Climate Chronicles

Silly Stuff Stalking Our Bodies, Our S(h)elves

Adam — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:55:23 +0000

The Killer Barbie Doll

We are awash in a world of unintended consequences.

From a historical perspective, we didn’t intend to poison the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and the many other noxious by-products of fossil fuels. We didn’t even know about much of it. Rather, we blithely sought to build factories and bridges, weave cloth, travel the world in engine-driven vessels; aggregation of wealth for the very lucky very few was in there somewhere too. That nasty dog, pollution, just seemed to nip at our tails at every step of the way.

Similarly, on a personal level, today we don’t indend to support slave labor, destruction of forests, clogging the oceans with plastic, wars for oil, or the deranged climate that could end it all. But support it we do, every day in every way.

These connections are rather difficult to understand, not because of their intrinsic mystery but because our culture screams incessantly that all of our folly is not only fine, it’s essential to life itself. We appear to have been conclusively convinced, having fought inconceivably destructive wars and developed weapons of mass destruction just to maintain our way of life. Meanwhile, the ceaseless onslaught of consumer messages lulls us into thinking that our behavior is just fine.

But just behind this flimsy curtain are people who have been forced from sustainable living by our “free trade” agreements. Who work eighty-hour weeks for little pay to provide us with non-essential bobbles. Who suffer from toxic environments that we hesitate to allow at home but have exported to the third world for convenience. All for fancy handbags, cheap clothes, greasy hamburgers, or cruises to Alaska. Things we don’t need, and that often contribute little to quality of life and gross national happiness (1).

The average lifespan of stuff, from purchase to dump, is short. Just consider how long you actually use the things you buy, or if you do use them regularly, how long they last. We are beginning to understand how damaging the end result is: we’re banning landfills and trash burning, and moving towards more recycling (2). But we don’t seriously address our consumption at the basis of the cycle, and all the human and environmental damage along the way.

Chris Jordan, a Seattle artist and photographer, has created a remarkable series called “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait,” in which he takes a graphic look at our off-the-charts wastefulness. I’ve mentioned his work before - if you haven’t seen it yet go to the website ASAP:

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php.

As “Running the Numbers” so clearly depicts, the magnitude of our blind indulgence is stunning: we are systematically eliminating our very life support systems as we have already done to so many extinct and soon-to-be extinct species. For trinkets, for nothing more than a temporary endless supply of entirely unnecessary and mostly useless and quickly discarded stuff.

Is our silly stuff worth it? When it comes to satisfying, peaceful, joyful, fulfilling lives, most of the consumptive stuff is silly in perspective, it’s so terribly temporary at best. Is it worth it? How do we rationalize our behavior? Do we deny the magnitude of the consequences? The causality? How long do we continue to say, “My personal contribution is so small that it doesn’t matter what I do?”

I personally sold my car last summer, ride my bicycle almost everywhere, stopped using my clothes dryer, live below the official poverty level, and think about the unintended consequences every time I eat a 3,000-mile banana . . . yet I still eat the banana.

How do I - and we - make that transition. How do we get to survivability and sustainability, what personal emotional steps must we take? How do we give up our cherished but deeply flawed way of living in the world, replacing it with a sustainable existence? As Richard Heinberg has recently stated, “if we are all in various stages of waking up to the problem, we are also waking up from the cultural trance of denial in which we are all embedded” (3).

So please, dear reader, share your thoughts on the matter and post a comment!

Next time: Hope in the Dung and the Dirt

1. See Richard Ingham, “Gross National Happiness,” August 25, 2005, http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=news.display_article&mode=C&NewsID=4925. The Bhutanese seem to have developed a much more sensible approach to quality of life.

2. See William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, North Point Press, 2002. This is one of my favorite books on sustainable, closed-loop product cycles. They use the word “downcycling” to describe what we disingenuously call “recycling”: “[The product] is made of things that were never designed with further use in mind . . . and all [of the recycling] effort has only succeeded in postponing the usual fate of products by a life cycle or two . . . [they are] only stopping off in your house” on the way to the dump (p. 4). And because of the “mutagenic materials, heavy metals, dangerous chemicals and dyes” that abrade into the air to be inhaled by their users or leach into the ground and poison the earth, we have “unwittingly become party to a process of waste and destruction.”

3. Richard Heinberg, “Peak Everything,” MuseLetter #185 / September 2007, http://www.richardheinberg.com/museletter/185.

Bali Dancing

Adam — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 18:29:07 +0000

Ah, the intemperate tempestuous two-step . . .

“The Conference, hosted by the Government of Indonesia, took place at the Bali International Convention Centre and brought together more than 10,000 participants, including representatives of over 180 countries together with observers from intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations and the media” (1).

So begins the main page of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, which gathered from December 3rd through 14th in the rather recent year of 2007. I felt my first shudder at the number of participants and all the atmospherically toxic air miles. Well, we have to do that for a greater goal, right? Even if destroying the planet in order to save it seems (!) like a paradox.

But my first shudder paled in comparison to the second: The Bali Roadmap (2).

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The Last Frabjous Days of Exponentiation

Adam — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 16:02:45 +0000

Tea for two, times two times two times two . . .

