George Monbiot calls for private sufficiency, public luxury

Sufficiency is the concept that you pick the right tool for the job; you don't need a chainsaw to cut your bread, and you don't need a car to go to the corner when a bike will do. I have suggested that it is a lot more important than efficiency; studies have shown that a leaky apartment uses less energy than a modern house, simply because it is smaller and only has one exterior surface. But for most people, it is enough. It is sufficient.

Apartments and bikes can be enough, and can be pretty nice

George Monbiot of the Guardian writes a long and depressing article about how The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us. He pretends optimism, that if we all pull together like we did back in the Second World War right now we can pull out of this nosedive:

I don’t believe such a collapse is yet inevitable, or that a commensurate response is either technically or economically impossible. When the US joined the second world war in 1941, it replaced a civilian economy with a military economy within months. As Jack Doyle records in his book Taken for a Ride, “In one year, General Motors developed, tooled and completely built from scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft."

But that is as far as the optimism goes, as he continues by noting that "the oligarchic control of wealth, politics, media and public discourse explains the comprehensive institutional failure now pushing us towards disaster.”

Read the Treehugger story by Lloyd Alter - “George Monbiot calls for private sufficiency, public luxury.”