The other day, I saw a car speeding down the road ahead of me. It was going faster and faster and it was all I could do to catch up to the car to give warning of the road ahead. I’d seen the signs and paid heed to what they said, but the other driver seemed entirely oblivious.
My attempts to warn the driver were being ignored. In desperation, I tried honking the horn, waving my arms and shouting into the wind, but the driver just kept on accelerating.
I reached my car’s ability to give chase and fell back for my own safety as the car sped off into the distance. He too couldn’t go any faster it seemed, but his momentum was so great, that it was easy to see that he’d never make the road ahead, even he’d fully slammed on the brakes and went into an emergency skid.
To my shock and horror, this is exactly what happened. I came across a pile of twisted metal, bone and broken glass. It looked like he’d hit the brake far, far too late, but they didn’t do him any good at all. There wasn’t even a recognizable car, let alone a driver in the tangled mess. It was horrible fate, but what else could I have done?
I sat there and pondered the meaning of it all. I didn’t even call anyone. Who was there left to call?
This is exactly what is now happening with the climate change denialist movement. They’re speeding ahead, oblivious and uninterested in knowing the real facts, which they simply don’t much care about. The road ahead that they have come to rely on as being ‘there’ simply isn’t. Its changed now and at the pace that they are going, they’ll never make it. Their inertia is too great now, effectively everyone’s is. Asking them to stop or slow down or just get out of the damned car isn’t going to make any difference now.
We’re already at the point where teaching others about climate change, if done with the idea and impression that it’s going to change the outcome, is a waste of our time. While human lifestyle changes are critically important and necessary, this still won’t change our overall outcome in regards to climate any measurable amount now, as it is too late for that. Any changes we might make will have a negligble impact, as the rest of the world, including industry and government, is too busy with the BOA model.
And this is why the Green Movement is so damnably misled, an underlying tenet of their doctrine assumes that we can actually effect change at the individual level, when we cannot. But they’re not alone, even the non-green movement (government, Big Oil, business, etc.) is just as guilty of this type of deception.
As much as I despise the business as usual approach, the fact remains that business as usual will only hasten the inevitable now, while stopping the business as usual model will not actually accomplish very much at all (in regards to climate).
I read only yesterday where Americans only have 37 tons of “personal carbon” left available to them to “avoid dangerous climate change”. Calculated out, that’s only 7 years. Does anybody REALLY believe that we’re going to radically change our ways in just 7 years and stop emitting carbon? This would require what I’ve advocated, the complete shutdown of all industry and activity world wide. NGFH. Sigh, the truth is too painful for us to comprehend.
Stopping the BOA model can actually only help in other areas, such as our problems with dependency on things like monoculture, overproduction, resource consumption, species extinction and habitat loss caused by humans. In other words, stopping could prevent the increasing and accelerating loss of life and resources, but it won’t have much impact at all on our climate future. Existing climate inertia and feedback loops already have too much inertia for us to believe we can “stop climate change”. This is a bullshit mantra that has been taken up by everyone in the movement, and I’m going to call a spade a spade here — it’s crap, it can’t be done now and is misleading us from something we do need to be doing.
Lonewolf has sent me a bunch of links and videos on the climate change denialist movement. I’m not going to bother posting them here, as this stupidity doesn’t even deserve the space, you can find them yourself if you want. They all start out the same way, supposed “scientists” often of dubious backgrounds and credentials, deny facts and eye-witness and recorded accounts. Basically they lie, and lie often and even go so far as to claim that we’re improving our climate with our industrial and human activity.
Needless to say, these IDIOTS are driving full speed ahead, absolutely and utterly oblivious to the clearly posted roadsigns. They simply do not care that they are driving the planet into extinction. I have no sympathy for willful fools, they are actually engaged in very dangerous denials and they should not be tolerated, period.
Therefore, instead of dealing with the idiotic denialists and the false promises of the Green movement, it would seem to me that our time would be better spent on the following areas:
a) preservation of the existing and still remaining life and biodiversity;
b) survival strategies for human adaption to climate change.
We cannot adapt species to climate change effects, this is something that they have to do themselves. The only thing we can do here is protect them from further depredations and habitat impacts by humans. This is an area that isn’t being dealt with adequately (still), as it requires a much more forceful tactical response by humans against other humans who are still hell-bent in strip mining the planet into oblivion. They’ll succeed too, unless they are stopped.
