Change Who You Imagine You Are
Bill McKibben, Adbusters
Scientists who keep track of Arctic ice recently issued an alarming bulletin: the ice pack was melting as never before and was 20 percent smaller than the long-term average. What’s more, as it thawed and the light-reflecting white ice changed to light-absorbing blue water, the melting cycle was entering a self-reinforcing phase. One researcher noted “The feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover.”
Bigger global news than that is hard to imagine. I mean, you can see it from outer space. Remember those posters from Apollo 7 of the blue- white orb drifting through black space? Well, it doesn’t look like that any more. There’s a lot less white and a lot more blue. We’re quickly building Earth 2.0. And it’s full of bugs. Literally.
So it seems kind of odd, in the face of all that bigness, to be thinking small. Surely the answer is a Manhattan project of some kind, unleashing all our scientific talent to figure out the powersources to replace coal and gas and oil and hence staunch the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. Surely the answer is a huge international initiative – Kyoto on steroids – to somehow force governments to slow the growth of emissions. Surely both those things would help; in fact, surely they’re required.
But they’re not enough. It’s becoming clearer every day that the roots of climate change lie not just in the technological infrastructure we’ve built to exploit fossil fuels, but in the habits of mind and heart created by that infrastructure. For example: cheap gasoline allowed us to rip up the trolley lines and replace them with cars, which in turn allowed the sprawling suburbs, which in turn allowed ever bigger houses, which in turn allowed an unprecedented isolation from community. One survey of Americans found that three quarters did not really know their next door neighbors.
So how do you change that? Well, you could raise the price of gas, or rebuild the trolley line.
But as long as we’re trapped in our sense of ourselves as individuals, such changes will breed as much resentment as anything else. If we’re really going to start using the bus, we need – to borrow from earlier movements – some consciousness raising.
(Jan 2006)
More Realistic, Humble Economists Can Stop Environmental Ruin
Paul Ormerod, Adbusters
What do the English, the French, oysters, economics and the environment have in common? A lot, it turns out.
The first three components of this equation form the title of a fascinating book by Robert Nield, former professor of economics at Cambridge, England. Nield has loved oysters all his life. Shortly after he retired, on a long vacation in France, a question occurred to him. Oysters are plentiful in France, with 2 billion a year being produced, yet scarce and expensive in England, which produces just 10 million. Why? Nield knew that this was not always the case – in the mid-nineteenth century oysters had been in such abundance in Britain that they were an important part of the diet of the Victorian poor. Why had that changed?
His research took him deep into the intersection between economics and the environment. He determined that oysters all but disappeared in England because the disastrous laissez faire policies of nineteenth-century British governments allowed them to be harvested almost to extinction. Conversely, in France the extraction and conservation of this valuable natural resource was carefully regulated and controlled.
Nield’s entertaining book – if you really want to know how to open an oyster this is for you – illustrates the usefulness of thoughtful, real world economics when applied to environmental problems. Traditionally, many environmentalists recoil in horror at the very thought of economics. It’s understandable, given the faith-like certainty which many economists attach to pure free-market solutions everywhere and at any time. Indeed, this is why I wrote the Death of Economics just over ten years ago. I wanted to do my bit to help kill off a wholly unrealistic and damaging way of viewing the world.
But at the forefront of the discipline, there is a lot going on to make economics more practical and useful. Granted, many economists themselves haven’t caught up with this trend, and remain stuck in their old ways. Yet environmentalists can profit – if I dare link these two words together – from the direction economics is moving.
(Jan 2006)
Majority prefer renewables and efficiency over nuclear future
David Hopkins,
An overwhelming majority of [UK] people favour the promotion of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency measures as the best ways to tackle climate change rather than restarting a nuclear power programme, a new poll has found.
The survey, published this week and carried out by a joint team from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and Ipsos MORI, found that 78% of respondents favoured renewables as the energy choice of the future, while 76% thought energy efficiency and lifestyle changes would be a better way of tackling emissions.
However, it also found that roughly half (54%) of respondents would be willing to accept the building of new nuclear power stations if it would definitely help to tackle climate change – a view that has been doubted by a leading scientist.
The results come as the Government is conducting its review of energy policies – widely believed to favour the nuclear option (see related story) – and is due to report later this year.
(17 January 2006)
The Energizer
Amory Lovins has a vision: The U.S. economy keeps going and going and going-without any oil
Amory Lovins as told to Cal Fussman, Discover
AMORY LOVINS is a physicist, economist, inventor, automobile designer, consultant to 18 heads of state, author of 29 books, and cofounder of Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think tank. most of all, he’s a man who takes pride in saving energy. The electricity bill at his 4,000-square-foot home in Old Snowmass, Colorado, is five dollars a month, and he’s convinced he can do the same for all of us. his book winning the oil endgame shows how the united states can save as much oil as it gets from the persian gulf by 2015 and how all oil imports can be eliminated by 2040. And that’s just for starters.
As told to Cal Fussman”
When I give talks about energy, the audience already knows about the problems. That’s not what they’ve come to hear. So I don’t talk about problems, only solutions. But after a while, during the question period, someone in the back will get up and give a long riff about all the bad things that are happening—most of which are basically true. There’s only one way I’ve found to deal with that. After this person calms down, I gently ask whether feeling that way makes him more effective.
As RenĂ© Dubos, the famous biologist, once said, “Despair is a sin.”
(February 2006 issue)
Article was just posted — may not be online long.
