This is a guest essay from Jan Lundberg, who is, at press time, on the Climate Emergency Fast promoted by Mike Tidwell's organization. It is a response to Tidwell's recent piece in Grist, "Consider Using the N-Word Less." Jan publishes Culturechange.org and participates in campaigns to have cities ban plastic bags and water bottles. His previous article in Gristmill is "(How can we be) looking at the end of the age of oil."
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We have to do more to minimize global heating and catastrophic climate change than do the same things differently. Rather, it is time for a revolution in our culture's values and pursuits. Climate scientists bear this out with their findings and warnings, which is why we hear Al Gore now calling for a 90 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions. (At this point he's allowing too many years to reach the objective, but he's on the right track.)
Energy efficiency is vital when we are such a wasteful society, because modest changes can reap huge savings. There can be further technological improvements to cut greenhouse gases while allowing people to continue their lives in the same fashion, for a time, that they have enjoyed (or endured). However, as Mike Tidwell pointed out in "Consider Using the N-Word Less," relying on measures such as simply encouraging better light bulbs and more fuel efficient cars will fail.
Knowing that the Earth's climate is shaping up to rapidly shift to a new state -- probably not seen since 55 million years ago -- we cannot play politics with what really needs to be done to make a last attempt to curb greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently. Yet under our system of big business and its influence over both legislation and the content of media, we are witnessing a tragic denial of the need to do the possible, now, to slash greenhouse gas emissions. The present economy is held to be more important.
We cannot buy our way out of the climate crisis, although we must make wiser purchases. It is imperative to simply stop polluting the thin envelope of Earth's atmosphere with carbon dioxide. It can't be stopped 100% overnight, which is what our cherished climate needs, but we can and must carry out essential travel and exchange of goods and services without the excesses of global corporate trade and consumerism. Being car-free, for example, is much better and transformative than buying a gas-sipper. Not having electric appliances, or sharing them with neighbors (as in a laundromat, or an internet café or library), is worthy of the climate challenge we face. We need to accept the sight of clothes-lines, depave driveways and parking lots to plant gardens, and refuse to buy products transported long distances.
A technological fix does not recognize the urgency of the crisis or the challenges of too many billions of consumers at a time of peaking global oil extraction. We need something strong that's commensurate with the threat, instead of barely ratcheting up some comfortable remedies. What about lifestyle change and embracing local economics to replace globalized corporate pillaging?
Society is overdue in debating the feasibility of technofix development and slow implementation versus slashing energy use and corporate profit now. Is it feasible to have a kick-in-the-balls approach to the global heating beast, or not? For a stronger, quicker approach than Mike Tidwell's, let's consider:
• He wrote, "Like Jim Crow practices, we must by law phase out completely the manufacture of inefficient light bulbs and gas-guzzling cars, as a serious start to fighting this problem." This would have been a real start two decades ago when the situation was more manageable and resources were not so depleted, in a less populated world. His message, resting on his examples, does not deliver, just as an anti-racism campaign does not get at root causes if fundamental economic injustice is not addressed with actions that support an alternative.
The gap between what the technofix-approach offers and the problem at hand is not just something for us to read about over coffee as we check our Daily Grist. What Tidwell considers a cure will hardly suffice at this point, when global heating has started to spin out of control.
• "To move our nation off of fossil fuels, we need inspired Churchillian leadership and sweeping statutes a la the Big War or the civil-rights movement." Too bad Tidwell's measures do not heed the climate scientists' warnings. The right to private property has rationalized unending greed. It controls our politics, so any honest leadership would have to come from someone -- you and me -- other than the leaders we have elected and can see on the mainstream horizon.
• Why do measures that are not even half-measures get the lion's share of attention? Lifestyle change is not where the funding wants to go. So, much nonprofit activism props up the status quo. Not buying any new cars, whether one goes car-free or not, is a serious measure for dismantling the power structure of climate destruction, if done on a large enough scale.
• Tidwell's conclusion -- "...muscular clean-energy statutes that would finally do what we say we want: rescue our life-giving Earth from climate catastrophe" -- is a top-down solution that takes precious time and would not slash greenhouse gases to the extent needed. This approach would fall far short of the need for the 90% greenhouse-gases immediate reduction. Some environmentalists suffer from the illusion that major changes are just not in the offing, or are too sensitive to bring up. Or, we must offer a solution that is relatively painless and allows people to think that their basic way of life as consumers will merely change a bit, for the better, but not be upended.
