Twenty-Five Thousand Climate Marchers, Met David Suzuki

My Heartfelt Message to COP21 Negotiators // Published on Nov 29, 2015

COP21 is all about the policies, methods and timeframes that will ensure we slash carbon dioxide emissions and avoid global climate change chaos. My research tells me that zeroing emissions is only one of the three vitally important legs of the bar-stool…

This video is in response to a request from Canada’s Minister of The Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna.  Her video, where she asks for public comment, COP21 Canada Video Campaign, is here.  Link to her tweet.
———- ———-

Ottawa Calls for Climate Solutions and Climate Justice with 100% Renewable Energy

Today was a chilly and windy day in downtown Ottawa. Over 25,000 people gathered at City Hall and marched through the streets to Parliament Hill for a massive rally on “Climate Solutions and Climate Justice, 100% Possible”. Police that I spoke to said there were >10,000; in any case the gathering was the largest in Ottawa’s history for climate change.

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The demand is for political leaders in Paris to agree to strong reductions of fossil fuel emissions, with the goal of reaching 100% renewable energy by the year 2050: namely zero fossil fuel emissions by 2050. In the first video that I took of the march, I am standing several feet high on the roadside barrier in front of the US Embassy in downtown Ottawa, capturing the incredible energy and passion of the vibrant marching mass of thousands of people passing me:

Climate Solutions & Justice Ottawa March (1/3) // Published on Nov 29, 2015

November 29th. Ottawa’s kick-off for action at the Paris COP21 climate change talks. I filmed the start of the march. Organizers, and others say 25,000 people attended; police said -10,000. Huge either way; largest in Ottawa’s history. Objective for society must be for zero emissions, as soon as possible…

Personally I think we are in an emergency situation, the likes the world has never seen before. I have thought this for about the last 5 years, with no doubts and 100% certainty. I think that we are undergoing early stages of abrupt climate change, that if continued unchecked will lead to an Arctic “blue-ocean event” by 2020 or sooner, and the enormous feedbacks will then carry us to a much warmer planet, greatly exceeding the 20C threshold rise that the politicians debate. A blue-ocean event guarantees that the frequency, severity and duration of extreme weather events will ramp up 10 to 20 times over what we see today.

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Aerial Photograph at End of Rally (notice says 100%)

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Zeroing emissions as-soon-as-possible, on an emergency footing is only one leg of the three legged bar-stool. It will alone not stop the nonlinear climate change that we have initiated. The second leg of the stool is Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

We must remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to stabilize the chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans to ensure a stable climate system, this is necessary to prevent the ocean acidification from taking out the phytoplankton base of the marine food chain, which would cause a collapse of the entire ocean ecosystem, followed by terrestrial biosphere collapse.

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The third leg of the stool, equally important is to cool the Arctic using Solar Radiation Management (SRM) methods, to restore the stability of the atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns. The bar-stool is precariously balanced, and about to tip over to an unrecognizably warmer planet.

In my second of three posted videos, I continued to freeze my butt and fingers off as I captured the bulk of the march towards Parliament Hill.

Climate Solutions & Climate Justice Ottawa March (2/3) // Published on Nov 29, 2015

This second video of three that I filmed today is of the thousands of people in the climate change march passing me as I balanced precariously on the concrete road barrier in front of the US embassy in downtown Ottawa. It was chilly and windy and I froze my butt and fingers off, but the sacrifice was well worth it.

From my vantage point, balancing precariously on the roadside barrier I continued to film and pay attention to the amazingly creative signs that people carried.

100% Clean. 100% Possible, 100% Solutions
Freeze tar sands expansion, Dude, where’s my rainforest?
Save Us. Save Me.
On Thin Ice SOS, With gold, we cannot buy another planet
Go Green, Climate is a Human Rights Issue

As the end of the march passed my location on the roadside buttress, I reflected on the enormous mass of humanity that had just passed me. It is these moments that give me great strength to continue on my climate education and social media path. I quickly took a shortcut to Parliament Hill to meet up with the crowd there.

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I quickly headed to the steps directly in front of Parliament Hill, and found a great spot to continue filming just behind the podium set up for speakers. In my third and final video, I recorded some of the speeches and the crowd as they each held up white pieces of paper to allow a cameraperson atop a crane to take some memorable photos of the event.

