A life loaded with contradictions

Life of the climate activist is loaded with contradictions.

Much of what they do is about helping people better understand the dynamics of our climate’s disruption and within that explain that effective mitigation of atmosphere damaging emissions arises from human behaviour.

That behaviour of the activist is strangely contradictory. Simply doing what they do is the behaviour of which they are critical.

Living and working within the modern living is energy intensive and to reach a point where a person’s life is effectively carbon-neutral, they are forced to become remote to the lifestyle they really want to change.

That person may live a wonderfully environmentally benign life, but buried in their bolthole, they have little influence on the wider society, except for a small circle of friends and acquaintances.

The idea that we should live the life we want to see others pursue is a wonderful ideal, but to live an absolutely carbon-neutral life could only be achieved by abandoning modern life completely.

Most climate scientists and other eager to broadcast their message far and wide employ the carbon-costly benefits of modern life to engage with others in the hope that humanity, generally, can reach some sort of conclusion about how the world can, and should approach this rapidly unfolding difficulty.

An ABC story headed: “Rocket blasts off with NASA satellite to help track climate change” tells of how NASA has launched a satellite to help with weather forecasting and tracking global climate change by measuring how much water is in the Earth's soil.

That in itself is a weird contradiction – everything about a rocket is energy-intensive from the embedded energy to the massive amounts of fossil fuels it takes to get the satellite into orbit.

So the contradiction dilemma continues – we know climate change is real,, we know is happening and we know it has the potential threaten life on earth, but yet a little like the Easter Islanders who built and worshipped the very idols whose creation threatened them, we continue to build and employ the technology and ideas that has taken us to where we are now.

It was Einstein who said something about insanity being found among those who used the same ideas repeatedly while expecting a different result. The technology that gave us rockets is what disrupted earth’s climate system and yet will still employ it as we search for answers.