No One Here Gets Out Alive

[the48er]

If you're at all familiar with the prominent British author John Gray, you know that the subject line of this post is in no way hyperbolic. This guy takes gloom-and-doom environmentalism to truly spectacular depths, and throws in assorted other goodies guaranteed to infuriate everyone sooner or later (but almost certainly sooner) -- left, right and center.

Nevertheless, much of what he has to say about global warming in this remarkable article in the New Statesman is inarguable. The short version: global warming is irreversible and accelerating. We've already ensured the immanence of a vast, planetary mass-extinction comparable to that which took place about 55 million years ago, about all we can do is try to focus on developing the technology to enable our species to avoid extinction.

While Gray really can be intermittently wacko and infuriating, in the very next sentence he can be utterly brilliant and dead-on in ways that few others are. I couldn't recommend the article more highly, provided you're not given to hurling heavy objects across the room when what you're reading takes a turn (and another and another) for the ugly.

No chucklefest, this, but well worth large dollops of time, patience, and reflection, in my estimation.

[glitch]

1. Good post. Welcome to DU! nt

[the48er]

2. Thank You

I really hope that folks will take the time to read Gray's article.

Even those of us (and I certainly include myself here) who are somewhat cognizant of the problem are doing pretty close to nothing about it other than to jack our jaws and play in the pixels -- even in the face of a climate shift that seems very likely to lead to our extinction -- and sooner, rather than later. Damn.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Thanks - a good article, on the whole

though I'm surprised he didn't mention the energy and land that goes into large-scale meat eating (as well as reducing the number of humans we're trying to support on the planet, reduce the number of mammals and birds we breed on purpose).

I also wonder about the oft-quoted "oil based fertilisers". From my school-level chemistry, they are mainly natural gas based (methane is converted to hydrogen, which is converted to ammonia, which is the basis for all artificial nitrates) - hydrogen can be produced from water, if you have the energy (and that's an ideal use for intermittent electricity generation, such as solar or wind power - your fertiliser plant might be idle at times, but you can store the nitrate very easily, so you're OK over any reasonable time period). There's also the question of the economics of returning to crop rotation involving nitrogen fixing; and I don't know if that's applicable in all parts of the world.

It's certainly true that the best solution to just about all the problems is a smaller population. It really annoys me when people say we have to change government tax policies, maternity leave etc. to encourage population growth. If they want policies like that, they should have the grace to admit it's because they like children for social reasons, not because there's an economic shortage of people in the world.

Personal vehicles will surely end (but I think bicycles will become ubiquitous); living in contiguous housing, eg apartments, will surely increase - less surface are to lose heat when it's cold (or absorb it when it's hot - a larger building should stay closer to a combined day/night average in hot weather rather than warming up so much during the day). Air travel will be almost unheard of. The economy will have to be different to industrialised countries of today. And I think Britain will build a new generation of nuclear reactors, because in the end we'd rather do that than buy natural gas at ever increasing prices on the world market, and wind won't give us the base generation we need for an approximate lifestyle like today. I suspect the USA will too.

[the48er]

5. *Vastly* Smaller Population Is the Key

Thanks for picking up on the population angle. The fact that Gray addressed it was one of the things that kept me reading his highly disagreeable but colossally important (IMO) article.

I don't see how, in 2006, any sane person can look seriously at the basic science involved in all this (but who's got time for that?) and conclude anything other than that for the foreseeable future, breeding is one of the most heinously selfish, evil, stupid things anyone could possibly do. With apologies to Bill McKibben, "No, not even one."

Unfortunately, most of the high-profile pseudo-science relating to the study of Earth's human carrying capacity is so weak and simple-minded as to be worthless. But I strongly suspect that the planetary max is absolutely no more (and possibly much less) than one or two percent of our current 6.5 billion. I'd conjecture further that if we don't get it into those kinds of ballparks pronto, Gaia will not only do it for us, she may just have to flush us altogether.

So I question whether we'll be around to ride those bikes. I'd guess that we'll be gone long before things actually get all that much warmer; done in by such related problems as tropical diseases moving pole-ward and "new" uber diseases popping up regularly as a result of humans' crowding in on other species -- and one another. It's the countless "side effects" that'll get us -- not the warming per se.

[raccoon]

4. Great article. Thought provoking. Especially the following

statements I thought important:

"In per-capita use of resources, it is the richest countries that are most overpopulated..."

In the Western nations, it's easy for people to think it's Third World countries with high birthrates that are the cause of the population/resource problems.


"The type of energy-intensive industrial economy that is being adopted in India and China is clearly unsustainable. At the same time there is not the remotest prospect that the rush to industrialisation will be abandoned..."