Climate Solutions & Climate Justice Ottawa March (3/3) // Published on Nov 29, 2015

The third video of three that I filmed on the Ottawa Climate Change Rally. Over 25,000 people attended, according to media sources, -10,000 according to the police liaison officers that I spoke to. I filmed the crowd from atop the steps just in front the Parliament Building, iron barricades, and police carrying submachine guns. I asked them if these weapons were really necessary, being in open display? No reply, just a look that one does not ask.
———- ———-

All in all, it was an incredible day. Now, we need real action at COP21 in Paris. What can be simpler than a global price on carbon? Do we really need 40,000 people to go to a place like Paris to achieve this. We need real action to zero fossil fuel emissions as quickly as possible, not people in suits talking in slow motion, like the previous 20 COPs. Like I have said before:

We have had 20 COPs and achieved squat.
Can we have a lucky 21?
It wins in BlackJack,
Why not in climate?

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Guess Who I Met at the Rally.  No Less than Dr. David Suzuki!

Now, for the highlight of my day. At City Hall the incredible David Suzuki was the last speaker. He said that he spoke as a grandfather and an elder. After his call for the initiation of the march towards Parliament Hill he started walking and was surrounded by vast numbers of media. I kind of tagged along, and was a few rows behind him and the banners at the start of the march. As we proceeded towards Parliament Hill I thanked him for being in Ottawa, and introduced myself and my work.

We proceeded to talk for 5 to 10 minutes while walking in the march, on Arctic temperature amplification, jet stream slowing and waviness causing extreme weather events to increase in severity, frequency and duration and on the enormous risks of methane emissions from the permafrost and marine sediments in the Kara Sea and the Eastern Siberian Arctic Shelf.

He asked me what I thought of Guy McPhersons view that its game over for humanity in 2030. I said that humans, acting in concert with the best science and technology can become the largest braking feedback in the entire climate system, but we have reached the wall and must act immediately. Thus, I could not agree with Guy. He thought that Guy was wrong to take hope from people. I gave him and his assistant my business card after I had handwritten my new website paulbeckwith.net onto the card. I told him that I had filmed over 90 educational videos on climate change over the last several years, and he seemed impressed so I very much hope that he looks at some of them.

Regards, Paul

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About paulbeckwith

Well known climate science educator; Part-time Geography professor (climatology, oceanography, environmental issues), University of Ottawa. Physicist. Engineer. Master's Degree in Science in Laser Optics, Bachelors of Engineering, in Engineering Physics. Won Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario gold medal. Also interested in investment and start-ups in climate solutions, renewable energy and energy efficiency. Avid chess player, and likes restoring old homes. Married with children.
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5 Responses to Twenty-Five Thousand Climate Marchers, Met David Suzuki

  1. Taras D says:

    “I said that humans, acting in concert with the best science and technology can become the largest braking feedback in the entire climate system, but we have reached the wall and must act immediately. ”

    Paul, you are correct about reaching the wall and you are correct about acting immediately. However, I think that science and technology are not the solution to our problem. Overpopulation is our main cause of global warming. Technology is nothing without energy and the most potent form of energy on earth is oil, followed by coal and then gas. We’ve built the society that we have on abundant energy, now we’ve destroyed the planet, exploited most resources to the limit and we still think we can have our standard of living while growing the economy and consuming like we do.

    Wishful thinking, I call that. Guy has given up, anyone can see that. But that’s because given all the facts, things are that bad. We can prolong the inevitable, but the longer we wait for the crash, the more disastrous this crash is going to be.

    Read Joseph Tainter, Paul Ehrlich, and Jared Diamond’s works on complex societies and what makes them go bust and you will see the real scale of our predicament. Green technology can’t solve the problem because it relies on rare earth metals, which are of course rare and expensive. Feeding an ever growing population is another matter altogether. How we will feed 2 more billion is the 1 trillion dollar question.

    Hope is good, but hope for a magic solution is down right criminal. Yet, the real solution everyone is afraid to talk about because it’s going to be harsh and difficult to achieve. Still, now we only have that one choice, we reduce our population in the next 10 years and go back to 1800 style of living or the earth will remove our whole population the next 100.

    Like

  2. SCassi says:

    When you go around telling people that we going to see 6 degrees in a decade or two, you are basically agreeing with Guy McPherson that humans are going to go extinct. I don’t know why you think people are suddenly going to wake up and change their behaviour and stop runaway global warming with geoengineering and negative emissions. It’s just not going to happen…people haven’t changed over the last 50 years, why would they change now, it’s human nature to stay the same. People are not going to stop burning oil, coal and gas. Period. People are not going to stop eating meat, until there is no meat left to eat. And then they will probably eat each other. So you and Guy McPherson have the same outlook, you just hope for a miracle. And that’s what it is..stopping the Arctic Methane Monster…a miracle.

