Entries Tagged 'Developing Nations' ↓

I hyperbolate only slightly. If climate change will devastate these countries – if some of them will be completely obliterated by the results of our actions – is this not equal to war? Who can blame them for walking out of the Copenhagen talks?

If this seems extreme, consider this example: If a river flows through two countries and the upstream country decides to take all the water, there will certainly be war. The downstream country will have no choice. The same parallel applies with climate change: the developed nations have caused most of the global warming thus far, and, much worse, have denied and obstructed action to reduce the impacts. Continue reading →

…what if there was a type of nuclear power that:

• Was radioactive for a few hundred years, not millennia
• Could not meltdown
• Could not be used to make weapons-grade materials
• Burns up existing high-level radioactive waste and weapons material?

There is. Or may be, if the current research versions of Thorium reactors pan out. I still don’t think nuclear is the way to go, and I still think that conservation should be the number one priority, but if this technology could be made to work, I could get behind it as a temporary measure. Continue reading →

Population has not been raised as a major issue at Copenhagen, but it should be. China is the only country that has mentioned it at all. The developed countries are dodging the idea of stabilising population because their economies are based on continuous growth, and population growth is an easy way to do that: More people = more consumers.

However, more people also means more of everything that is damaging the planet, especially more people living rich country lifestyles. Developed countries could stabilise their populations tomorrow if they so chose, because most have birth rates lower than death rates. It is immigration that is keeping population growth going in the rich countries, and at the risk of being labelled a racist, I will say that immigration must be immediately reduced to result in a stable population in the developed countries. Continue reading →

Every person I know who has faced the reality of our climate crisis battles with feelings of despair, some or all of the time. When you pull the pieces together and take what the scientists are saying and combine it with our foreseeable political reality, it is hard not to believe we are doomed. Meaning, the collapse of civilization and a massive dieback of humanity is inevitable, and the only question is when.

But wait, there’s worse. The more you look into it, the more you realize this collapse and dieback will certainly affect you personally quite negatively, and is likely to happen sooner than later. And you also see such powerful vested interests who have corrupted our economic and political systems to their short-term benefit standing in the way of change, that you really cannot see the needed change as possible.

From James Lovelock saying it’s all over but the crying and dying, to James Hansen saying we are already over the safe threshold and have 5 years to get our carbon under control; or John Holdren saying we are now dealing with climate change and what we are fighting to avoid is catastrophic climate change, to mainstream scientific views that climate change is happening more quickly than they thought…well, it can lead to despair. Continue reading →