The Absurdity of “Fighting” Global Warming

I have started collecting stories of sustainable practice. There are many of us doing so many things at so many levels, yet, when I talk with people in organizations or even in private I often hear a response sounding like, “I just don’t know where to begin.” 

Often, when people tell me they don’t know where to start, it is in reference to “fighting” the malevolent specter of global warming. I’ve got news for you.  We can’t “fight” global warming. It’s not an enemy. It’s an outgrowth of who we are, who we’ve been and what we’re becoming.

They only way we will make a significant impact on lowering the level of greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere is to radically shift our energy generation and consumption practices as quickly and decisively as possible. We can’t “fight” global warming. We have to give in, give up and move on.

What is fueling global warming? Nearly everything we do. As I type away I’m also sucking up energy from the PGE power grid here in Portland which is, still to a great extent, coal fired. If we want to stop greenhouse gases from accumulating in the atmosphere we have to stop generating them. And, more importantly, we have to help other people stop as well.

This doesn’t mean villifying coal. Coal is not an enemy, it’s compressed carbon. We need to take our collective dis-ease with our current lifestyles and channel that energy into realizing fundamentally different ways of using and generating energy. I know, I know, renewable forms of energy are inefficient, expensive and not practical. The engine in an Oldsmobile wasn’t going to get us to the moon either.

What’s holding us back? We are. Change is hard, scary and uncomfortable, especially when you are a comfortably consuming American, Japanese or newly middle-classed Chinese. Give it up people. The dream of the last one hundred years is choking us with CO2. Let’s figure out and realize a better way. 

Revolution is coming one way or another. Either we keep “fighting” global warming with ineffective protocols, accords and reductions (until the glaciers melt, sea levels rise and all hell breaks loose) or we leap forward to something that just might sustain ALL of us. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.

Let’s stop fighting and start being the change we need to see in the world. Rant over. Let’s get on with it.

Tags: change, climate change, CO2, coal burning, global warming, greenhouse gases, renewable energy

Happy New Year of Change

 

At the end of each year at the Kiyomizudera in Kyoto a kanji (Chinese character) is chosen to represent the old year. For 2008 that character was:

It means “change.” My sense is this is only the beginning. To quote The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

What follows in Yeat’s poem is a vision of violence, bloody anarchy and descending darkness. I believe we have an opportunity here and now. What follows is what I’ve written before.

We can allow change to run it’s capricious and inconsiderate course and react to it, we can respond to it openly and courageously and do the best we can or we can be change, change change, shaping and creating the present and, thus, the future. We do as we do.

How do you do? Happy New Year.

 

Tags: change, Happy New Year, Kiyomizudera, The Second Coming, Yeats, 変