Response needs to be immediate and dramatic

Author Joseph Stiglitz.

by Robert McLean

Our response to climate change needs to be more immediate, and dramatic, than imagined.

References to future events continue to intrigue me for although I acknowledge the importance of planning, many seem to glibly go ahead apparently unaware that our climate is quickly becoming unmanageable, not that it ever was.

The closing of the London Olympics brought comments from many about their hopes and dreams for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, South America.

Just today (August 13), reading The Price of Inequality, author Joseph Stiglitz said, in discussing the 2008-09 global financial crisis, that the American economy would not again operating at its prime until 2018 – that’s six years away!

Those who understand the implications and ramifications of the changes we have made to our climate, are predicting significant difficulties for all parts of the world and certainly by then.

Those same people are arguing that the world needs to shift to an alternative energy source immediately, not in four or five years, but immediately and along with the reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by close to 100 per cent over the same time frame.

Stiglitz's latest book will
help you understand
the distrurbing nexus
between politics and the
economy.

Both those things border on impossible, particularly as the fossil-fuel industry is both so pervasive and powerful with its tentacles deep in most every political party, certainly those with power and influence, around the world.

Along with most others, I am entrenched in political and economics paradigm that generate inequality, poverty, confrontation and, beyond those things, a way of living that is absolutely unsustainable.

We don’t have much time (we are in fact about 40 years too late), but a first step would be to reduce our consumption and so demand and energy and our seemingly insatiable appetite for irreplaceable resources.

To do that we need to live quieter lives, that is step back from the abyss, contemplate and consider and work less (in the traditional sense) and apply ourselves to more purposeful leisure and in doing that make our communities richer and more resourceful.

For some time now (several months) the idea of a Four-Hour Work Day has been articulated encouraging us to be more innovative about how we live and shifting our allegiance from becoming financially richer to creating resilient and tightly bonded communities that will allow us to live in a world that will be somewhat different from what we presently understand.

It is about retro-fitting our economic system and returning to a style of democracy that is truly about one-vote per person and not, as it has become in America and is becoming here, “one-vote per dollar”.