    Like

    • David Korn says:

      I agree with so much of what you both say. In a lot of ways. And not just out of courtesy, but from my heart.

      But know this. I know both Paul extremely well–I am the David Korn behind the scenes here, and know Guy quite well. And while there are touchstones, they are related but not hardly the same. Repeat, I have had ample and sustained contact, in email and phone with both these gents. Hours. Doing projects for both.

      Guy and Paul do not have the same outlook. That is quite a presumption! More about YOUR need to show disapproval than fact. Not even close. Same means same. Related outlooks. That is a fact. Thank you to both of you above.

      Like

  3. JH says:

    If some are still puzzling over how we should live, what’s the healthiest and most sustainable way for humans to exist on our planet that doesn’t degrade the biosphere that we all rely on, we have but to look at the way our earliest ancestors lived in a pre-agricultural world. Homo saphiens survived quite well in ancient times according to the fossil record before the birth of agriculture. But once we began gathering behind walls, shoveling up the ground, fashioning spears, rallying around sheets covered with symbols and appointing other people to rule over us, our course was set. And only now are we reaping the consequences of that unfortunate decision.

    Just looking around at the slums our cities have become, the way we abandon entire swathes of what was once ‘prime real estate’ turned sewer to move further and further out into the surrounding landscape to do it all over again, ever increasing the size of these death zones, our fondness for industries whose poisonous byproducts cannot be disposed of in any safe manner, the way we treat animals not as living beings with the same right to live autonomously in freedom that we demand for ourselves, but as ‘products’ for our gourmet pleasure, entertainment and apparel, our penchant for seeing our planet not as a unique living jewel perfectly suited for life, now struggling to sustain itself against our depredations, but as a resource to use up and spit out, it’s clear that giving an aggressive species ‘intelligence’ may not have been the best evolutionary idea.

    More, now that we’ve wounded the planet, some say irreparably, instead of unstintly doing all that we can to fix the problem we created here, we dream of space, turning our attentions instead to other planets as a possible solution to human survivability.

    Mars is the next step for humanity — we must take it

    “Elon Musk has built a $12 billion company in an endeavor to pave the way to Mars for humanity. He insists that Mars is a “long-term insurance policy” for “the light of consciousness” in the face of climate change, extinction events, and our recklessness with technology.”
    http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/10/tech/mars-humanity-conversation/

    Why I signed up for a one-way trip to Mars

    “We owe it to future generations, who will be left with the problems of Earth, to try to find new homes throughout the solar system.”
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/opinion/beemer-mars-trip/

    We share this planet with roughly 8.7 million other species, yet we are the only species out of those millions that find it necessary to destroy the Earth and all the other forms of life that unfortunately also happen to live here too – to promote our singularly destructive way of life. There’s nothing noble about it. We’re not the end product of a Natural Selection developed by a benevolent nature in an effort to create intellectual Masters of The Universe greedy enough to crush the rest of the planet beneath our boots. We’re simply one of many animals that call the earth home, arrogant yes, but not divine.

    And yet, we humans DO believe that we are the Masters of the world. We DO believe that this planet belongs to us to use, experiment with and dispose of in any manner we so choose. The other animals who also happen to call this planet home are, to our collective minds, essentially squatters, parasites on our property, freeloaders on our planet. They exist on this OUR world not because of any particular largesse on our part, no, but only because we don’t happen to need those particular places (what’s left) they’re inhabiting at the moment. But as our numbers continue to expand, we will. When all those new Billions of us coming online in the next few decades need the space they’re occupying, we’ll take it. We give no quarter, we offer no apologies.

    Why should we deliberately destroy an environment in the long term for short term profit? Nuclear power for instance. How smart is it to deliberately produce a highly toxic substance that remains highly toxic for millennia just so that we can text our Facebook ‘Friends’ on our ipads?

    At the very least, we should figure out how to dispose of the radiation our 400+ nuclear power plants have already produced before we make start making more. Doesn’t that make sense?

    Same with mountain top removal, for coal. Our landscapes ruined in the long term for short term energy. Come to that, sucking oil out of the ground and shooting it up into the sky. Digging holes in the earth and filling them with plastic. Dumping our trash and toxins at sea, and filling our atmosphere with satellites. C’mon, are gadgets THAT important?

