OUR CHANGING WORLD
Awakening the Next Renaissance
Reversing the Code Red for Humanity
Ominous images of a blood-red Australian sky are a hellish illustration of an imminent apocalypse, along with images of California burning, New York flooding, Jakarta sinking and South America devastated by years of crippling droughts. “A Heat Dome Kills An Estimated Billion Marine Creatures In Canada”; “Raging Fires Kill Billions Of Animals In Australia”; Floods Kill 300 People In China”; These are the kinds of headlines frequently flashing across our screens.
In the Russian republic of Yakutia in Siberia, one of the coldest inhabited places on Earth, heatwaves and droughts ignite a monstrous fire that destroys 21 million acres. For the first time in recorded history, smoke reaches the North Pole. There was not even an attempt to estimate the number of animal deaths.
Cyclones are ravaging India, Bangladesh, Australia and other countries around the Indian Ocean. Hurricanes are getting more powerful, causing devastation in the Caribbean and Mexican Gulf states. Typhoons are hitting China, Japan and Indonesia. Storms are getting more powerful and more frequent.
The suffering of people and animals is unimaginable. All of this gives credence to those predicting the proximity of the apocalypse.
How did we get here?
For starters, we pump 43 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year and nature is spewing this poison out through storms and downpours, on one end and getting constipation that causes droughts, heatwaves and fires on the other.
Nature has been tolerant and warned us about these consequences for more than half a century. We ignored it. We are now crossing the red line, and the warnings are getting sterner. We still have time to appease mother nature. She will give us another chance if we stop destroying other species, who are also her children.
If we don’t stop the ravage of her habitat, she will unleash her fury on us, against which we will be helpless. She will destroy one perverse species to save millions of others.
Humanity has manoeuvred itself into deep shit. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres said a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was nothing less than “a code red for humanity”.
Being homo sapiens, the wise man, one would think that we would have some feasible survival plan to extricate ourselves out of this deadly situation, but we don’t. Nafeez Ahmed Escaping extinction through paradigm shift.
We do complain a lot, though. We also feel sorry for ourselves and wriggle our hands in desperation, hoping that our political, religious and business leaders will pull us out of the shit. They won’t! They are too busy jockeying for positions and enriching themselves to find time for the mundane business of governing.
On occasion, when a photo opportunity presents itself, they’ll stick a finger in the dyke, oblivious of the fact that water is already pouring over the top of the wall. We should not complain. We elected them.
We also bestowed ourselves with the lofty title of homo sapiens, but that shot was wide of the mark. Homo stupidus would have been more accurate.
Faced with the present turbulence, competent leaders would be getting together, putting aside their differences and focusing on common issues threatening our continuous existence. They would be talking peace and cooperation instead of rattling their sabres at one another. Their job is to create a safe living environment, not get our young people onto killing fields. Instead of training them to kill, they should teach them to heal and employ them to restore nature.
At least a percentage of these global armies should be employed on projects that reduce the effects of climate change. Volunteers from these armies could plant trees, clean the oceans, or do myriad other things to improve the situation. The military has people and equipment. They should use it for the benefit of humankind. We must insist that our elected leaders and other civil servants work for our best interests. That is their job.
Then there are our religious leaders. They are supposed to take care of our spiritual well-being and create an aura of love and peace around their flock. Each religion, be it Christian, Islam, Judaism, Hindu, Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, or any other, has a shared premise of love and peace. A cursory look at the current global religious landscape would reveal more hate and confrontation.
Religious leaders focus on differences, which are often ceremonial rather than substantial. What differences can there be in the interpretation of love and peace? However, the differences are the basis of their power. Many wars have been fought over those liturgical differences. If there are no differences, we would only need one religious leader.
Why not agree to preach love and peace across religious boundaries and continue practising specific aspects of their religion as before.
Out of all holy books, we ask for unity on preaching just two things across religious boundaries — love and peace. Everything else stays the same as per the requirements of any specific religion.
Organised religions influence more than five billion people. Leaders must guide their followers in joining hands with people of different faiths to tackle the gravest challenge humanity has encountered.
They don’t need to spend the next six months or a year setting up a global consultative conference to start implementing this approach. They can start now and have a meeting later.
The esteemed Pope Francis, who has solid environmental and humanitarian credentials, would be an excellent person to lead this initiative.
The Joys of Minimalism
Minimalism can create a sense of sophistication as well as improving quality of life. Karina Collins Climate Action to Save the Planet.
If we buy fewer things, we can afford to buy products that last and look good for a long time. The additional incentive is that we would have to keep our weight stable. There are also fewer things to worry or care about, giving us more time to do things we didn’t have time for previously.
Quality is a crucial aspect of our life. It embodies high emotional value through the longevity and delight it provides. As English poet John Keats aptly put it: “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”. Blindly following fashion is harmful to our mental state and the environment. Invent your style and relish it.
Be what you are created to be — unique. Quality clothes give you class, as quality ages well. Repair what’s broken and support companies who make quality products and provide quality services. Don’t waste money on throwaway goods.
Consider the process of manufacturing an item of clothing. Whether we make it from plant or oil-based material, it requires energy to manufacture. Energy is a principal generator of hothouse gases, 72% of total emissions. Even before manufacturing a piece of cloth, we emit pollutants while mining the raw material or farming plants.
We then have to transport the raw material to a factory, and once manufactured, to a retailer. Every stage of the production and marketing process creates pollutants: storing raw materials or finished products, using a toxic pollutant to dye it, packaging and shipping it, and displaying it in-store before someone buys it. In many cases, we wear it once or twice, as by this stage we have bought something more fashionable.