Our survival strategies would be how and where future humans (and those alive today) can actually live, and how they should live. A lot of what civilization has done is to either create cities and human areas of habitation in non-inhabitable spots, or worse, decimate the local and regional resources that humans can no longer survive there without the massive importation of resources (including water and food). Dubai is a perfect example of this, but so is Phoenix, southern California and most desert locations inhabited by humans around the world.
These areas can only naturally support and sustain far smaller human habitations then they are currently being required to. As peak energy makes this increasingly difficult, massive migrations will take place (which is already happening).
Survival strategies would also deal with many other issues, such as overpopulation, resource consumption and demands, biodiversity instead of monoculture wastelands and the related food security issues, and the very notion of “cities” and paved over areas where quite literally nothing is allowed to live. A complete revamping of so-called human “requirements” versus human needs would be necessary and once redefined, culturally embraced through education and (very important), business.
The very definition and activity of business would also need to be redefined and reshaped for adaption, as our current attitudes and beliefs towards business is predicated upon resource destruction instead of resource preservation or enhancement.
There are various groups around the world that are engaged in various aspects of these strategies, but unfortunately the amount of progress and momentum that they have achieved is fairly limited. In part, because they must deal with all the built-in resistance to their efforts in our culture and society, and their efforts, even all of them combined together, are not really ever going to be enough to effect the cultural changes required.
I think we constantly fail to appreciate the magnitude and the scope of the task (and the problems) we have. We fail to realize that ten thousand supporters, or even several million, cannot really change anything. At best, tiny “course corrections” are made. In example, the movement to get fast food companies to stop packaging their food products (hamburgers) in Styrofoam boxes, and return to waxed paper finally succeeded after many years of effort. But it didn’t stop pollution, or the overfilling of our nations landfills or reduce the consumption of resources. It actually had a fairly negligible impact on human pollution. That’s not to say it should not have been done, but it is an example of a “shallow success”.
We see this type of failure everywhere, because we are constantly failing to address the underlying issues themselves. This is why teaching others about climate change is really a waste of time, our BAU model isn’t changing sufficiently (or hardly measurably) enough to change the outcome of past “climate contributions” made by humans. The truth is, it simply can’t. But we’re being distracted into believing that it could if we try a little harder, which is not true.
So when I pose the points above of preserving biodiversity and remaining life on Earth, and strategies for human adaption, I’m actually stating that –
1) let’s start dealing with reality (dangerous climate change is flat-out going to happen no matter what we do); and
2) we need to start acting (behaving) like we understand this instead of this ongoing delusion that we’re “going to change in time”.
We will change, but not in time. Many studies have been done that demonstrate that humans can and will change, but only when they are forced to do so. The assumption that voluntary change and the big one — business change, will happen before disaster occurs is dead wrong. Just look around for this evidence, we’re rebuilding New Orleans, we’re still building and testing dangerous weapons and pathogens, we’re still practicing gene-splicing, we’re still creating frankenfoods, we’re still practicing monoculture, etc. The list of wrong-doings and refusal to change in advance is literally endless.
As a side note, realize that there is inertia and momentum in all of these things too, which is what makes it very very difficult to change or abandon. One of the reasons why I actually advocate collapse is that it is the change agent (force) that makes the dramatic changes possible. But that doesn’t mean it’s likely, as we are just as likely to go back to the BAU and past practices (in everything) if it’s allowed. And that depends on many factors, such as how deep the collapse becomes, resource availability, political leadership, industry, finance and much much more. Collapse does not mean we will change, it just means that some things may stop or slow down, and it present an opportunity for change that we don’t actually have today. Whether we take that opportunity is yet unknown. Odds are, no, we won’t, as this is what we’re doing now as the collapse deepens and we’re still quite stupidly taking the wrong roads, again and again and again.
Eventually however, we will change, because this is going to be forced upon us (or we’ll simply die out) but we’re definitely “not there yet”. But I find this conclusion unacceptable, especially since it means we’ll have literally consumed everything on the surface of the Earth in our descent into extinction. That should not be allowed to happen.
I’m too tired right now to finish with a concluding paragraph, I’ve been up since 3:00 am (again), so this will have to be enough for now.
