Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A new report out today from Rapid Transition Alliance founding member the Centre for Alternative technology (CAT) looks at how the UK can cut energy demand by 60% and reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions using current technologies, without relying on unproven carbon capture.
But if we plan to reduce our consumption before it happens to us, if we plan to have more time and human energy to give away rather than sell, the impact is softened. If we direct our focus towards making connections and building resilience, and away from making money and buying things, we will all be better off than we otherwise would have been.
We humans are aggregating more power, and doing so more unequally across society, than in any previous period in history. Power is good; without it, we would be powerless. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and that’s an apt way of describing the human predicament in the early 21st century.
We could all be a little happier, a little healthier, and a little more centered. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to decide between putting on my hockey gear and heading over to Walmart or putting on my hockey gear and playing a game with my daughter and her friends. Tough choice, eh? Happy holidays to you and yours!
In other words, we have a long way to go if we choose to reduce emissions by simply replacing fossil fuels with wind turbines. As the ecologist Bill Rees noted in his recent Tyee analysis, “the green energy transition is not really happening.”
This post from almost exactly 10 years ago is like a “report from the front” of my own thinking related to the question: How can Americans fall in love with limits the way we’ve fallen in love with freedom?” Our romance with freedom as entitlement, expansion, breaking (up, in, out), and, when you come right down to it, selfishness writ so large it’s sociopathy, is literally killing the web of life and the cohesion of societies.
With the support of a community we trust and a clear view of our potential, we can experience the growing crisis as an opportunity to make the needed changes rather than sink into despair or live in fear of the future. With the support of a community we trust and a clear view of our potential, we can experience the growing crisis as an opportunity to make the needed changes rather than sink into despair or live in fear of the future.
One of the firm rules of systems is that you can’t change just one thing. Why do we keep on discussing options compared to a business as usual scenario? There will be no business as usual scenario when climate change hits and there will be no business as usual scenario if human society takes appropriate action.
In this post, I reflect on the vocabulary we need to be familiar with if we are to raise awareness and develop widespread literacy and skills for responding to all our interrelated problems, from climate breakdown to soil erosion, species extinction, human suffering and inequality. The issue of language and vocabulary has arisen in a number of conversations I’ve had with friends and acquaintances in recent weeks, as we approached the School Climate Strikes on Sept 20 2019.
In a sustainable and responsible culture, there will be meaningful, even essential, work to be done at home. I’ll outline a few contributions of homemakers to a post-industrial society and offer my own experimentation, its successes and its failures (as an example but not as evidence that I’ve perfectly achieved responsible living).
The left urgently needs to get over its long-term fascination with “productivism”, to realise that the best line of attack against capitalism is to focus on limits and sustainability, and to plunge into Transition Towns and related initiatives.
That begs the question: why aren’t developed nations, such as European nations, rapidly replacing their fossil fuel uses with renewable energy and why do they still have high per capita CO2 emission rates, typically much higher than developing nations?
