Of Far-Reaching Dilemmas
And Provisional Remedies
By Emily Spence & Jean-Louis Robert Turcot25 September, 2007
Countercurrents.org
A large number of people who we know are glum, worried and perhaps even severely pessimistic. Their orientation is not altogether unreasonable. Indeed, it would seem unrealistic to not react as they do given their understanding of various monumental events impacting the world and the appallingly harmful outcomes that arise on account.
For example, one of them, in NY, worries that her home is close to the ocean and several feet above sea level. She wonders about the way that the topography will change as waters rise from arctic meltdown. She also frets that this is not a good time to sell her house due to the residential market slump.
Furthermore, she blames the latter occurrence, ultimately, on our government and big business. After all, how can many average Americans pay for their mortgages when their jobs keep disappearing overseas and their wages keep lowering due to competition? How can they afford to buy all of the clothes, household items and lots of other goods made overseas when the overall US wealth has increasingly flown to the most affluent economic set while everyone else is slipping in a downward spiral to have less? How can income be generated in America to purchase all sorts of products when a huge portion of them are being made by foreigners in huge sweatshops with salaries of a dollar or two per day?
Meanwhile, the underlying facts ARE disturbing. This following assessment succinctly explains the general state of affairs: "The United States is the richest country, and in 2000, the mean wealth was $144,000 per person. In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth. [1]" As such, it just seems that some people cannot distinguish between avarice and the number of assets that constitute one's simply having enough. (To gain a more replete overview of this financial disparity and excess, please look at information provided at reference two [2].)
In relation, one has to wonder about the fantasy land that President Bush must have visited when he, recently, stated that the US economy is robust. How can it possibly be strong when, according to creditcards.com, the average household credit card debt in the US was a whooping $9,300 in 2004 and one can assume that, especially with the housing foreclosures, overall debt has sharply increased since then?
Certainly, this is the case: "Household debt has risen particularly fast over the past decade in the United States. The outstanding amount of household financial liabilities increased from 89% of personal disposable income in 1993 to 139% in 2006, an unusually large rise by historical standards. Although similar run ups occurred in other OECD countries, the increase was particularly substantial in the United States. [3]"
Add to this that the US government owes a staggering $9.02 trillion USD [4] and, all considered, there seems a huge financial disaster just waiting to tumble in upon us all (except, of course, the utmost wealthiest class). So, is it any wonder that the whole economic system is falling like a line of interconnected vertical dominoes wherein each individual segment pushes over the next and the next? No wonder that the reverberations are being felt throughout the world and the dollar is being shunned like a harbinger of bad tidings.
On top of these monetary concerns, many people have further ones about the Iraq conflict, an unethical never ending battle for which the underlying motive always was control of oil reserves. Far worse than its fiscal price tag (over $453,000,000,000 to date for the US alone) is the outrageous cost in human life involving the deaths of more than 1,062,000 men, women and children [5], the acute human suffering, the severe social impact from the ongoing and massive migration surge of Iraqi citizens, horrendous related environmental damage, as well as the widespread devastation relative to housing, water supplies, electrical grid, infrastructure, jobs, medical aid, food stocks and other basic provisions on which life in Iraq, literally, depends.
Further upsetting to many persons is the sense that the ME warfare could spread given the many various contentious factions involved in resource and related clashes. Meanwhile, the fact that war funds are not used for human uplift in lieu of vicious annihilation is, obviously, outrageously despicable and immoral [6].
Meanwhile, the global peril caused by greenhouse effects and humankind's rapacious rape of nearly all worldwide environments, likewise, has many people distressed. From such a frame, conclusions derived from related studies are greatly disturbing. For example, especially so are the ones stemming from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), a body of research compiled by 1,300 investigators from ninety-five nations over a four year period. (It comprises of the most comprehensive analysis of current planetary conditions ever undertaken and resulted in a detailed report compiled by World Resource Institute (WRI) and approximately thirty partners.) To see a summary of findings, please go to the links at reference seven [7] from which one can note that the ultimate supposition is that human actions endanger the Earth's capacity to adequately maintain future generations.
If this isn't sufficiently gloomy by itself, the 2007 research by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) offers further grave information. It is that greenhouse gases, with a ninety percent certainty to be caused by our too great reliance on fossil fuels, are driving cataclysmic level of climate change. These, in turn, will introduce other grim perils of which many are already irreversible [8].
