If you are fat, most people would say you should probably go on diet. Cut down on what’s causing your love handles and that bloated beer belly. The same thinking, it seems, applies to climate change: having gorged ourselves on the bad stuff — fossils fuels and carbon emissions — while skimping on the greens, what we need is a carbon diet of sorts, a way of cutting down on the environmental equivalent of cakes, koeksisters and beer.
It’s really quite a simple thought process that has broken the complex problem of climate change down to a straightforward linear equation, stating that what you put in directly relates to what you get out. Put in carbon emissions on one side of the equation, and you get climate change on the other. So if we want to limit the amount of climate change we experience, we need to cut down the carbon emissions. And having followed this thinking it’s no wonder we have “solutions” like carbon sequestration, hybrid cars and carbon credits trading. But something just doesn’t seem right.
Let’s go back to the example of how we tend to tackle weight loss. While the stock standard solution to belly bulge is dieting, time and time again we see that ultimately dieting just doesn’t work. And I think that’s because we’ve misunderstood the problem in the first place. Sure being overweight is directly caused by overeating. But perhaps instead of stopping there we should go one step further and ask: But why are you overeating in the first place? Understanding “over-weightedness” as a problem of too much eating gives us “solutions” like appetite suppressants, stapled stomachs and no-carb diet frenzies. And sometimes they work in the short run but ultimately these are patches that only treat the symptom of an underlying condition. If we re-think being overweight as a more complex problem caused by an interaction between environmental factors, lifestyle choices and socio-economics, then perhaps we’d have more success in “treating” the problem.
In other words, I may be fat because I sit behind a desk all day, rarely exercise and can’t afford to eat a fully balanced diet — and because I happen to quite like beer. Sure, I’m fat because I consume more than I expend energy-wise but I consume that amount for a number of reasons, of which my being overweight is a spin-off. Telling me to cut down on what I eat or to stop eating a particular set of foods just isn’t going to deliver the goods — it’s simply not a sustainable solution for the life I live.
Now, in the same way, a simple carbon diet is also not a sustainable solution if everything else stays the same, and especially not if another couple billion people start living like we do. And on that note, I read an article from The Economist about how the newly raised wages of Chinese workers could be what ultimately ends the current recession. More Chinese workers getting paid more, means more consumption and more market expansion. It also necessarily means a bigger carbon waist-line, no-matter how “green” manufacturers and consumers try to be.
And that, I think, is the crux of the matter. For as long as we reduce climate change to a simple problem that can be solved by cutting down our carbon emissions, we’ll keep missing the goal of stopping or even slowing climate change. We’ll continue to see it as a problem that we can “invent” ourselves out of. Or a problem that can be dodged if somehow we manage to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it underground. And for as long as we keep seeing the problem in this light, we’ll miss what makes climate change a real problem in the first place: that our entire economic system and therefore the whole way we live our lives, is ultimately what drives our addiction to fossil fuels, our rampant consumption, and the carbon emissions we create. It is a lifestyle that’s wholly unsustainable and needs to change. Yes, we need to cut down our emissions, but that goal in itself will come to nothing if we don’t make other drastic changes too. As said above, dieting helps with weight loss, but actually keeping the weight off in the long run requires a change in lifestyle that goes far beyond just consuming less. As the causes are complex and often systemic, they need to be responded to with systems-based solutions that replace reductionist answers. And I would argue that the same applies to tackling climate change: unless we change our lifestyles and our economics in addition to our carbon diet, efforts made to reduce carbon emissions are unlikely to be effective in the long run.
With you 100%! We will wipe ourselves out because of pollution and soil contamination and degradation before climate change does us in.
But then who cares what happens in 85 years if we just all stop breeding more Yahoos. Then we can enjoy what we like, hammer the place and then after our demise – recovery. If not by this lithosphere, the life that evolves after the mantle belches out its next mountain building exercise.
I recommend a good peat bog as a final resting place to ensure one’s personal place in the fossil record of palaentologists of the next age. Let’s mix the species up to give them a challenge. Now that’s an excuse for a good hunting season…
The once-off tax on new vehicles as proposed by min Gordhan does not seem the right way to go. That tax will probably just disappear into the state coffers and not be used for environmental purposes. It could work counterproductive, because someone who has paid thousands extra for a vehicle would be encouraged to use it more intensively to recoup the expenditure.
It would be better to tax fuel according to the principle “the polluter pays” and in that case it is proportional. That tax should be used solely for environmental purposes.
Personally I am not convinced we can harness climate change, but a strong case can be made for using a non-renewable asset as frugally as possible.
@Mike – That is an excellent workable analogy. There seem to be many similarities and even overlaps, ignoring the main resourse abuse of overpopulation for the moment. Some eat too much because they live on nutrient-poor junk foodm. This would be similar to using badly made plastics-based items, designed for obsolence to keep one consuming. Some eat for emotional reasons, feelings of inadequacy, for the same reasons people buy fuel-guzzling 4×4,s. Then there is the: I-was-brought-up-to-eat-two-types-of-carb-in-one-meal who really does not understand they are partaking in unnecessary excess who would display similar excesses in other parts of their lives: a TV in every room, rooms full of shoes, etc. What most people seem not to realise is that it is all connected. If the oil is gone, so will the whole synthetic industry: nail varnish, car polish, cellphones?n etc.
Yes I agree exactly. We do need to change our lifestyles, our economic system, and drastically reduce our population. Lifestyles are probably the easiest to change, from driving less, using renewable energy and changing our diet to consume less meat and eat locally produced food. Capitalism is a major problem as economic theory does not seem to take into account that resources are finite. Very often, economics reduce the value of natural systems to a monetary value, and the value of exploiting a resource to exhaustion, is often more than can be gained from using a resource sustainably. The only economic system that works presently with the high population we have at the moment is capitalism, with the assumption that resources are infinite. They really are daunting problems and I can only see change happening after it has been forced by circumstances.
… and due to my new mode of typing (BB) I never finished that train of food. We need to make the oil last longer by using it more sparingly just as we need to eat small amounts of high quality food instead of mountains of junk, that way, we will have time to come up with better alternative fuel sources and Earth systemes will better be able to cope with the non-natural poisons that result.
Sounds wonderfully simple, doesn’t it? Until one factor in the producers of these products and what they will have to say about slower consumption.
Good one Mike.a ‘green’ article that has a strong and close to home comparison.
Unforntunately our entire economic system is designed for self destruction. Politicians have at most a 5 year vision – next election. Business leaders aim for the next share holders meeting to make sure they retain their jobs.
So who looks 50 to 100 years ahead – no one except maybe parents.
R100 today is about R13,000 in 100 years time at 5% inflation pa compunded. Zim just did it in afew years but our money system is doomed to fail. We certainly are not planning to have our economic system which is heavily reliant on consumers to be around a 1000 years from now.
Japan has a birth rate of about 1.3 so they are now trying to get couples to marry and have children as the economy will suffer YET their vision should be just to wait 50 years. Parents will have more children if they see a future for them. Parents strangely enough do think more than 20 years ahead.