A Long Slog to the End of Global Warming

July 2nd, 2008 Posted in The People, Sociology of Group, Global Warming, Mass Movements, Ideology

There is no individual resolution of the global warming crisis. One person turning down the thermostat in an unused room is not enough. It is a case of hang together or burn separately. Man’s effect on the heating pattern of the earth is, if we are to believe our eminent scientists, the consequence of our unity in our fossil fuel usage. What we have built together, we will have to dismantle together.

The necessary decisions and actions required are not simple. We use energy in a variety of ways in a variety of settings. Transportation, shelter, tools, gadgets, generating stations, manufacturing are all different and special. There are further distinctions within each sector. The diversity is encyclopedic in scope. What we have to do, if we accept the task, is knock down several revered, beloved, habitual, valuable, and singular institutions simultaneously and replace them with intrinsically different alternatives whose consequences in practice we can not totally anticipate. It, like all human choice, will be a crap shoot.

Yet the logic of this change is convincing. The greater risk is with staying the same. The polar caps are melting, sea level is going up, the tundra is turning to mush, the winds are ablowing, the floods inundating, the deserts getting dryer and expanding. We all expect a big cauldron of a granddaddy tropical heat wave that will go on and on like Hell itself. We will need a modern Dante to describe it. Surely even enemies in their macabre dance of death must see this shared menace approaching.

The sociology of our situation requires an abstract description of the social order and process that are forming. A new ideology (understanding) based on technical measurements and observations is articulated and begins to be accepted by the people. To the extent that it governs and logically evokes necessary actions a mass movement develops. Eugene Ionescu’s play, “Rhinoceros,” sums up the down side of this experience, but here the angels, we hope, are on the side of the group.

A counter ideology representing the old way is always present. A front of contention and possible conflict is established. Its form and content varies according to actual situation. Leadership and organizing cadres become involved within the governing regimes and within the informal order of the people.

For global warming this is where we are. Now what are we to do?

I have to admit that I have been convinced by the anti-fossil fuel arguments. I am for the rapid conversion to alternate renewable fuels and to the equally rapid reduction of fossil fuel use (along with the associated production of greenhouse gases) toward zero. I am a rhino in what I think is a benign and necessary cause.

We are not giving up objectivity, only seeing its limit. The state of the future of our planet belongs to all of us. The observer is a participant. Think of it as a job of work for us all. So much to do, so little time.

There are three preliminary tasks:

(1) The incipient mass movement is there but I suspect it is not uniformly distributed. Knowledge takes hold as a segmented order. So the scientists and journalists must continue to grind out their packets of reality as they see it. Of course if the heating pattern and the understanding of it change we will want to hear that as well. The ideology should stay as close to the ecological and natural reality as we can approach.

(2) The move from ideology to action is hampered by obstacles. These are beliefs and cultural motifs in place that contradict, deny, minimize, confuse us as we try to find our way through. The contention with the pro-fossil fuel industry and lobby is found in this gray area. Complexity, half-truths, omitted facts get into the discussion. Sometimes we all seem to be on the same side. Exposing and clearing these blocks to action is the job for the intellectual, the critic, and the activist sociologist. The objective is to clear the runway for takeoff.

(3) The movement to end the greenhouse effect that we are supposing (with some conviction) supports global warming takes the form of a division of labor. Specialty engineers, activists, participants in each institutional sector are the cadre representatives of the whole (the rest of us.) Their jobs are to find and introduce the best ways to reduce greenhouse emissions in the short term and to eliminate them in the long while maintaining the necessary and essential functions the fossil fuels had been supporting. In the short term, for example, the lighter hybrid car and the more efficient and lighter gasoline powered cars with vastly improved mileage per gallon of fuel would seem an advance over the heavier gasoline guzzlers.

The recognition that we are together, that our positive individual acts contribute to a larger whole, and that with coordination we can exercise our efforts in several directions at once will be salutary in itself.

I feel better already.

More on this topic in our next post.