(no subject) : comments.
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
I wasn't looking for a qualified explanation, just a reaction I suppose. I guess I got it. Thanks anyway.
(no subject)
(no subject)
It is a crying shame that Monbiot comes across in such an angry manner - because it is shooting his excellent intentions in the foot!
Having met him (via Oxfam and People and Planet) I know that he may not be, shall we say, aware of how he comes across.
(no subject)
[I don't know if he's consciously reached that conclusion, mind.]
(no subject)
At the moment the environmental message is one of utter incoherence and for the average man and woman on the street (or business man or woman) the sense of doom is almost choking. For you is 'may as well vent before we die', for others it is 'party now, because the distopia is nigh'.
We are are all trying to find our way and our truth through this mess, and I for one would like to find some hope.
When you have NGOs, Govts and respected spokespeople lashing out at each other and at those who are trying to do something rather than use that energy on doing something constructive it is utterly utterly self defeating and I think the damage caused to potential public action is far more severe to our futures than a business 'having a go', paying someone to reduce emissions buy building a wind farm in India, thinking about its carbon footprint for the first time and sticking a few recycling bins in the staff kitchen.
Joe Public sees all this going on and just doesn't know what to think. So he puts out his recycling, opens a bottle of wine and sees if there is anything good on the telly by way of blotting out the doom for another day.
Where's the bottle opener...
Just to add: Some research we did at Oxfam demonstrated that it takes on average about 15 years to achieve a social paradigm shift. We can see this with ending apartheid, Make Trade Fair - going all the way back to ending the slave trade.
We are living in that moment again but this time it is the worlds biggest ever paradigm shift. It will knock terrorism off(or way down) the political agenda in the next 3 years. Govts follow where people lead, they have no choice (and they never were innovators). Yes there will be damage. But I think we still have a chance to avoid the worse case scenarios. I end this comment feeling positive.
I may well be idealistic. But I make no apologies for that.
(no subject)
I'd be in the "party now" camp except that's an awfully convenient rationalisation and I _could_ be wrong, but as far as I can make out even in the best _possible_ case - ie, all governments worldwide immediately impose austerity measures of a similar stringency to those in place in Britain during WW2 (and manifestly such measures are possible) - we'd still face a fairly dismal outcome, albeit that we might well keep most of the species alive. In the best plausible case - say, people stop being quite so readily distracted into pointless greenwash activities like buying Priuses and biofuels - we're most likely all screwed. I think the most likely case is that global warming is halted only by atmospheric dust from the use of nuclear weapons.
So, ha, I said I wasn't going to write this up, but - reducing potential future emissions in the Third World to justify continued emissions in the First World is like trying to catch fish in a tree next to the river. In particular, we're pretty much at the point where all the readily available supply of fossil fuels is going to get dug up and used in the next few decades - arguably preventing an increase in demand at best delays that slightly. Demand needs to reduce radically so that some of that supply can actually be left in the ground (and, again, that's the bare minimum necessary to effect any meaningful change) - and for that to happen, those Westerners who were going to buy the offsets need _not to fly_ - not to reduce the Third World competition for energy so they can use it themselves.
(no subject)
So on reading your comment, I, ordinary joe, wanna give up, cocoon into my friends and family and make a mental note to keep a stash of pain killers to swallow when the shit hits the fan.
I clearly remember coming home from school at 12 years old having learned about Hiroshima for the very first time. I stood in the living room looking at the roses growing in the garden and my head was spinning in shock and distress. I cried all evening. It was 1980 and we in the midst of the cold war. There was no where to run to and we had no where to hide.
Here we are again - only it's worse. I know that. But I'm not going to give up. I totally agree - we need a WW2 effort on a global scale. But the beauty of the WW2 effort and its acceptance and adoption by the public was due to raising and maintaining moral. You can achieve a certain amount by haranguing people into change, you can achieve far more by inspiring them.
(no subject)
We might achieve _more_ by inspiring people but (regrettably) the only government that seems to be achieving anything is China and they're achieving it by being a repressive police state. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.