Warming Up

June 28th, 2008 Posted in The People, Global Warming, Mass Movements

Think of global warming as an uncontrolled fire that is growing. The scientists have sounded the alarm. Now we only need our engineers acting as our fire department consultants to deploy a technical response. We, the people, in a mass movement bucket brigade will use this remedy to douse the blaze.

It is a model of a possible way. The threat–man’s acts have an unexpected ecological consequence. The concept–burning fossil fuels release massive and persistent greenhouse gases that preserve and increase the earth’s surface temperature. The action–we stop using the culprit materials and the crisis abates.

In a contrary way the government (in association with the international system of governing nation-states) acts, supposedly for the benefit of the whole. It outlaws the use of fossil fuels, to be replaced by alternate natural and benign energy sources like wind, sun, water in motion, thermal heat. The greenhouse roof in the sky is dismantled and we all, snug in our long-johns, live happily ever after.

More likely we will find our way into a combination of the two as we did in the tobacco-cancer crisis. The mass movement of the people was in the parallel giving up of the tobacco habit. The government eventually placed exorbitant taxes on tobacco products and outlawed smoking in public indoor spaces. Note that the overthrow of the tobacco monster habit is still not complete, that it has continued for many decades, that a lot of unnecessary early illness and death continues, and that leaders of the tobacco industry along with hard core members of the tobacco cult have resisted the process to protect their investments and their profits and their jobs and their unique culture.

The linking of energy use to increasing earth temperature is a more complex equation. The consequence is not as palpable. Cancer striking kin and neighbors and self like the black death of the middle ages catches one’s attention but this heating trend is more like a rumor–the faint rumble of the Golden Horde approaching. Will it arrive tomorrow or sometime in the next century or will it be diverted? Or maybe it is only a myth and a delusion? So the connection of gasoline to the white roof panes of the greenhouse are forgotten along with the possible catastrophic future. The auto driving habit is only threatened by the rising cost of the pernicious fuel. Our factories, houses, tools, operated by unconcerned humans, spew out (let’s take a chance and call it) death. The Horde is no rumor, it is us.

Yet we are no fools. We are modern and we can understand a long range scientific prediction and we can understand the constant possibility of political extortion by the international oil cartel against our national interest. We might be ready to join the mass move against the fossil fuel habit once we are roused and can see the route forward.

Energy, like Count Guido, goes off in all directions. It requires more than giving up a dangerous act. It points to a radically new way of life. We have to go consistently and constantly toward the more efficient and less destructive ways of energy use. We have to lower our use of manufactured energy to the most essential purposes–change our priorities. And we have to conserve energy as though it were gold and we were all Volpone clones.

The difficult jump to the non-tobacco regime was duck soup in comparison. What is this new threat and way? A change in physical environment (not a fatal disease), it leads to a change in habit and behavior and technical usage that requires the mass to act together in unison to be effective. One person driving an electric car in Mexico City will not make a difference. The mass movement has to be at the social level. A change in a number of sectors is needed and not simply one–transportation, building, tools, manufacturing, power generation, gadgets. The required changeover feels like a loss of power and convenience; feels like the loss of a known economic and cultural order. This is more than a change of one habit, it is a critical change in life style.

It becomes obvious, everything considered, that we might not be able to reach the goal of zero greenhouse gas emissions. Short term self interest is a critical block. We might not be able to get there from here. A conclusion I am reluctantly beginning to reach. The fact that an increase in the price of oil has more influence toward reducing use of the automobile than all the dire scientific predictions of global warming is a bad sign. But one can hope (against the doubt) that it is only a temporary hitch. Who knows, maybe a Goya image will penetrate and dissolve the willful blindness.

The paradigm of the mass movement is there ready to be mobilized, but like a car with caked plugs, a weakened battery, and a near empty tank there is a lot of rhetorical grinding but no explosion.

We need a spark.

Don’t we.