Without doubt, one solution for the ecological collapse is to try to encourage stronger interest in limiting population growth, as fewer people leads to less use of fossil fuels and other goods. Another is to curtail individual resource consumption.
Regarding this last point, John James, one of the writers for Crisis Coalition, Incorporated (http://www.planetextinction.com/) located in Australia, remarked, that he, on an ongoing basis, is trying to influence selected politicians; provides for 100 % of his electric needs from solar power, has his own water supply, operates a gas/petrol car while saving for an electric car that can be charged from his own solar cells, as well as possesses forty fruit trees and a veggie garden big enough to feed fifteen. At the same time, he uses no air conditioners and generates his heat during cold periods from his own wood.
While the above measures are constructive and admirable, many of them likely could not work for city dwellers as a method to shrink personal eco-footprint. (Presently, approximately 2.5 billion people live in cities, and it is expected that, in thirty years, this number will double to 5 billion.) Therefore, we need a somewhat different model to address such a widespread need. In short, we need one in which John's self-sufficiency is expanded to include public utility offerings, that avoid reliance on fossil fuels. (Sixty-seven percent of electricity in the US currently originates from fossil fuels [9].) In addition, other items, such as vehicles, could piggyback off of this alternative provision.
For example, there are cars right now that have traveled 3,000 miles at sixty mph on solar power alone, no batteries. At night, drivers rest and, when the sun comes up, the electric engines are ready to go. No fossil fuel, no emissions of any kind, no biofuels, no ethanol, methanol, alcohol, or any other propulsion force other than good old sol is required!
At the same time, the total energy required for the entire United States, hypothetically, could be garnered from a single 100 X 100 mile (10,000 square miles) array of solar collectors deployed in the Great Basin Desert in Nevada. Of course if that isn't enough, the Great Basin Desert is only one of many potential locations that could be used in the US, although it alone is possibly many times larger than the solar collecting capacity required.
In the evening when the sun goes down, so could much of the population then delimit use. Yet for those who would want to keep on working or playing, energy could be obtained from trans-ocean power lines connected to similar grids in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and elsewhere or from storage batteries. With solar collectors, the Sahara alone could probably generate ~ 100 times what is needed for the entire planet.
For home heating and cooling, one could simply plug into the ground grid. In addition, our running heat exchangers connected to it would not add a single molecule of greenhouse gases to the air in the same way that they wouldn't when we would plug cars, deliver trucks, trains or anything else into the grid. Oh, and we haven't sufficiently tapped into wind, tidal power, geothermal energy, nor any other benign power sources yet. All the same, why should we when the sun's energy, alone shining on the planet, is estimated to be about 10,000 times greater than our collective human need?
That's just a start in terms of ways that humanity could solve some problems affiliated with global warming, provision of many more jobs, income generation and other troubles that, directly or indirectly, impact all of our welfare. So, why go to war for oil? There's really none (and never was) unless, of course, we like giving money to providers of armaments, oil companies and grotesquely affluent reserve owners.
Moreover, why think, as touched on lightly above, that there can't be adequate job provision in all countries when, without doubt, setting this massive solar plan in the works would offer a staggering array of employment opportunities? In addition, let us remember, if this scenario seems impossibly large scale in operation to pull off, the programs that arose in relation to The Great Depression, the aftermath of WW II and many other major catastrophes. In other words, it could be set to start if there is sufficient will, financial backing, technical support, training and manpower applied to the task.
In this sense, it does not have to only represent a wild science fiction tale. Besides, if we don't get the provision quite right initially, we can keep on trying as, let's face it, we ARE running out of oil, coal, gas, wood and other finite options while, all the same, the human population and its demand keeps exponentially growing.
If global warming were the only potential calamity facing our species, and providing that Hawking's foreboding of Venus-like temperatures does not come to pass, we could theoretically avoid some of the consequences of climate change by applying human ingenuity towards benign energy usage. Even present technology, combined with a massive input geared towards rapid construction of energy alternatives, could probably reduce greenhouse gases to a level that would substantially decrease the likelihood of human extinction happening anytime soon.
However, the threats to humanity are greatly increased by the way that we continue to treat people everywhere on the planet. We wage war in our own backyards against one another by evicting each other from our foreclosed homes as if we were cattle stock on the range. Meanwhile, only the strongest, in terms of rising to the top of our financial hierarchies, reach a level at which survival is better guaranteed by the accumulation of wealth, and are, thus, protected from ending up on the streets.
