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Tuesday, February 9, 2010
5 10 2 These environmentalists, or the hundreds of thousands of other women and men who believed passionately in such ideas, were unable to slow the economic juggernaut that rushed across this continent, however. Most did not think of that as their role; it did not even cross their minds. They set up small islands of park and wilderness for the tide to rush around. And they worked to cure modernity’s most toxic side effects, making sure certain chemicals were banned and the Clean Air Act passed. This movement has been remarkably effective. Even as our economy has grown larger, smog has also abated. We can swim in most of our rivers again. And our model has spread to the rest of the world. 15 20 3 However, when it came to global warming, this kind of environmentalism flunked. Despite 20 years of increasingly dire warnings, American carbon emissions continue to grow; we would not even engage in the Kyoto Protocol, the one international effort to bring carbon emissions under some kind of control. A few western nations are doing better, but even they are having trouble meeting their reduction targets. And the developing world is starting to flood the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, on an almost American scale. From 1990 to 2004, China’s carbon emissions increased by 67 percent, nearly all of it the result of coal. 25 30 4 We are now starting to realise this failure was almost inevitable. Environmentalism’s method of handling global warming is flawed. 35 5 The old paradigm works like this: We judge just about every issue by asking the question, Will this make the economy larger? If the answer is yes, then we embrace whatever is in question – globalisation, factory farming, suburban sprawl. In this paradigm, the job of environmentalism is to cure the worst effects, and endless economic growth makes that job easier. If you are rich, you can more easily afford the catalytic converter for the end of the tailpipe that magically scrubs the sky above your city. 40 6 However, it turns out that, above all else, endless economic growth is built on the use of cheap fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas are miraculous – compact, easily transportable, and cheap. 45 7 Precisely, the same fuels that gave us our growth now threaten our civilisation. Burn a gallon of gas and you release five pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. Furthermore, as China demonstrates every day, the cheapest way to spur economic growth is by burning more fossil fuel. Even Benjamin Friedman, the Harvard economist who wrote a brilliant book defending the morality of economic growth, conceded that carbon dioxide is the one major environmental contaminant for which no study has ever found any indication of improvement as living standards rise. 50 55 8 This means we might need a new idea. We need to stop asking, ‘Will this make the economy larger?’ Instead, we need to start asking, ‘Will this pour more carbon into the atmosphere?’ 60 9 For that to happen, we would need to change as dramatically as lightbulbs. We would need to see ourselves differently – identity and desire would have to shift. 10 For instance, the houses that we build are enormous – more than double the size they were in 1950, despite the fact that the number of people in the average home continues to fall. Even a technologically efficient furnace or air-conditioner struggles to heat or cool such a giant space - and the houses can only be built on suburban lots, guaranteeing that their occupants would be entirely car-dependent. What would it take to make us consider smaller homes, closer to the centre of town, where we could use the bus, or a bike for daily transportation? 65 70 11 It would require, I think, a movement that takes people’s aspirations for good and secure lives seriously - that takes those desires more seriously even than the consumer economy has taken them. We would need a kind of cultural environmentalism that asks deeper questions than we are used to asking. 75 Adapted from A Deeper Shade of Green by Bill McKibben, National Geographic, August 2006 Bill McKibben, an environmental essayist and activist, is the author of the best seller, The End of Nature. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/02/nigerian-oil/oneill-text.html Posted by ShAnNoN at |
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