by frog
Personally I’m a bit ambivalent about climate change gestures like Earth Hour and it’s more aggressive little brother Alarmism.org.
It’s all well and good as an educative measure sitting in the dark for an hour each year or setting off an alarm each month. But that assumes that individual people people, once educated, can be the solution. We can be the solution, but not by acting individually. We need to act collectively and politically. The way I see it, the big solutions to climate change are government and international ones – ending and repairing deforestation, comprehensive changes in our transport system toward public and active forms of transport, switching to renewable energy generation, changing in our food production system from large scale industrial to small scale organics. Individual people switching off their lights, maintaining the pressure in their tyres, etc all helps to mitigate the problem, but not solve it. The solution is not not educating individuals to change, but compelling political and economic systems to change.
I do think that Earth Hour or The Alarmists have a role to play in the battle against climate change, but I worry that they don’t give the impression that they see themselves as primarily political movements.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Mon, March 17th, 2008
Tags: , cliamte change, earth day, the alarmists
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Good post, Frog. You are absolutely correct about the need for acting ‘collectively and politically’ to solve environmental problems. And also about the fact that the ‘solution is not not educating individuals to change, but compelling political and economic systems to change’. Excellent. I’m very pleased too see such an approach, and I hope that this is the way that the Green Party is now thinking. Certainly the history of the Greens so far is more of the opposite – being concerned about non-solutions that will only mitigate the problems, and about trying to change individuals rather than systems. Congratulations on the shift in thinking! I hope (but don’t expect) that it might find some influence amongst Green MPs.
Bryce
http://www.liberation.org.nz
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Bryce – I take it by the double negative in your comment that you fully endorse education as well as collective action in solving our environmental problems…
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at earth hour fwwog, we have party at my place, big flashy strobes and fun, night hot baths, kevyn miller and them say they turn up in his v8, leave it rumbling a while so that the boy racers next door see what’s what, then we cruise down sort out them dudes at transit
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but any sexx there, peterquixote? won’t cum if no sex, boy racers, girl racers, v8s, all bit boring though, all really want is sexx, no substitute fast kars 4 inadequate and unconfident; yes, sexx, sexx, peterq, got sum happening at your party???
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being a bit norty pq, no substitute slow kows 4 inadequate and unconfident either!!!
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kars, kows, koal, peterq, sorry, got no funny line on koal, cost just not funny, you agwee fwwog?
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If governments do not do anything, does that mean individuals should do nothing, because individual actions will not be sufficient to solve the problem?
It may be irrational (at least from an economic perspective) for individuals to make sacrifices when only collective action will be able to solve climate problems. However, just because something is irrational does not also mean it is immoral.
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peterq, kevyn’s 300ZX hasn’t been re-engined with a V8 – yet. No point sorting out Transit – not there fault all the money goes to Jaffaville and Helengrad. Better to line up all the pollies in place of traffic cones and see who can slalom the fastest.
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what do we think of this, folks?
global cooling in the oceans: http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/pol/611299757.html
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Basically we have two sets of data that disagree now. We have to go back and work out which one is more wrong. The earlier collected data showed warming. The argos shows nothing significant. In the meantime a hell of a lot of ice melted into the water, but that may not mean anything. The people collecting the data have to reconcile it.
Which is to say, not a hell of a lot to think or say about it for a while except that now we have to make sure that this data is repeatable and or the differences are explicable. Data doesn’t conflict without explanation.
respectfully
BJ
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on the other hand diverse data don’t lead to a particular conclusion without explanation!
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I think it’s interesting that most of the solutions to the questions about climate change, resource management etc. seem to involve changing our ways, using alternative energy and all that good stuff that replaces non-stainable things like oil and coal. Dispite that fact that wood for example is a renewable resource, it also has a time factor involved in it’s replenishment. This means that if we look at pine plantations as a source of biofuels (as Scion is looking into) we need to take into account that currently it takes around 25 years for a pine tree to mature so that it can be converted into biofuel. If we know that it takes 25 years to grow the tree, we should also look at how long it will take for that fuel to be consumed. Using the Scion calculators I got roughly the same energy from 1 tonne of dry sawdust converted to biofuel as we get from 2 1/2 barrels of oil. This sounds ok, so it must mean that the problem is solved then, so we can carry on as we are, knowing that the answer has already been found. But if we take the current NZ oil consumption rate of around 150,000 barrels a day, thats the equivalent enery gained from 60,000 tonnes of dry sawdust per day or 21.9 million tonnes per annum (at our current oil energy consumption rate that is). I’m not sure what that equates to in hectares of mature trees, but it must be a fair bit, and we need to produce this each year multiplied by 25 (to take into account the growing time).