Meanwhile because of this non-inclusive way of thinking, we protect each other from each other with an ever larger array of extraordinarily effective weapons, which have now become a threat to everyone across the Earth. In this sense, it is not global warming, nor the menace of a nuclear war that is the looming danger to our species. Instead, it is the way we continue to think, and subsequently act.
In this sense, we are our own worst enemies, and, unless we change the way we think with respect to what survival implies, we will be much more vulnerable to any potential species-ending event than we would be if we only and simply were to take better care of each other. In this vein, were innumerable dollars, that are spent every day on producing ever more weapons and making lavish war preparations, spent on finding and developing alternate energy sources, global warming scenarios would be reduced proportionally. Likewise, if the multitudinous troops practicing war maneuvers every day were deployed to fight the extremes of poverty, we could truly become the species which much of the world claims we are -- a very special, almost divine kind.
In this broader sense, every single person who merely considers his own and his own family's needs on this planet is as responsible for global warming and the hazard of human extinction as much as every Bush-like individual... Perhaps this last statement is a bit over the top. All the same, we collectively have to somehow face the fact that our ways of thinking have created this mess and, if we are as caring and intelligent as many would claim that we are, we should be able to change something that will permanently help us to avoid our own propensity to mess things up for each other.
All considered, let's simply face the facts. While symbolic tribalism in sports bouts are all well and good for those who like boxing matches, football and other forms of competition wherein two sides are pitted in rivalry, it is high time that we get rid of the opposition arising from nationality, skin color, religious differences, ethnic and cultural background, along with other divisions that keep us in permanent antagonistic contention. Especially this is needed as worldwide resources dwindle even further. Otherwise, warfare is, more than likely, to escalate between the haves and the have-nots, the well-to-do and the unjustly disenfranchised rest.
This all in mind, we should, on a practical level, prepare for the diverse effects of global warming. These include limiting our consumption of all sorts of products and buying locally made goods as much as possible as these do not rely on shipping, which uses fossil fuels. Doing so also requires our encouraging government officials to also prepare, which means our pressing them to develop plans for alternative energy supplies. Similarly, we should prompt further others to make necessary changes and, finally, we should accept that hard times are ahead.They are simply unavoidable at this point.
However, we are a resourceful species. If we start to change our ideology in needed ways to support ourselves collectively, we can begin to put into motion the plans necessary to wean off of fossil fuels, stop our warring over resources and find a way to cooperate for mutual benefit.
After all is said and done, let us reflect on Albert Einstein's thoughts: "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security." If we can keep this outlook in mind, perhaps it will not be too late, in the end, to save ourselves from ourselves.
[1] This data derives from: Distribution of wealth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth).[2] Information on this topic is provided at: Google Answers: wealth in the US (answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=2050), Oxford Scholarship Online: Income and Wealth (www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/eco), Wealth and Income Inequality in the USA (multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03may/may03inter), Wealth Distribution in the U.S. : Houston Indymedia (houston.indymedia.org/news/2003/07/14100.php), United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States), The World's Billionaires - Forbes.com (www.forbes.com/2007/03/07/billionaires-worlds-ri), The Forbes 400 richest Americans - Forbes.com - MSNBC.com (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6082174/) and http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/diag/what.html.
[3} This quotation is from: Economic survey of the United States 2007 (www.oecd.org/document/51/0,2340,en_2649_201185_3).[4] This figure was obtained from: United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States).
[5] Assorted information concerning the war dead is at: Just Foreign Policy - Iraqi Death Estimate (http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/
iraq/iraqdeaths.html).[6] An overview of this subject is provided at: Cost of War - National Priorities Project (costofwar.com/index-world-hunger.html).
[7] Summaries and updates can be obtained at: Post Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: From Assessment to Act... (www.wri.org/biodiv/project_description2.cfm?pid) and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment - Wikipedia, the free encycl... (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Ecosystem_Asses).
[8] Details are located at: IPCC WG1 AR4 Report (ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html) and
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - Wikipedia, the f... (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergovernmental_Panel_on).[9] Please access figures at: Where Does Electricity Come From? - Environmental Defense (http://www.environmentaldefense.org/article.cfm?contentID=774).
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