Our vanity, nourished by cheap clothes, is a hefty contributor to climate change. Cheap turns out to be very costly for the environment.
Socialites, who flaunt a new dress for every social occasion, bear a lot of responsibility for this harmful practice. They should be paying more attention to what’s in them than what’s on them. We could encourage their sophistication by pouring scorn on their behaviour. After all, they are celebrities because we celebrate them. If we don’t follow, the fame dies.
Find true happiness in spending quality time with your family, contemplate the ups and downs of life with friends, spend a misty afternoon romancing your partner and re-enacting good times. Enjoy everything you wanted to do but have missed by chasing the wrong priorities.
We must move away from the philosophy of ‘endless growth’ and conspicuous consumption and build a new mindset that will shift our thinking to a more contemplative one. Endless growth is not possible as Earth’s resources are finite.
If we continue this endless growth path, we will hit a dead, and likely deadly, end. We will irreversibly damage the Earth’s capacity to renew breathable air, productive soil and drinkable water. We must stop destroying species that are crucial for providing food, pollination, and clean water, which are all essential for our existence.
If biodiversity collapses, human civilisation will disintegrate.
A Renaissance of the Human Conscience — the Solution to the Climate Crisis
Our laws are biased towards big corporations. Human automatons run most of them, indoctrinated by the religion of profit at any cost. The humanity that is supposed to be inherent in humans’ makeup has been leached out of them and replaced by insatiable greed and the philosophy of climbing the corporate ladder.
Environmental issues don’t get serious consideration except for PR purposes. This mindset has to change as the dominant corporations are the biggest polluters on Earth. The laws created with the help of paid lobbyists have to change to preserve our habitat.
The problem is that many lawmakers depend on contributions from corporations to finance their re-election. They are reluctant to change the laws and offend their benefactors. In those cases, lawmakers need to be changed too. So far, there are regular elections in many key countries that can make a meaningful difference if run by wise leaders. Karl Burkart ‘Show me the money’: a new slogan for the climate movement
We have to rip up the old rulebook that corrupted the concept of democracy and instruct politicians on what we want them to do. They always brag about being civil servants, and we must give them a chance to prove their bona fides. Given the heartfelt motivation that we can provide if united, politicians will change. Despite popular belief, they are also people. Of course, they will try to divide us and again rule, but that was a scenario from a rule book already thrown out.
An Environmental Economy Is Our Vehicle to a Radiant Future
To go into the future with confidence, we must eliminate carbon dioxide emissions and remove the excess from the atmosphere, as it takes 120 years to deplete naturally. Even if we stop polluting now, we will still leave the problem to our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to deal with. Do we care?! Nice ancestors!
In addition, there are an estimated 1,4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide and methane locked in the Siberian permafrost. As global temperatures rise and the permafrost melts, these gases evaporate. The more gases that evaporate, the more temperatures rise. As temperatures rise, more gases are released. We are riding an upward spiral to hell, and we have to turn it around.
Nowadays, everything is topsy-turvy.
Carbon is the main element on which coal, oil and all life on Earth are based; therefore, it is a highly versatile commodity. We already have processes to turn carbon dioxide into fuels, polymers, fertilisers, proteins, foams and other materials.
We must encourage the development of more processes for its use and subsidise the costs of technological development and the building of plants to extract gases from the atmosphere. Companies will invest in reducing and finally eliminating hothouse gases from the atmosphere if they can profit from it.
To succeed, the Environmental Economy has to be profit-based. There is an erroneous perception that people are not supposed to profit from it because it is a conservation effort. This perception of sacrifice is likely the biggest drawback of the environmental movement. We are wired to benefit from our enterprises. If there is no profit motive in it, we will not get far. The human race is not nearly that altruistic and idealistic yet.
It is essential to build an environmental economy based on a profit motive and also to advocate an environment-friendly lifestyle without affecting the quality of people’s lives. Otherwise, it is not going to happen. We have to compromise to achieve our environmental objectives. We have to motivate a significant shift in all fields in human activity, and it will be impossible to achieve unless people see personal benefits.
Designing, funding and building extraction plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere requires enormous resources. The organisations best suited for the job are oil companies with extensive experience building massive projects in the carbon field.
They also have money. They receive $5 trillion in government subsidies per year, and there is intense pressure by the public for this support to be discontinued. They are in the bad books of society, as they are responsible for most of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Oil companies should take the initiative and work with governments to build plants to take carbon out of the air and convert it into commercial products. Governments would gradually reduce unpopular oil subsidies and replace them with carbon subsidies. This kind of arrangement would be a win-win situation for everyone and especially for oil companies.
Oil companies will prosper, humanity will have a bright future, and we could all be friends on a cleansed and peaceful Earth.
It is the best deal oil companies will ever get. They generate pollution and then get paid to clean it. The deal of the century!
We have to turn saving the planet into a global religion. This religion will not infringe on the observance of any other religion. It will happily coexist with other religions as it doesn’t have rites and rituals that conflict with different beliefs.
This new religion follows a simple premise: we are the custodians of the Earth. We have done a lousy job so far. Now we must make an extraordinary effort to get things right. Shelly Fagan How to Get 5 Billion People on Board to Fight Climate Change.
We have to create a vision of a beautiful world and make the dream a reality. We bestowed ourselves with the title of homo sapiens, so let’s live up to it. Let’s forget our faults for a moment and focus on liberating the incredible potential that we are blessed with, and create a bright future.
Ante
October 2021