What I’m trying to get at here is that renewable should not be confused with sustainable. A renewable resource can still be depleted down to nothing, just like oil and coal. In fact if you think about it, oil is actually renewable, the only problem is that it takes millions of years to replenish. Because we use it at such a fast rate we percieve it as non renewable. Wood is obviously renewable though, because we can observe the rate of growth, and in most cases we even plant the trees ourselves. It’s doesn’t take a genius to understand why oil is not a sustainable resource, but I think it’s hard for most people to understand how something like wood can also be unsustainable.
We know that it grows and that growth takes time and also land area. We also know that growing food takes up land area, and places for people to live take up land area. There is also the funny little thing about us not being the only species that lives on the planet, so I s’pose they take up a bit of space too (they even use some of the same resources we use).
So finally my point. You cannot solve a problem without looking at all of the factors (ask any school kid that can add numbers). Missing out some of the factors does not make the equation easier, it just makes finding the wrong answer easier. The factor that is too hard to add in is population growth. Ask any Tikopian if population growth is a problem, and they might explain to you that zero population growth is one of the reasons that they have suvived on such a small island for thousands of years. I say one of the reasons because there are other factors in Tikopian culture that have helped them survive. Sustainablilty is also a factor, but just like population growth, it can’t be taken as the only factor that needed to be addressed by the Tikopians.
I sent an email to the Greens a while ago asking why population growth was not being pushed as a climate change issue, and actually got a reply back from Jeanette Fitzsimons, which surprised me, but what truely surprised me was that she did agree that overpopulation is an issue, and that the zero poulation growth was even one of the policies of the Values Party before it changed to the Greens. What also surprised me was that she said there was no good research to say what the carrying capacity of New Zealand actually is. In fact even the Tikopians did not know what the carrying capacity of Tikopia was untill they surpassed it (suicide, warefare and infanticide were among the solutions they found, would this be acceptable to us though?). Jeannette did make the point that New Zealand has a relatively steady population, and population growth could not be percieved as a problem for NZ at the moment. This seems to me to contradict the government’s policy of “working for families” and the incentives to increase birth rates in NZ.
Despite our current stability, I think population growth is still a problem we need to think seriously about in New Zealand for 2 reasons.
Firstly: not many of us can say we don’t know of any family or friends who have gone overseas for better money and lifestyle. If resource scarcity degrades their standard of living overseas, will they come back home?
Secondly: At my work we have 2 immigrants working for us. One from Zimbabwe, and the other from the Philippines. The immigrant from Zimbabwe told me the other day that when he was offered the job in NZ, he immediately considered it home. He also told me that he will never go back to Zim. It doesn’t take a genius to realise what might make him feel that way. The other immigrant from the Philippines told me that he brought his family here mostly to get away from the impending overpopulation problems in the Philippines.
If these reasons come from people who had never even been to NZ, would it be easier for ex pats to make the same choice to come home if global problems become worse?
I am not trying to say we should start killing people, but I think we should start looking at the whole problem, even if we eventually come to the conclusion that it might be too late for “easy” solutions.
It might sound a little fatalistic, but I don’t think we have the ability to find the “best” solution before a solution finds us.
As a surgeon I worked with told me once. “All bleeding eventually stops”
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Well said Doug, the environmental (green as in a leafy thing) movement has been high jacked by a group who claim that helping the environment goes hand in hand with social justice, where priorities are equal. It is true that children are innocent at birth but the buck must stop somewhere, and green parents are aware of population issues.
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The Green Party of Aotearoa/NZ is famous for its esoteric arguments that no one understands but them.
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oh no doug t! that school kid would have to be able to multiply numbers, not just add, if we are talking about factors!
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Interesting comment Andrew.
The little bit in brackets was actually just a metaphor though. Can you say met-a-phor Andrew? (that bit was sarcasm).
Also, when I was talking about factors, I was more thinking of things that contribute to a situation.
But on reflection I realise that my little metaphor was far too confusing to understand, and I should have left it out all together.
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DougT, IMHO the only problem with your metaphor was that factor has different meanings in science and mathematics. Your illustration of the difference between renewable and sustainable was a good one. Failing to look at biofuels in that way has created serious problems.
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i understand metaphor doug t, though i don’t quite understand how your latest post expresses your appreciation of my sparkling wit (w-it), certain though i am that that was your intention
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Yeah, I was just fighting fire with fire Andrew.
Anyway this has nothing to do with the original topic.
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