    Yes, I know, the system is already in place. It’s downright heretical to even imagine our world back in it’s unconcreted state, clean again, not crawling with one particularly hostile and selfish species. Nothing new there,

    Neolithic man had taste for extreme violence, says study

    “A mass grave with at least 26 human skeletons discovered in Germany shows that conflict in Neolithic Europe some 7,000 years ago could be horrifically brutal, with victims tortured and mutilated, reports a new scientific study.”
    http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/08/18/neolithic-man-had-taste-extreme-violence-says-study.html

    Same with the environment. Our destruction of everything not us started a long time ago,

    Laying blame: Humans caused mass megafauna extinctions in ancient past

    “When species after species of animal continue to go extinct today, it’s pretty clear who to blame. Humans are ushering in a sixth mass extinction event, largely through human-caused climate change but also through deforestation, overfishing, and other distinctly Homo sapiens activities. But how far back does our ability to obliterate stretch?

    “A debate has continued for decades now on exactly what was the primary cause of big die-offs of large mammals from the end of the last ice age: was it a changing climate (a naturally changing one, that is, unlike today), or the spread of early humans? A study by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark claims to have cleared up the cloudy question, with computer modeling laying the blame squarely on humans and only very slightly on climate.”
    http://conservationmagazine.org/2014/06/laying-blame-humans-caused-mass-megafauna-extinctions-in-ancient-past/

    We’re making a planet that looks more like an assembly-line corporation that specializes in single product merchandising than a living, biologically diverse, elementally dependant world, actively employing our best minds to figure out how to do this ever faster, more anthropocentrically, and cost effectively.

    We’ve figued out how to circumvent earth’s natural checks and balances, so much so that our species has become virtually invincible and promises to be the last animals standing on the coming scorched earth. To do that, we’ve deliberately and quite happily upset those checks and balances, degraded the biosphere and are vigorously destroying any chance every other form of life needs to survive here as well, with few real twinges, simultaneously congratulating our wise men at the forefront of this debacle because of their suicidal cleverness.

    The Agricultural Revolution was our first pushback against that balance, the Industrial Revolution another, the Green Revolution still another. Now were we’ll ensconsed on road to our Final Solution, our Coup de Gras against our world, the Technological Revolution.

    We, man, have always believed in a social evolution kind of progress. Things always moving forward, getting better, a little at a time. When I was a kid, I was told that one day soon we’d all be living in gleaming cities in the sky. Mass transport would consist of silver monorails moving happy laughing people around clean shining cities hanging in the sky, smoothly and efficiently. Individuals would travel by jet pack or flying cars. Appliances would do all of our work for us without complaint, no pay – no strikes. Diseases would be eliminated – no racism, no poverty, no gangs, no graffiti, war a thing of the past.

    I’m still waiting.

    Today, things are substantially worse than they were when I was a kid. I won’t go into any examples, no point in arguing the obvious that we all know to be true, ignore it though we may. Yes, there have been some improvements, mostly in the field of medicine. We may soon conquer death and allow even more of us to fit on a finite and already overcrowded planet that doesn’t appear to be getting bigger anytime soon. But overall, really?

    These days were told that climate change mitigation will make all things new. It would be like a Bruce Willis movie where the good guys swoop in at the last minute to save us all from certain annihilation. By making fundamental changes to the way our planet has always existed so that we can continue to live as we’ve always done, we can have our cake and eat it too. The environment will be healthy, everyone will be making lots of money working for clean industries, we’ll be living in a virtual world were we can communicate by thought alone and colonize the stars with more of us, (that’s important for some reason). All we have to do is be patient.

    I feel like I’ve been here before.

    For now, we’re scrambling to try to fix the ridiculous mess we’ve gotten ourselves into here. Legislators from around the world are meeting in Paris this December to try to sort out the shortest minimum that we can get away with to keep our environment in at least some form of habitability for the foreseeable future. A plan that will allow us to continue to degrade our home less catastrophically in the hope that we can prolong our way of ‘life’ indefinitely. We face Climate Change with one enormous caveat: civilization MUST be maintained AT ALL COSTS. That’s our bottom line. The whole cake eating thing. We’re desperately doing everything we can to try to figure out with our best minds and our best technology how to deny the laws of physics. This planet is only so big.

