It would be nice to hear it straight for once. Stopping climate change means giving up on growth.

from Dissent magazine:


Growth vs. the Climate
Daniel Immerwahr ▪ Spring 2015



[font size="1"]"We have the solutions." At the People’s Climate March, September 21, 2014 (Light Brigading/Flickr)[/font]

The year 2013 was one of the ten hottest on record. So was 2010. So were 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2003, 2002, and 1998. Last year, with its polar vortex and biting winter, seemed to bring relief to North America. Except it also brought temperatures of over 120ºF to Australia, massive flooding to Malaysia, and the third harrowing year of drought to California. As it turns out, 2014 was the hottest single year since meteorologists started measuring in 1850.

By now, we’ve raised the average global temperature a little less than one degree Celsius since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The best predictions suggest that, if we go about our business as usual, we will raise it somewhere between four and six degrees by 2100. With the heat will also come side effects: fiercer and more frequent storms, droughts, acidifying oceans, melting glaciers, and the loss of species.

And the bad news is, that’s not even the bad news. Although the altered climate is threatening in its own right—heat alone killed tens of thousands of Europeans in the lethal summer of 2003—the thing to really worry about is the infrastructure. Each drought, each megastorm, each scorching summer puts a strain on the complex systems that provide us with water, food, and power and that keep disease and disorder at bay. These systems can often endure a single crisis—one Sandy, one Katrina. The problem is what happens when the Sandys and Katrinas start coming back to back, piling up on each other. That’s when the money runs out, the electricity goes off, and everyone starts wondering where to find water. If true catastrophe arrives, it will not come gradually—the frog in boiling water—but, as the historian Nils Gilman writes, “as a series of radical discontinuities—a series of bewildering ‘oh shit’ events.”

Welcome to the future. Oh shit.

Those with long memories will know that this isn’t the first time it felt like we were testing the earth’s ability to support us. In 1968, the biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which prophesied civilizational collapse for societies unable to rapidly bring down their birth rates. There were simply too many people, he argued, for the planet’s dwindling supply of resources. Ehrlich got a vasectomy and preached birth control, though he also advocated for more extreme measures: compulsory sterilization, a ban on cars, and a tax on cribs. Internationally, he proposed “triage,” aiding the countries that remained viable but writing off those, like India, that he saw as too far gone. .......................(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/growth-vs-the-climate