Ignore Global Warming, There Is No Practical Solution, Let’s Be Realistic
Brock A. Shaver
September 25, 2006
It is time to really look at what faces the human race, the whole picture, not the broken up concepts that make us feel like we are actually in control of our fate.
We are an incredibly positive, optimistic culture. It is not fashionable to sound negative, but sometimes reality is like that. The issue of Global Warming falls into this category. Society analyzes a problem to fix it like a car engine. But the hallmark of civilized thinking is that we shy away from seeing the whole picture, the scale of the entire problem.
Considering Nature as ‘the environment’ demonstrates that we cannot even conceive of the correct terminology for our vanishing human habitat. Nature is alive. The ‘environment’ is a concept, something we can adjust if we just take a wrench to the components of the system. It is the fundamental fallacy underlying the very structure of how we think. Modern Western civilization cannot escape, let alone recognize, its own thought processes. And yet it is this very process that is at the root of the problem.
The first reaction is the reflex to deconstruct and analyze the issue. We are born into this scientific-like thinking, and few are truly aware of how it affects every assumption that we make. Civilization has used this to create an enveloping artificial environment for humans to live in. We take it for granted and do not understand its full ramifications to solve a problem of a planetary size. Can there be any question that humans are in charge of their own fate?
Humans control reality. We do it using knowledge. And we’re good at it. Where once we were subject to nature, our survival system now is based on numbers, mathematics, and equation-thinking. This began with science, which converts phenomena into numbers and equations to produce stable, reliable knowledge. Science declares what is reality. Reality is what we can see and control. And we are suspicious of anything that cannot be ‘proven’ through some demonstration before our eyes. We are literalists, despite knowing that meaning is relative.
Business took science and numbers and created this entirely artificial survival system we now rely upon. Without grocery stores, millions would starve. They are a business, which converts workers activity into a number in the long equation to reach that one magic numeral, the quarterly profit. A grocery store is dependent on a long supply chain from the field, through transportation, factory, store and finally to our mouths. Each component is a business, coordinated, like an equation, to deliver our daily bread. If any of those variables fail, the grocery store is empty. We are confident that there are redundancies in the system to keep this from happening.
And yet without numbers, in the form of a paycheck, workers cannot eat even if the supermarket is full. That paycheck is dependent on jobs. Everything we buy supports an inestimable number of employees. Buying a Hotwheels toy at the local mall sustains lumberjacks to fell the trees, truckers, paper mill workers, chemical factories, ink producers, design technicians, marketers, warehousing, buyers, bankers, the list is endless. And that is just the packaging we throw out. If we stopped consuming toy cars, a great many people will be unemployed. Now consider how many tens-of-thousands of different items are in one massive discount store. And how many different stores are in an average mall, and how many chains and malls there are. As you keep multiplying, one begins to see the scale of the economy, and how many paychecks are dependent on our consumption of packaging and products.
Most houses have enough items in them to furnish two homes. The yard sale and the garbage dump are critical to our suburban lifestyle. Few realize that a hundred houses occupy only a couple of city blocks. Surveying how little space it takes to put that many houses in begins to show the scale of how many homes are in an average city. It quickly becomes apparent how massive our settled population is, and how much ‘stuff’ is out there. To sustain those mortgages and lifestyles we need to keep consuming or the economy will fail and millions will lose their jobs. It is our survival system, based on numbers.
Our minds always like to focus on what is ‘out there.’ We see a problem with ‘the environment’ and we want to repair it. The reason is to stop a threat to us. And the question underneath is, how do we do this and still maintain our standard of living? All the components of the biosphere have been discerned. The solution should be obvious, and our success at creating this remarkable lifestyle of abundance, convenience and medicine provides a foundation of confidence that we can manage anything that Nature throws at us. After all, we tamed the earth. Instead of fighting the looming weather and forests like our pioneer ancestors did, our daily connection with nature is the annoying rain between the car and the house.
If we were to correct Global Warming, we would have to stop pollution. That would mean a loss of jobs. It would mean living with less, lowering our expectations. That sounds like deprivation. The last generation that has any experience with scarcity was born in the 1930’s.
