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Illegitimate Prosperity
Our prosperity was based on unsustainable means, it was never legitimate, cheap energy fueled it and now we pay the price.
Date: 3/22/2009 1:46:54 PM ( 15 y ) ... viewed 2874 times Illegitimate Prosperity
It is not real, in that it can all just disappear in an instant.
Thats what a person has if they get their wealth by robbing banks. At any moment, the police can swoop in and arrest you based on the video evidence of the banks' security cameras. You can be found out, your crime can be exposed, and then you realise that all you had was just "pooftah". It was real, but not real.
Or the person who has a steady stream of money that they get by making several smaller holdups, of convenience stores for example, where the next one might be the last one where the clerk [or more likely the owner] beats you badly with a baseball bat and when sitting in a jail cell your bruises remind you of the lie you were living.
Our entire society is like that. We have "illegitimate wealth".
One reason that this is true is that our wealth cannot be sustained. We have just seen one of the scenarios unfold in front of our eyes with the "credit crisis", where big money people just get too greedy, and greed is something that is not going to go away but regulations might be able to reduce some of the excesses.
There was also some institutional reasons for saying that our wealth is not, and never was, sustainable - such as the fact that the US dollar has been used as the "de facto global currency" for almost 100 years now and that status brough Americans and their biggest trading partners some unearned wealth. The cost of certain goods sold in the USA was reduced because of the effective subsidy of "US global hegemony" on everything that the USA consumes.
But the BIGGEST reason, the entire reason I am writing this, is that the wealth of North America and most of the developed world WAS BUILT ON CHEAP ENERGY. Oil, coal, natural gas. Fossil fuels, which are that form of stored carbon that we are now releasing into the atmosphere in a huge hurry; what took millions of years to accumulate underground is being put into the air in just 200 years! It is upsetting the balance of life on planet Earth, and therefore our prosperity was illegitimate. Not sustainable. We are going to die off in massive numbers because of what we have done with carbon. We are now too late to change away from that course. 10 years ago might have been soon enough to reduce emissions and thereby avoid catastrophe, but we didn't do it. When the tally of the damages from the Bush2 Presidency are added up, it will be obvious that the greatest damage came from the "global warming denial machine" that he assissted, along with the oil corporations.
The prosperity we want to think we will get back when this credit crisis has ended will not be possible anymore. Renewable energy COULD have put us into a safe zone if we had enough of it installed now, by starting 10 or 15 years ago when science first agreed that global warming and climate change were real. Now we are going to be saddled with the ongoing, and ever-deepening, expenses of dealing with climate change. We will have to build bigger and bigger barriers to ocean level rise, the ports that now handle most of the global trade will be under water. We could have used that wealth to create renewable energy capacity, and we will still have to do that, but with all the extra expenses we will create too much debt. The economy will never be the same again.
We will be dealing with "climate refugees", a situation that will make the holocaust look like... I better not say it due to the risk of offending those victims, but suffice to say there will be BILLIONS of people facing starvation and they won't just let it happen without at least trying to save their lives and the lives of their children. Would YOU just agree to sit still with your crying children and starve, on the basis that "we cannot all have food, so I won't spoil the party for the others that can be fed"?
All of these scenarios will become realities by 2030, maybe as soon as 2015. Thats right - just SIX years from now, the oceans could rise a meter as the slipping Greenland Ice Sheets slide into the Atlantic... they are allready moving 10 times faster than they were 5 years ago. The storm surges could wipe out a lot of usefull farmlands in one bad season - one big splash of salty ocean waters wrecks farmland for decades. Drought, and the ironic flooding that often occurs with it, has allready wiped out Australia's crops for several seasons, and several other places around the world have also lost crops due to drought and flooding over the past few years, and "it is only going to get worse".
"It is only going to get worse" - because our rate of emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is still increasing. We are emitting FOUR TIMES as much CO2 now as in 1990, the target year for stability. Emissions are not yet stable, much less reduced to where it needed to be by now, the global warming effects are accellerating now. Feedback loops, where "warming causes more warming" from things like the melting Arctic permafrost that gives up huge amounts of methane.
And now you are allready bored. So our prosperity isn't real, never was. Heard that, move on. Okay, I will end this here.
PS - please read Gwynne Dyer's book "Climate Wars" for referance next time you want to deny that global warming is real, or that it won't be so bad.
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