It’s The Economy – Because I’m Stupid
Posted by keith on April 16th, 2008
On the day China was announced as the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide* (well, about as official as we can get at the moment) Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the UK announced that he was going to focus on just one thing — and I’m not surprised considering how important this thing is:
“Next month’s University of California report warns that unless China radically changes its energy policies, its increases in greenhouse gases will be several times larger than the cuts in emissions being made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol.”
Sorry? Did I get that wrong? Oh, it isn’t the changing global climate — the event that now guarantees to cause irreversible ecological damage that will affect us dramatically — that Gordon Brown is focusing on; it is the economic climate. Silly me. I do forget sometimes that if we don’t all go to the shops to buy piles of crap, fly off on sunny vacations and keep using more and more natural resources to ensure that the global economy keeps on growing then we are doomed! Doomed to what, exactly?
Here’s what Gordon actually said:
“Every day that I wake up is about keeping this economy moving forward, keeping stability in the economy and keeping growth…we will do everything in our power to keep the economy moving forward”
To everyone who has an inkling of knowledge about both ecology and economics, this statement reeks of a complete disregard for climatic stability, indeed you could just substitute “global warming” for “economy” and you would get a pretty accurate rendition of what all Western governments, and those non-Western governments that have adopted the growth-lust of the West, are doing to the planet:
“The problem is that growth has to come from somewhere, and it can either come from some artificially created value, such as property prices, which could collapse at any time, or some resource, such as oil, coal, cropland, rock or metal, that is continually being used at an increasing rate. In short, if companies do not accelerate their use of resources then the global economy will not be able to carry on as it is. The economy is hell-bent on consuming the Earth’s finite resources in order to survive.”
(from http://earth-blog.bravejournal.com/entry/17630)
Next time you hear Gordon Brown mention the environment, climate change or anything else vaguely green, just ignore him: he is just another cretin who thinks that money is more important than life.
*This is what I said in 2006: “China has overtaken the USA in absolute numbers of televisions and refrigerators, but with a population 4 times higher, the per capita use is still well below that of the USA for these, pretty representative, items. China’s total carbon emissions have just exceeded (as of 2006) those of the USA.”
April 16th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
History teaches us empires come and go, rise and fall; but history provides no evidence for the existence of so huge, and soon to become unsustainable, an empire, one that actually threatens to engulf the surface of our planetary home in the way the seemingly endless expansion of the “Economic Globalization Empire” is doing in our time.
The gigantic scale and rapid growth rate of the unbridled, global big-business empire, the one we recognize as the predominant human construction on Earth, appears to be approaching a point in history when this world- engulfing economic empire irreversibly degrades Earth’s frangible ecosystems, dangerously dissipates its limited resources, and recklessly diminishes Earth’s capacity to offer a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
April 16th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
It’s the ECOLOGY, Stupid!
What concerns me most is this: the family of humanity appears not to have more than several more years in which to make necessary changes in its conspicuous over-consumption lifestyles, in the unsustainable overproduction practices of big-business enterprises, and its overpopulation activities. Humankind may not be able to protect life as we know it and to preserve the integrity of Earth for even one more decade.
If we project the fully anticipated growth of increasing and unbridled per-capita consumption, of rampantly expanding economic globalization and of propagating 70 to 75 million newborns per annum, will someone please explain to me how our seemingly endless growth civilization proceeds beyond the end of year 2012.
According to my admittedly simple estimations, if humankind keeps doing just as it is doing now, without doing whatsoever is necessary to begin modifying the business-as-usual course of our gigantic, endless-growth-oriented global economy, then the Earth could sustain life as we know it for a time period of about 5 more years.
It appears to me that all the chatter, including that heard in most “normal science” circles, of a benign path to the future by “leap-frogging” through a ‘bottleneck’ to population stabilization, and to good times ahead in 2050, is nothing more than wishful and magical thinking.
Unfortunately, even top rank scientists have not found adequate ways of communicating to humanity what people somehow need to hear, see and understand: the reckless dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of Earth’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, appear to be proceeding at a breakneck toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some sort unless, of course, the world’s colossal, ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global economy continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point the runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/