Our culture is built on pain relief. Business cannot sell pain, only supply some need. Everything we do is to control our happiness through the freedom from pain, boredom, and discomfort. Living with less would entail a radical shift in the psyche of 600 million Westerners. Could we convert our societies fast enough so that we would not need a car to work and shop, our homes to not need electricity for light, heat and appliances, and know what to do without having to pay for our distractions? To stop Global Warming means halting pollution. Everything in our homes is manufactured and packaged. It would mean throwing our entire way-of-life into reverse.
Business is now the central institution of power, supplanting government. Unlike kings, who used armies and repression to express their authority, business has only money to base its dominance upon. Would it be willing to cooperate in its own demise? If a company is not growing it will most likely fail. Business cannot simply maintain the status quo to stay alive in a competitive marketplace.
And even if it chose this course, does anyone believe that China and India, with four-times the population of the West, will gladly give up their rapid economic growth, and growth in world political power, to stop Global Warming? Is it realistic to believe that China will add extra costs of pollution controls to its industry, thus lowering its competitive edge, to save the planet? Would they stop adding one million new cars on their roads a year, and impose California-style emissions controls on the ones they have?
Does anyone think that the Chinese Communist Party would forfeit the prospects of becoming a greater economic power than the United States? Would Washington allow the Chinese to simply take that world hegemony?
We believe the environment is the problem, Nature that is. We have not seriously considered that the real issue is the human environment. Our survival system is based upon numbers, equation- and conceptual-thinking by individuals and institutions. It is second nature to us, and we cannot imagine how to think outside of our analytical thoughts in pursuit of happiness and freedom from pain. Everyone has an opinion. We can think of anything in a million ways. And our thoughts are focused on the skills necessary to survive in this system of business and money. We are not too good at harvesting and preserving our own food, spinning our yarn and knitting our clothes, and kneading our bread into a wood oven on a daily basis. Our survival is dependent on a grocery store and money, not the earth from which it comes. It is hard to make Global Warming real when citizens have no un-manufactured relationship with the earth in the first place. That is why society believes it can fix Nature like a car engine. We do that with all life, especially our own. There are gyms, diets, medicine and psychiatrists to keep us operating in our survival system. Modern humans are in control of all they perceive.
Unfortunately spirituality cannot even help us. Religions are fortresses of belief systems. When they clash, bad things happen. And civilization now operates on the Christian definition that reality is only (God), humans and inert matter. Science and business bow to the Church’s spiritual province and concentrate on what the clergy ignore, objective matter (including animals and plants, the ‘lower’ life forms). America kills on average 2.5 million cows a month, and 8.5 billion chickens a year to supply the economy. True life is solely human-centered, just as spirituality is. Religion has little regard for Nature. It is only concerned with wisdom for humans, with no real spiritual understanding outside of the God-human pipeline. It promotes the individual just like secular society does. And the Church wiped out cultures that combined humans living with Nature. Native spirituality offers balance and sustainability through respect (and submission) to the greater life force of Nature. This is both religious and secular heresy and completely impractical. We are in control to Save us from this hostile earthly life. It is drastically beyond religions,’ business or citizens’ ken to fathom alternatives to our dilemma. Can you imagine the West ‘going Native’ overnight? The pope and corporations would have something to say about that.
Realistically, judging by the new data that shows Global Warming is accelerating, civilization is rooked. Our economy is based on environmental stability. Any small glitch and the stock market shudders. The political and economic instability of 2.5 billion Asians challenging the West provides enough grim uncertainty for the fear-and-greed of Wall Street, which is the foundation for our paychecks. Throw in the warming seas, drought in the Amazon, melting polar ice caps, water shortages on the prairies, and our limitless post-World War II prosperity becomes questionable, to say the least.
A solution on this scale is not within reach. We are not used to looking at the whole of a situation. Westerners prefer to break down problems into manageable bits. Our confidence belies the fear of the size and complexity of what we face. Individuals are increasingly isolated and feel impotent to affect any change. And institutions have no self-interest in solving the problem, lest it affect the share price and popular vote. Weekly, new studies show that climate change is occurring at much faster rates than we had anticipated. But it is still not real in any perceptible way. Our lives are so removed from the earth in our comfortable urban cocoons, endless daily activities ‘just to survive,’ and our dependence on grocery stores, cars, and electric appliances, that we have no impetus to act. As we recycle our garbage back into polluting factories, we are confident that someone will come up with a painless solution when it is actually needed.
