by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
When most people ask, “How can we stop global warming?” they aren’t really asking what they pretend they’re asking. They are instead asking, “How can we stop global warming without stopping the burning of oil and gas, without stopping the industrial infrastructure, without stopping this omnicidal system?”
The answer: you can’t.
Nuclear power simply is not safe unless and until the day that we can use fusion instead of fission but that day is still so far off that it, more than likely, is never going to arrive.
The electric car, touted as the answer to the ICE and everyone wishing to continue with personal motoring, is also no answer at all for, in fact, it emissions may not come from the vehicle itself but from the production of both the car, the battery and the electricity used with which to charge the battery.
Governments the world over and also the green movement per se are not prepared to tell the people that the way they have been living is going to be history or they are going to be history. Mankind has but two choices, to adapt and change or to die.
Industry has to be brought down to a level of production where it but produces for what people need and not what industry produces and then wishes to sell to the people by means of advertising suggesting to people that if they have but that product they will be happy ever after.
Production needs to be localized so that the “factories” and workshops produce and sell only in a nor or less local area supplying the needs of the people. And the same goes for agriculture, for food production.
As far as personal transportation goes the age of motoring, unless we really wish to commit ecocide and thus suicide, is history and we need to use other ways of getting about, ways that are tried and tested and have been used for centuries.
It is not just carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions that are behind climate change. Other aerial and atmospheric pollution is equally a culprit and the warnings were issued already in the 1960s and early 1970s by those people wrote off as hippies and new agers. However, they were right after all. However, governments and others love to play with CO2 as almost the only kind that may be the causal agent of climate change because they have invented this lovely system of indulgences call carbon credits and carbon certificates and even a stock exchange for them.
The soot that is causing the glacial melt in the Himalayas and other mountain ranges has been renamed to “brown carbon” so that they can still play with those indulgences. It is soot, people, and it comes out of the chimneys of the factories, settles on the glaciers and thus causing them to melt by absorbing rather than reflecting the rays of the sun, thus causing the melt.
Mankind has to change and adapt or will, invariably, die as the Earth will no longer be able to support life. Thus, if we want to survive and give future generations of people and other life a chance then we must change our ways and do so pronto. Ideally yesterday or the day before even.
Those of us who advocate this are hated by the people and especially the governments, and first and foremost by those in the developed world. The former don't want to hear it because they want to believe their governments that life will go on as it is and the governments don't want us to tell the truth because the don not want the populace to be stirred. The mere advocating of the need to change can, to some extent, get one branded as a “domestic terrorist”.
But we must continue to warn for, unless the people do wake up and understand that stopping climate change cannot be done by retaining the constant-growth economy and the personal motoring and all that, we all will be in serious problems and, in the end, the Planet will no longer able to support life, at least not human life.
In order so that the people do not realize how critical the situation has become with oil many governments in the developed world have brought strategic reserves of oil (and gas) on stream to keep the prices artificially at a lower level than they would be in reality.
In 2011 the world used 40% more oil than it produced and forecast, though amended later, was for 2012 to be 60% more than production. The recession saw to it though that it was ONLY 50% above production. Now it does not take a mathematical genius to work out that that – somehow – does not compute and that reserves were brought into play. But, reserves are just that... reserves... and they will run out sooner or later.
The hope is now being placed on tar sands oil and shale oil and -gas with claims of enough oil for the next 50 to 100 years... That would mean another 50 to 100 years of emissions of various poisons killing the Earth entirely. All in the name of progress or what?
I guess that governments also believe, like Professor Hawkins, that we have to abandon the Earth and find another inhabitable Planet (to destroy). Reality check! There is no other planet that can sustain life in our solar system. None. Maybe they believe that in the next 50 to 100 years they can find one, eh?
We need to change and should have done so already yesterday and that means that we have to get used to a different way of living than that that we have been used to – well the majority of people in the developed world – for a rather long time already.
We have to go back to ways of our ancestors and not just as regards to personal transportation but also as regards to production of goods and food and their distribution. The way we live and work and much more.
That does not, necessarily, mean that we will no longer have electricity or such as renewables can provide that for us, and also cooking gas via methane digestion, but it has to be brought down to a local level of the home and the current and voltage used must change. And we first and foremost must also reduce our energy consumption, as we must reduce consumption as a whole.
Personal transportation will no longer be the motorcar but Shank's pony and the bicycle and, for longer distance, the likes of public transport, in the form of buses and trains.
When we bring everything down to a local level, or almost local level, then commuting long distances will be a thing of the past as will be the out-of-town super- and hypermarkets and shopping malls, then there will be no need for all this traveling about.
We also cannot stop climate change by geo-engineering, by spraying chemicals into the atmosphere and creating artificial clouds. Those may stop the rays of the sun reaching the Earth and heating it up but they also change photosynthesis and thus reduce food production. Hello! Is everyone stupid? It would appear so. Stop playing G-d! We need to change, period! And we need to do that NOW!
© 2013