    I really do Not intend to be a pessimist, I like feeling as hopeful as the next person. But until we’re willing to acknowledge that WE are the problem, that there’s something inherently ‘buggered’ about our species, a species that thinks mercy = weakness, forests = lumber, atmosphere = dump etc, we’re never going to find a permanent solution to the fact that the monsters that we’ve been looking for since time immemorial, that we’ve been scaring our children with even before there were cities, that we continue to promote in our literature, in our movies, in our games, and in our nightmares, are us.

    Like

  4. JH says:

    The Problem with People

    If some are still puzzling over how we should live, what’s the healthiest and most sustainable way for humans to exist on our planet that doesn’t degrade the biosphere that we all rely on, we have but to look at the way our earliest ancestors lived in a pre-agricultural world. Homo saphiens survived quite well in ancient times according to the fossil record before the birth of agriculture. But once we began gathering behind walls, shoveling up the ground, fashioning spears, rallying around sheets covered with symbols and appointing other people to rule over us, our course was set. And only now are we reaping the consequences of that unfortunate decision.

    Just looking around at the slums our cities have become, the way we abandon entire swathes of what was once ‘prime real estate’ turned sewer to move further and further out into the surrounding landscape to do it all over again, ever increasing the size of these death zones, our fondness for industries whose poisonous byproducts cannot be disposed of in any safe manner, the way we treat animals not as living beings with the same right to live autonomously in freedom that we demand for ourselves, but as ‘products’ for our gourmet pleasure, entertainment and apparel, our penchant for seeing our planet not as a unique living jewel perfectly suited for life, now struggling to sustain itself against our depredations, but as a resource to use up and spit out, it’s clear that giving an aggressive species ‘intelligence’ may not have been the best evolutionary idea.

    More, now that we’ve wounded the planet, some say irreparably, instead of unstintly doing all that we can to fix the problem we created here, we dream of space, turning our attentions instead to other planets as a possible solution to human survivability.

    Mars is the next step for humanity — we must take it

    “Elon Musk has built a $12 billion company in an endeavor to pave the way to Mars for humanity. He insists that Mars is a “long-term insurance policy” for “the light of consciousness” in the face of climate change, extinction events, and our recklessness with technology.”
    http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/10/tech/mars-humanity-conversation/

    Why I signed up for a one-way trip to Mars

    “We owe it to future generations, who will be left with the problems of Earth, to try to find new homes throughout the solar system.”
    http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/opinion/beemer-mars-trip/

    We share this planet with roughly 8.7 million other species, yet we are the only species out of those millions that find it necessary to destroy the Earth and all the other forms of life that unfortunately also happen to live here too – to promote our singularly destructive way of life. There’s nothing noble about it. We’re not the end product of a Natural Selection developed by a benevolent nature in an effort to create intellectual Masters of The Universe greedy enough to crush the rest of the planet beneath our boots. We’re simply one of many animals that call the earth home, arrogant yes, but not divine.

    And yet, we humans DO believe that we are the Masters of the world. We DO believe that this planet belongs to us to use, experiment with and dispose of in any manner we so choose. The other animals who also happen to call this planet home are, to our collective minds, essentially squatters, parasites on our property, freeloaders on our planet. They exist on this OUR world not because of any particular largesse on our part, no, but only because we don’t happen to need those particular places (what’s left) they’re inhabiting at the moment. But as our numbers continue to expand, we will. When all those new Billions of us coming online in the next few decades need the space they’re occupying, we’ll take it. We give no quarter, we offer no apologies.

    Why should we deliberately destroy an environment in the long term for short term profit? Nuclear power for instance. How smart is it to deliberately produce a highly toxic substance that remains highly toxic for millennia just so that we can text our Facebook ‘Friends’ on our ipads?

    At the very least, we should figure out how to dispose of the radiation our 400+ nuclear power plants have already produced before we make start making more. Doesn’t that make sense?

    Same with mountain top removal, for coal. Our landscapes ruined in the long term for short term energy. Come to that, sucking oil out of the ground and shooting it up into the sky. Digging holes in the earth and filling them with plastic. Dumping our trash and toxins at sea, and filling our atmosphere with satellites. C’mon, are gadgets THAT important?

