Independent UK: We'll save the planet only if we're forced to

[marmar]

Johann Hari: We'll save the planet only if we're forced to
Thursday, 21 February 2008


Do you check every item you buy to make sure it is green and planet-friendly? Do you buy carbon offsets every time you fly? Stop. It is time to be honest: green consumerism is at best a draining distraction, and at worst a con. While the planet's fever gets worse by the week, we are guzzling down green-coloured placebos and calling it action. There is another way. Our reaction to global warming has gone in waves. First we were in blank denial: how can releasing an odourless, colourless gas change the climate so dramatically? Now we are in a phase of displacement: we assume we can shop our way out of global warming, by shovelling a few new lightbulbs and some carbon offsets into our shopping basket.

This is a self-harming delusion. It's hard to give a sense of the contrast today between the magnitude of our problem, and the weediness of our response so far. But the best way is offered by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen.

He explains that until 10,000 years ago, the planet's climate would fluctuate violently: sometimes it would veer by 12 degrees centigrade in just a decade. This meant it was impossible to develop agriculture. Crops couldn't be cultivated in this climatic chaos, so human beings were stuck as a tiny smattering of hunter-gatherers.

But then the climate settled down into safe parameters – and humans could settle down too. This period is called the Holocene, and it meant that for the first time, we could develop farming and cities. Everything we know as human civilisation is thanks to this unprecedented period of climatic stability.

Today, we are bringing this era to an end. By pumping vast amounts of warming gases into the atmosphere, we are creating a new era: the Anthropocene, in which man makes the weather. There is an imminent danger of it bursting beyond these safe parameters, and bringing about a return to the violent, volatile variations that prevented our ancestors from progressing beyond spears and sticks. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-well-save-the-planet-only-if-were-forced-to-784893.html

[gateley]

1. Excellent article - Recommend. nt

[hatrack]

2. Kunstler - "We'll keep behaving the way we do until we can't, and then we won't"

In a nutshell.

[Hissyspit]

3. Yup.

[alterfurz]

5. "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...

....after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -- Winston Churchill

[NickB79]

4. By the time we HAVE to save the planet

It will already be too late.

[Pooka Fey]

6. You got that right. n/t