Guest post: We’ve left it 50 years too late
Originally a comment by Rob on The judgment of history is too late.
A couple of years ago I attended a conference for the oil and gas industry. We’re not directly involved in that industry, but they make use of our companies services for specialist environmental monitoring.
The conference was heavily picketed and was protected by a significant police presence for the three days it was on. Protestors had even gone to the trouble of placing remote triggered sleep disruption devices on and around the hotel prior to the cordon going up. Kudos for commitment I guess.
Apart from the fact that some of the protesters had taken a four hour return flight to attend the protest, what I found fascinating was that probably 60% of the papers were focused on climate change, the industry’s role in that, and what if anything the industry could do to help reduce emissions. It was pretty obvious that a small number of the audience were outright climate deniers. It was also pretty obvious that most industry participants were very well aware of the true state of climate change (they were well aware that things were on an appalling track) and wanted very much to find some way out.
One senior executive explained over lunch that his young kids were starting to ask why he was destroying the earth. His view was that it was completely on the rich and developed nations to address the problem. As he put it, about 1 billion people use most of the worlds resources. About 2 billion people are just starting to get a taste of the life the rich nations have. The rest (5 billion) rely on twigs and dung for fuel and walk pretty much wherever they want to go. He said it is unrealistic and would be unconscionable to expect those already leading a subsistence life to give anything up – they needed more, not less. For the rich nations to try and keep what they have and use, while demanding that those recent aspirants give up and return to subsistence living, would lead to conflict and war. We – the rich nations – can afford to give up energy and resources. We can afford to develop and adopt new technology and change our lifestyle. We collectively don’t want to, and our politicians are too gutless to force us to.
It was frank and pretty brutal. Also hard to argue with. While we can see attitudes beginning to change, I reckon we’ve left it 50 years too late to allow the social conversation. I can’t see our Governments taking emergency action until the crash has already happened.
I have to agree with Rob on this one. By the nature of my work, I interact with a lot of technology-interested persons and as a group they are almost exclusively liberal. Most of these people are highly educated–graduate educations at a minimum, with a great deal of post-graduate work and careers in research fields. Despite this, almost to a person, their interest and focus is not on wealthy western nations ratcheting back our rate of consumption and trying to find a more sustainable way to live: quite the contrary. They are all interested only in methods of energy production that can sustain their way of life as it exists now, and the concomitant rate of change (that is, the increasing rate of consumption of energy and goods over time). A simple example is solar power: this is the great new beacon of hope to them, and my colleagues smugly exchange technical reports of increasing efficiency of research solar cells and the increasing adoption of the technology across the board. What they don’t care about is the associated ecological disaster that is occurring in Asia as a result of the Western hunger for feel-good solar. It’s easy enough to find evidence of that ongoing and expanding disaster, one which will grow to consume us in the West as well as those peoples and lands it is destroying now, but the people I try to show it to will shrug that evidence aside and say things like “there’s no other alternative”.
Yes, there is. It’s reducing consumption. But that is the last thing my wealthy western-lifestyle-acclimated colleagues want to hear, and when they DO hear it, they shrug it off.
Here is a link to an article by Michael Shellenberger on issues surrounding solar. Many of the same issues affect hydro and wind, and he doesn’t even bring up some of the worst parts of these so-called “renewable” sources.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/06/21/why-everything-they-said-about-solar—including-that-its-clean-and-cheap—was-wrong/
NB: I don’t particularly agree with Shellenberger in general, although he does bring up excellent points about solar, because he’s a proponent of going all-in on nuclear energy production. IOW, he’s not a realist about reducing consumption in the West, either, he just thinks that people are fooling themselves with a focus on solar. Which they are, of course, but I think that he’s fooling himself with his focus on nuclear as a universal palliative, and both are done merely because none of these people have the guts to say that as a society we owe it to the world to cut back on our massive (and increasing) consumption of resources and power. There are plenty of other sources out there on the internet, including reporting by the Guardian, about the massive ecological disaster that rare-earth mining in China in support of magnet and solar production is having on entire regions, too, so Shellenberger’s article above is not the only source of disturbing dissent.
This. So much this. And moving to the moon (and where do they think they’ll get the resources to survive on the moon, if they could even do it? By stripping the Earth of what little we leave of it, leaving those who are behind starving and turning the Earth into a wasteland). Now, though, it’s Mars, which is even more difficult – further away, damn cold. Oh, we found liquid water! Yeah, but not much. Oh, we’ll build a dome! Yeah, with materials we carry from Earth.
I’m sick of all of ’em.
And as for carrying materials from Earth to Mars – I watched an episode of NOVA the other day about the physics of getting rockets launched, the upshot of which is that it requires such a vast amount of fuel that the actual payload can only EVER be a tiny fraction. Good luck getting people to Mars before the planet is toast.
Yeah, I’ve made that point a few times, too, but most of the Moon/Mars living crowd are so obsessed they can’t hear. They have all these explanations for how it will work. None of them feasible.
We could probably save every ecosystem on Earth for what it would cost to keep two people alive on the moon, let alone Mars.
Earth ravaged by climate disaster is far more hospitable than the Moon, Mars, or the cold void of space. A great pitch for a show or drama-rich people fighting amongst themselves for scraps on a spaceship as the reality of leaving earth sets in. Could be your next play iknklast if you haven’t already written it. :)
Years ago I saw something on a poster, or t-shirt or something that has stuck with me since:
“Live simply, that others may simply live.”
I think it is asking a bit much to have expected action fifty years ago. My clear recollection of forty-five years ago is that the period of stable or slightly falling global temperatures recorded from 1940-1980 led expert opinion to the conclusion that such elevevation of CO2 levels as anthropogenic activity was then causing, was likely having the effect of merely balancing the long term trend towards the end of the current interglacial. That certainly was the position of one of my science teachers, who as a member of the local executive of Friends of the Earth, decried worries about CO2 as a scare story amplified by the nuclear industry.