    Yes, I know, the system is already in place. It’s downright heretical to even imagine our world back in it’s unconcreted state, clean again, not crawling with one particularly hostile and selfish species. Nothing new there,

    Neolithic man had taste for extreme violence, says study

    “A mass grave with at least 26 human skeletons discovered in Germany shows that conflict in Neolithic Europe some 7,000 years ago could be horrifically brutal, with victims tortured and mutilated, reports a new scientific study.”
    http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/08/18/neolithic-man-had-taste-extreme-violence-says-study.html

    Same with the environment. Our destruction of everything not us started a long time ago,

    Laying blame: Humans caused mass megafauna extinctions in ancient past

    “When species after species of animal continue to go extinct today, it’s pretty clear who to blame. Humans are ushering in a sixth mass extinction event, largely through human-caused climate change but also through deforestation, overfishing, and other distinctly Homo sapiens activities. But how far back does our ability to obliterate stretch?

    “A debate has continued for decades now on exactly what was the primary cause of big die-offs of large mammals from the end of the last ice age: was it a changing climate (a naturally changing one, that is, unlike today), or the spread of early humans? A study by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark claims to have cleared up the cloudy question, with computer modeling laying the blame squarely on humans and only very slightly on climate.”
    http://conservationmagazine.org/2014/06/laying-blame-humans-caused-mass-megafauna-extinctions-in-ancient-past/

    We’re making a planet that looks more like an assembly-line corporation that specializes in single product merchandising than a living, biologically diverse, elementally dependant world, actively employing our best minds to figure out how to do this ever faster, more anthropocentrically, and cost effectively.

    We’ve figued out how to circumvent earth’s natural checks and balances, so much so that our species has become virtually invincible and promises to be the last animals standing on the coming scorched earth. To do that, we’ve deliberately and quite happily upset those checks and balances, degraded the biosphere and are vigorously destroying any chance every other form of life needs to survive here as well, with few real twinges, simultaneously congratulating our wise men at the forefront of this debacle because of their suicidal cleverness.

    The Agricultural Revolution was our first pushback against that balance, the Industrial Revolution another, the Green Revolution still another. Now were we’ll ensconsed on road to our Final Solution, our Coup de Gras against our world, the Technological Revolution.

    We, man, have always believed in a social evolution kind of progress. Things always moving forward, getting better, a little at a time. When I was a kid, I was told that one day soon we’d all be living in gleaming cities in the sky. Mass transport would consist of silver monorails moving happy laughing people around clean shining cities hanging in the sky, smoothly and efficiently. Individuals would travel by jet pack or flying cars. Appliances would do all of our work for us without complaint, no pay – no strikes. Diseases would be eliminated – no racism, no poverty, no gangs, no graffiti, war a thing of the past.

    I’m still waiting.

    Today, things are substantially worse than they were when I was a kid. I won’t go into any examples, no point in arguing the obvious that we all know to be true, ignore it though we may. Yes, there have been some improvements, mostly in the field of medicine. We may soon conquer death and allow even more of us to fit on a finite and already overcrowded planet that doesn’t appear to be getting bigger anytime soon. But overall, really?

    These days were told that climate change mitigation will make all things new. It would be like a Bruce Willis movie where the good guys swoop in at the last minute to save us all from certain annihilation. By making fundamental changes to the way our planet has always existed so that we can continue to live as we’ve always done, we can have our cake and eat it too. The environment will be healthy, everyone will be making lots of money working for clean industries, we’ll be living in a virtual world were we can communicate by thought alone and colonize the stars with more of us, (that’s important for some reason). All we have to do is be patient.

    I feel like I’ve been here before.

    For now, we’re scrambling to try to fix the ridiculous mess we’ve gotten ourselves into here. Legislators from around the world are meeting in Paris this December to try to sort out the shortest minimum that we can get away with to keep our environment in at least some form of habitability for the foreseeable future. A plan that will allow us to continue to degrade our home less catastrophically in the hope that we can prolong our way of ‘life’ indefinitely. We face Climate Change with one enormous caveat: civilization MUST be maintained AT ALL COSTS. That’s our bottom line. The whole cake eating thing. We’re desperately doing everything we can to try to figure out with our best minds and our best technology how to deny the laws of physics. This planet is only so big.

    I really do Not intend to be a pessimist, I like feeling as hopeful as the next person. But until we’re willing to acknowledge that WE are the problem, that there’s something inherently ‘buggered’ about our species, a species that thinks mercy = weakness, forests = lumber, atmosphere = dump etc, we’re never going to find a permanent solution to the fact that the monsters that we’ve been looking for since time immemorial, that we’ve been scaring our children with even before there were cities, that we continue to promote in our literature, in our movies, in our games, and in our nightmares, are us.

    Like

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