Our present good fortune is the result of massive historical forces coming together. We live better than any people who ever lived. The present comfort and confidence from creating this artificial human environment comes with a loss of memory. There was a time when we had to live with the greater forces of nature and a humility that we could not solve all our problems with knowledge. Today we act like aristocrats, who do not know how their food got on the table, but expect it to be there because it always has. And we are daft enough to think our money, knowledge tricks and domination will ensure it into the future.
Just one country changing so completely would be a daunting task. Given enough time it could possibly do it. If it was just waiting for the rest of the world to develop into a Western lifestyle, well, we made the transition over the last two hundred years of massive upheaval. But combining these kinds of shifts in attitude, lifestyle, politics, and economics to control the complexity of the biosphere before it is too late does not appear reasonable. The equation does not add up when theory is applied to reality. We can see billions of light-years into the heavens, but in all practical measure human consciousness is still the center of our universe.
We have lost the wisdom of how to live with and respect the life system we treat as a bunch of molecules we can arrange. Respect requires looking at something whole and leaving it alone. Modern humans automatically think in terms of analysis, breaking down all meaning for our control and safety. We have turned Nature into a greenhouse to control our own view of human reality. And like Auschwitz, are about to gas ourselves to death with industrial efficiency. We cannot help ourselves. Our minds have created and dominate this artificial human environment, believing we can isolate non-human life to avoid of who we actually are.
To get out of the dilemma would take voluntary human suffering and adjustments on a planetary scale. Forty years after seeing the earth as a whole from space, we still think in terms of individuals and nation-states. It is not human nature to do what is necessary. Our knowledge has not equipped us for the task. Civilization took 12,000 years of abusive dominance just to get our species to this point of luxury. We have not made the leap from the worldview that reality is just humans and inert matter.
It is not fashionable to be negative. We prefer to continue in our illusion that we can actually fix a car engine of this size. Modern society is a numbers culture at its root. Unfortunately we cannot negotiate with one number, time. The problem is not the environment. It is the human environment, the survival system we have created using self-interest, numbers, equation-thinking and rationalism. We are looking at the carburetor when we should have been looking at the driver.
We are an incredibly positive, optimistic culture. It is not fashionable to sound negative, but sometimes reality is like that. The issue of Global Warming falls into this category. Society analyzes a problem to fix it like a car engine. But the hallmark of civilized thinking is that we shy away from seeing the whole picture, the scale of the entire problem.
Considering Nature as ‘the environment’ demonstrates that we cannot even conceive of the correct terminology for our vanishing human habitat. Nature is alive. The ‘environment’ is a concept, something we can adjust if we just take a wrench to the components of the system. It is the fundamental fallacy underlying the very structure of how we think. Modern Western civilization cannot escape, let alone recognize, its own thought processes. And yet it is this very process that is at the root of the problem.
The first reaction is the reflex to deconstruct and analyze the issue. We are born into this scientific-like thinking, and few are truly aware of how it affects every assumption that we make. Civilization has used this to create an enveloping artificial environment for humans to live in. We take it for granted and do not understand its full ramifications to solve a problem of a planetary size. Can there be any question that humans are in charge of their own fate?
Humans control reality. We do it using knowledge. And we’re good at it. Where once we were subject to nature, our survival system now is based on numbers, mathematics, and equation-thinking. This began with science, which converts phenomena into numbers and equations to produce stable, reliable knowledge. Science declares what is reality. Reality is what we can see and control. And we are suspicious of anything that cannot be ‘proven’ through some demonstration before our eyes. We are literalists, despite knowing that meaning is relative.
Business took science and numbers and created this entirely artificial survival system we now rely upon. Without grocery stores, millions would starve. They are a business, which converts workers activity into a number in the long equation to reach that one magic numeral, the quarterly profit. A grocery store is dependent on a long supply chain from the field, through transportation, factory, store and finally to our mouths. Each component is a business, coordinated, like an equation, to deliver our daily bread. If any of those variables fail, the grocery store is empty. We are confident that there are redundancies in the system to keep this from happening.
