This Is Gonna Hurt

It's said that some people see a half-glass of wine as half-empty. Others will see the glass half-full.

I see walls. Screw the damned glass.

The wine glass business is a reference to Andrew Nikiforuk's latest article in The Tyee where he contrasts two schools of thought - the BAU, the Business as Usual camp, and the GND, the Green New Deal camp, both of whom he argues, convincingly, are full of crap.  What they have in common, and it's very dangerous, is that they both approach climate change as a standalone problem, something that can be fixed, will be fixed. That's where they're both full of crap.

Most of our governments that claim to care likewise approach climate change as a standalone threat and those that do, including our own, are likewise full of crap. They will pour a little money and a little effort into averting catastrophic climate change only they'll fail. They will fail because it isn't a standalone threat. It is an existential peril, to be sure, but just one. There are others and they're all intertwined.

I don't care how strenuous your efforts are to put out the kitchen fire if the rest of the house is already ablaze. You're fighting a losing battle.

A dozen years ago when I started this blog I would recite a catalogue of natural and man-made challenges that confronted mankind, everything from global warming to the freshwater crisis and disease migration to terrorism and nuclear proliferation. It was quite an array.  I asked readers to help me make sense of these things, what were we looking at?

It took a while but eventually I noticed that there were a few common threads that ran through these perils.  Pollution was one. That included greenhouse gas emissions that were driving atmospheric loading into the lethal zone. Overpopulation was another. Finite planet, infinite numbers of humans, end of humanity. A third was our rapacious over-consumption of the planet's resources. It wasn't just that we were overburdening Earth's capacity for replenishing the very resources all life depends upon. The worst part was that our global civilization, especially the developed world, was mortally dependent on consuming about twice the available resources into perpetuity.

We were stuck on auto-pilot. 18th century economics, 19th century industrialism, 20th century geo-politics, all of which began to lose their utility four or five decades ago which tragically coincided with the rise of neoliberalism.

How much difference do you think a carbon tax will make to the staggering loss of biodiversity? What about our critical exhaustion of our stocks of arable soils, our farmland? Walls, walls and walls and we have no response to any of them except a hapless effort on global warming, a miniscule carbon tax.