The climate change metaphor

To write about climate change or global warming, as a concept that encompasses and affects almost all areas of life, requires delimiting a scope or an approach beforehand. It is simply too big to grasp otherwise. That is why, before diving in through this series, I feel compelled to pick-up my words where I left them in my previous article and to continue exploring the roots of climate change, yet not from a scientific standpoint, but from a conceptual one. To be able to think and to act on this overwhelming phenomenon, with or without putting a label on it, we need, as humans, to understand it. If we are going to assume the responsibility that we have on its acceleration, we must first visualize it and correctly comprehend it. That is, of course, if we manage to overcome the inherent difficulty of talking about something that we are not able to see or touch.

The complexity of a concept - climate change.

Climate change is something so big, so complex and so powerful that just imagining it poses a mental challenge, just like it is to imagine the universe. Even if we have a clear idea about whether it affects us or how it does so, climate effects are everywhere, but we only experience them through phases or moments. Climate change consists of many individual elements and it cannot be reduced to them, but only as a whole (think of a heat wave, a flood or a hurricane). We do not perceive climate change as it is, we do not touch it; it absolutely defies the definition of what a thing is; we only see the raindrops, the dry land, the snow, at a specific time. But the fact that we cannot perceive it as a whole does not mean that it does not exist or that the correlation is there.

Read the Medium story by Roger Molins  - “The climate change metaphor.”

Post capitalism: life within environmental limits

It may seem as though capitalism has always been a part of the Western world, but that’s not true. Although the concept has some roots in the Ancient world, capitalism as a system dates only from the 16th century.

There’s increasing discussion forecasting a post-capitalist society. 

Now, some 500 years later, there’s increasing discussion arguing for, or simply forecasting, a post-capitalist society.

Capitalism is locked into an economics of growth that is undermining the environmental foundations of life on Earth – that is, capitalism is ecocidal. And this has become the defining contradiction of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

As a result, this “growth imperative” alongside our own planet’s limits is likely to bring capitalism to an end in coming decades.

Read the Pursuit story by Dr Samuel Alexander and Professor Brendan Gleeson, both from the University of Melbourne - “Post capitalism: life within environmental limits".

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.”