And yet without numbers, in the form of a paycheck, workers cannot eat even if the supermarket is full. That paycheck is dependent on jobs. Everything we buy supports an inestimable number of employees. Buying a Hotwheels toy at the local mall sustains lumberjacks to fell the trees, truckers, paper mill workers, chemical factories, ink producers, design technicians, marketers, warehousing, buyers, bankers, the list is endless. And that is just the packaging we throw out. If we stopped consuming toy cars, a great many people will be unemployed. Now consider how many tens-of-thousands of different items are in one massive discount store. And how many different stores are in an average mall, and how many chains and malls there are. As you keep multiplying, one begins to see the scale of the economy, and how many paychecks are dependent on our consumption of packaging and products.
Most houses have enough items in them to furnish two homes. The yard sale and the garbage dump are critical to our suburban lifestyle. Few realize that a hundred houses occupy only a couple of city blocks. Surveying how little space it takes to put that many houses in begins to show the scale of how many homes are in an average city. It quickly becomes apparent how massive our settled population is, and how much ‘stuff’ is out there. To sustain those mortgages and lifestyles we need to keep consuming or the economy will fail and millions will lose their jobs. It is our survival system, based on numbers.
Our minds always like to focus on what is ‘out there.’ We see a problem with ‘the environment’ and we want to repair it. The reason is to stop a threat to us. And the question underneath is, how do we do this and still maintain our standard of living? All the components of the biosphere have been discerned. The solution should be obvious, and our success at creating this remarkable lifestyle of abundance, convenience and medicine provides a foundation of confidence that we can manage anything that Nature throws at us. After all, we tamed the earth. Instead of fighting the looming weather and forests like our pioneer ancestors did, our daily connection with nature is the annoying rain between the car and the house.
If we were to correct Global Warming, we would have to stop pollution. That would mean a loss of jobs. It would mean living with less, lowering our expectations. That sounds like deprivation. The last generation that has any experience with scarcity was born in the 1930’s.
Our culture is built on pain relief. Business cannot sell pain, only supply some need. Everything we do is to control our happiness through the freedom from pain, boredom, and discomfort. Living with less would entail a radical shift in the psyche of 600 million Westerners. Could we convert our societies fast enough so that we would not need a car to work and shop, our homes to not need electricity for light, heat and appliances, and know what to do without having to pay for our distractions? To stop Global Warming means halting pollution. Everything in our homes is manufactured and packaged. It would mean throwing our entire way-of-life into reverse.
Business is now the central institution of power, supplanting government. Unlike kings, who used armies and repression to express their authority, business has only money to base its dominance upon. Would it be willing to cooperate in its own demise? If a company is not growing it will most likely fail. Business cannot simply maintain the status quo to stay alive in a competitive marketplace.
And even if it chose this course, does anyone believe that China and India, with four-times the population of the West, will gladly give up their rapid economic growth, and growth in world political power, to stop Global Warming? Is it realistic to believe that China will add extra costs of pollution controls to its industry, thus lowering its competitive edge, to save the planet? Would they stop adding one million new cars on their roads a year, and impose California-style emissions controls on the ones they have?
Does anyone think that the Chinese Communist Party would forfeit the prospects of becoming a greater economic power than the United States? Would Washington allow the Chinese to simply take that world hegemony?
We believe the environment is the problem, Nature that is. We have not seriously considered that the real issue is the human environment. Our survival system is based upon numbers, equation- and conceptual-thinking by individuals and institutions. It is second nature to us, and we cannot imagine how to think outside of our analytical thoughts in pursuit of happiness and freedom from pain. Everyone has an opinion. We can think of anything in a million ways. And our thoughts are focused on the skills necessary to survive in this system of business and money. We are not too good at harvesting and preserving our own food, spinning our yarn and knitting our clothes, and kneading our bread into a wood oven on a daily basis. Our survival is dependent on a grocery store and money, not the earth from which it comes. It is hard to make Global Warming real when citizens have no un-manufactured relationship with the earth in the first place. That is why society believes it can fix Nature like a car engine. We do that with all life, especially our own. There are gyms, diets, medicine and psychiatrists to keep us operating in our survival system. Modern humans are in control of all they perceive.
