast majority of people living under its umbrella. We are very far from any such situation, in both cases, and we’re moving further away at lightning speed.
I have long ago understood that I don’t care for being rich, since I can’t be rich without inflicting serious damage to both the people I share this planet with, and all other forms of life whose existence allowed for humans to evolve, and without which there will be no humans. I have also decided quite a while ago that I don’t think it’s fun, or useful, or even possible, to continue living on a planet that no longer harbors lions or elephants or polar bears or little green tree frogs. I’ll happily cede my place; it’s not about me.