We have a social disease, and I’ve taken the presumptuous liberty to name it: exponentiosis stupiditus (”ES” as it is known among expo therapists). It’s a condition characterized by gleefully pursuing endless growth until its inherent impossibility clobbers us to smithereens. Generally incurable, it is highly contagious and endemic in the population of industrialized nations, with a prevalence of around 99%. Once infected at an early age, victims are afflicted with a compulsion to acquire stuff regardless of consequences. Many cultures and civilizations have suffered and expired from ES, but never before has it afflicted humans on such a planetary scale.

Despite the varied political rhetoric of the last few mercantile centuries, the issue is neither capitalism nor communism nor fascism nor socialism nor any ism. The issue is the prevalent cultural delusion that we can grow our portfolios of acquisitions without limits; indeed, if we don’t we’ll die.

Unfortunately, the opposite is true. And most of us have no idea why.

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The Futilitarians and the Trutilitarians

Adam — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:55:00 +0000

Why bother? Why indeed . . .

Meet the Futilitarians

Who are the Futilitarians? They are the majority of us, from silent to noisy, who acknowledge that global warming is a problem and want to do something about it. But they can’t bring themselves to believe - let alone act on - the demands of climate reality and the consequences of the general chaos delivered by our relentless exponential growth (more next time on exponentiation, i.e., the wonders of multiplication by two).

The Futilitarians are those whom I regularly and duly malign (although they have my sympathies), who expect material “progress” to proceed apace regardless of the limitations of the natural world. (more…)

With Friends Like These: The Nation Cruises Into An Iceberg

Adam — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 13:25:59 +0000

Why can’t we keep the dots connected?

Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation is the oldest weekly magazine in the country (1). Today it is a bastion of progressive opinion and insight, and on May 7, 2007, it published an urgent special edition entitled “Surviving the Climate Crisis: What Must Be Done” (2).

To give credit where due, there are some excellent articles in this issue, with important points by writers serious about global warming:

Christian Parenti tells us that “Only a few decades remain if we are to avoid cataclysmic runaway global warming and its attendant crises” (3), and reports that according to a government report renewables could supply all of U.S. electricity needs by 2030 (4). (more…)

Climate, the Casual Emergency

Adam — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:03:56 +0000

No time to say hello - goodbye! - we’re late, we’re late, we’re late! (1)

Why do we, the People, ignore the urgency of global warming? Sure, since Gore’s movie we’ve been paying more attention to a careening climate, but we don’t write home about it. We’re willing to change a few lightbulbs, but not to make any of the fundamental changes necessary to save the future (near as well as distant). We act like there’s a dribbling leak in our bathtubs, denying that it’s a gusher in our teetering lifeboat. Why?

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With Friends Like These: The Sierra Club Leads Us Off a Cliff

Adam — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:04:11 +0000

The future of life on earth is not a business decision . . .

While the Sierra Club has a long history of environmental education and activism, with respect to climate it is firmly in the delusional crowd of 80% emissions reductions by 2050 (see our September 25th post, The 80% Follies).

Sierra Magazine reports on a “climate brain trust” (1) that the Club convened on December 14, 2006. Why are we to trust the brains of these important people to guide us through the climate crisis? Well, because they are “prominent experts,” whom we might also call . . .

The Culture Savers

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Zero Carbon Britain - (Almost) Zero Carbon Now, Part II

Adam — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:04:14 +0000

A remarkable survival plan - if survival is what we want . . .

While Climate Chronicles indulges in solo prose to warn of the impending Flood, fervently hoping to muster people to address climate reality, the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) (1) in the U.K. is building an Ark - for all of us if we have the sense to climb on board. Founded in 1973, CAT is a leading European environmental research and experimental station and community, and has grown from wind turbines hand-made from cloth and old car parts to a state-of-the-art (both low- and high-tech) leading edge planning and development center. I highly recommend visiting CAT’s informative and entertaining website.

In June 2007 CAT issued its ground-breaking report, Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB) (2), which outlines the elements of a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the U.K. to zero by the year 2027. While I maintain that 2027 is far too late, I readily admit that I am stubbornly insistent on the demands of physical reality - ZCB is tipping its hat to political “reality,” as irrelevant to the natural world though politics may be.

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Zero Carbon Now - Part I

Adam — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:32:21 +0000

“All of the time scales seem to be shortened now. . . . Things are on more of a hair trigger than we thought.” (1)

The rapid and accelerating alterations in climate make it clear that we have to change course. If we care about the future in any meaningful way we literally have no choice (see previous and future posts for more detail on collapse-laden choicelessness). This non-choice is both simple and extremely difficult: Zero Carbon Now (ZCN).

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Terra Tostada - Life on Globally Warmed Earth

Adam — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:39:13 +0000

If it ain’t fixable, don’t break it . . .

One of the recurrent quotable quotes in the climate biz goes something like “if we act now, we can avoid the worst effects of global warming.” Well, I went to my files to find a recent example for you - but I almost couldn’t. With the accelerating change observed in the past few months, the invocation of such optimism seems to be waning.

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