Unfortunately spirituality cannot even help us. Religions are fortresses of belief systems. When they clash, bad things happen. And civilization now operates on the Christian definition that reality is only (God), humans and inert matter. Science and business bow to the Church’s spiritual province and concentrate on what the clergy ignore, objective matter (including animals and plants, the ‘lower’ life forms). America kills on average 2.5 million cows a month, and 8.5 billion chickens a year to supply the economy. True life is solely human-centered, just as spirituality is. Religion has little regard for Nature. It is only concerned with wisdom for humans, with no real spiritual understanding outside of the God-human pipeline. It promotes the individual just like secular society does. And the Church wiped out cultures that combined humans living with Nature. Native spirituality offers balance and sustainability through respect (and submission) to the greater life force of Nature. This is both religious and secular heresy and completely impractical. We are in control to Save us from this hostile earthly life. It is drastically beyond religions,’ business or citizens’ ken to fathom alternatives to our dilemma. Can you imagine the West ‘going Native’ overnight? The pope and corporations would have something to say about that.
Realistically, judging by the new data that shows Global Warming is accelerating, civilization is rooked. Our economy is based on environmental stability. Any small glitch and the stock market shudders. The political and economic instability of 2.5 billion Asians challenging the West provides enough grim uncertainty for the fear-and-greed of Wall Street, which is the foundation for our paychecks. Throw in the warming seas, drought in the Amazon, melting polar ice caps, water shortages on the prairies, and our limitless post-World War II prosperity becomes questionable, to say the least.
A solution on this scale is not within reach. We are not used to looking at the whole of a situation. Westerners prefer to break down problems into manageable bits. Our confidence belies the fear of the size and complexity of what we face. Individuals are increasingly isolated and feel impotent to affect any change. And institutions have no self-interest in solving the problem, lest it affect the share price and popular vote. Weekly, new studies show that climate change is occurring at much faster rates than we had anticipated. But it is still not real in any perceptible way. Our lives are so removed from the earth in our comfortable urban cocoons, endless daily activities ‘just to survive,’ and our dependence on grocery stores, cars, and electric appliances, that we have no impetus to act. As we recycle our garbage back into polluting factories, we are confident that someone will come up with a painless solution when it is actually needed.
Our present good fortune is the result of massive historical forces coming together. We live better than any people who ever lived. The present comfort and confidence from creating this artificial human environment comes with a loss of memory. There was a time when we had to live with the greater forces of nature and a humility that we could not solve all our problems with knowledge. Today we act like aristocrats, who do not know how their food got on the table, but expect it to be there because it always has. And we are daft enough to think our money, knowledge tricks and domination will ensure it into the future.
Just one country changing so completely would be a daunting task. Given enough time it could possibly do it. If it was just waiting for the rest of the world to develop into a Western lifestyle, well, we made the transition over the last two hundred years of massive upheaval. But combining these kinds of shifts in attitude, lifestyle, politics, and economics to control the complexity of the biosphere before it is too late does not appear reasonable. The equation does not add up when theory is applied to reality. We can see billions of light-years into the heavens, but in all practical measure human consciousness is still the center of our universe.
We have lost the wisdom of how to live with and respect the life system we treat as a bunch of molecules we can arrange. Respect requires looking at something whole and leaving it alone. Modern humans automatically think in terms of analysis, breaking down all meaning for our control and safety. We have turned Nature into a greenhouse to control our own view of human reality. And like Auschwitz, are about to gas ourselves to death with industrial efficiency. We cannot help ourselves. Our minds have created and dominate this artificial human environment, believing we can isolate non-human life to avoid of who we actually are.
To get out of the dilemma would take voluntary human suffering and adjustments on a planetary scale. Forty years after seeing the earth as a whole from space, we still think in terms of individuals and nation-states. It is not human nature to do what is necessary. Our knowledge has not equipped us for the task. Civilization took 12,000 years of abusive dominance just to get our species to this point of luxury. We have not made the leap from the worldview that reality is just humans and inert matter.
It is not fashionable to be negative. We prefer to continue in our illusion that we can actually fix a car engine of this size. Modern society is a numbers culture at its root. Unfortunately we cannot negotiate with one number, time. The problem is not the environment. It is the human environment, the survival system we have created using self-interest, numbers, equation-thinking and rationalism. We are looking at the carburetor when we should have been looking at the driver.
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