It turns out that with peak oil here already, we are soon not going to have the cheap energy to maintain global trade or food production on today's scale. And renewable energy is not ready to step in as enough of a substitute, when the oil market will soon be handing us an unmanageable, exacerbated shortage. Our approach at Culture Change includes the Sail Transport Network and gearing up for Puget Sound operation in conjunction with SCALLOPS (the Sustainable Ballard initiative). There can be joy in losing the consumer economy, if we can live with a whole "new" scale befitting a small, threatened planet.
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Comments
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kman Posted 10:04 am
05 Sep 2007
What are the effects of the 0.74 C warming we've seen over the last century, i.e. how bad is it?
Also, how bad would a 2 C warming by 2100 be, i.e. what would be effects of it?
Some resources would be very helpful. Thanks!
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Jon Rynn Posted 11:00 am
05 Sep 2007
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GreyFlcn Posted 11:40 am
05 Sep 2007
Wouldn't our effort be better spent convincing our representatives to pass better laws?
Since you run into a paradox, that if lots of people didn't drive, wouldn't that merely lower the price of gasoline, and then cause others to drive more.
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Colin Wright Posted 4:26 pm
05 Sep 2007
You seem to criticize him for proposing "technofixes". But you don't really address his point that we have to pressure government to pass strong laws. Presumably you think things are too far gone for that?
But surely it does't have to be either/or. We can build grassroots movements and lead low-energy lifestyles. But we can also lobby for effective laws that could put limits on carbon emissions. Indeed, even with Peak Everything we are going to need government action to keep carbon below 450ppm, and depletion protocols to make the transition to a low-(car)bon society as smooth as possible.
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odograph Posted 2:01 am
06 Sep 2007
A democracy, for better or worse, requires a consensus.
Tidwell might as well be criticizing fasting, as something that won't mean anything in and of itself. ("so what if a few people stop eating for a few days?") But fasting and Priuses and showerheads might be part of a movement, they might get us to a tipping point.
And we desperately need a tipping point. We need the kind of consensus, in a democracy, that will allow regulations with teeth to bring along the laggards.
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lorna salzman Posted 4:12 am
06 Sep 2007
8)Full Cost pricing of all goods to internalize the real costs of production and consumption;
9)Immediate halt to deforestation worldwide in the tropics; 10)boycott of all soybean, sugar and cattle produced in Brazil and other cleared tropical lowland forest;
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:27 am
06 Sep 2007
In addition, Lundberg seems to believe that we should reject virtually all of industrial technology; or at least that seems to be the implication; but I think we should be engaged in a rational discussion of which technologies should be rejected and which shouldn't.
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odograph Posted 4:52 am
06 Sep 2007
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Rachel Findley Posted 4:55 am
06 Sep 2007
I can speak to that, from personal experience. But I know plenty of other people who find the prospect of losing their stuff and wide-ranging travel a real threat.
The more people who opt out, and who clearly enjoy their new ways of living, the less threatening the transition will look. It will really start to look like fun when we build communities to support new ways of living, economically, medically, educationally and personally.
If there is no broad agreement on goals, coercion is not likely to work much better than Prohibition or mass sterilization in India in the Seventies. With broad agreement on goals and values, incentives or coercion can work to "bring along the laggards" as odograph put it. In a democracy (or even in the absence of democracy) a lack of consent will bring down a government or at least prevent its laws from working.
With consensus, people will change the way they live and accept regulations that support the consensus. Think of WWII--not just rationing but the draft, blackouts, Victory gardens, war bonds, displacement of Japanese people... you really do have to think about what the consensus includes; it can be life-destroying and life-affirming simlutaneously; propaganda can, for awhile anyway, support measures that are toxic to the body public.
Does it seem like it will take too long to reach a broad agreement on measures that protect the environment and support democracy, equality, culture? Maybe it will--so we had better get going.
Lots of joy. Quick. Now.
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rghusted Posted 5:14 am
06 Sep 2007
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socialscientist Posted 2:18 pm
06 Sep 2007
good ideas... add free public transit.
The more people ride the more frequent the service will have to be. Towns and cities will be more attractive. Move back to town and give the farms back to the [organic] farmers.
http://www.freepublictransit.org the beginning of the end of autosprawl
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Nucbuddy Posted 5:30 pm
06 Sep 2007
...And in that article you stated, "Whether huge cargo ships can keep plying the seas without fossil fuels is doubtful." However, nuclear-powered shipping is an option that has already been established as viable.
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SMLowry Posted 12:10 am
07 Sep 2007
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:13 am
07 Sep 2007
Nucbuddy -- Thanks for reading my diatribe, I hadn't thought of nuclear-powered cargo ships, I don't know if those would be as economical as diesel-powered ones; whether I like it or not, I suppose that option will be explored.
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SMLowry Posted 2:01 am
07 Sep 2007
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Jon Rynn Posted 4:15 am
07 Sep 2007
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