Carbon tunnel vision
Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”
The dismal reality is that green energy will save not the complex web of life on Earth but the particular way of life of one domineering species.
Christopher Ketcham
It isn’t climate change that caused a 69 percent loss in total wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018, according to a World Wildlife Fund study published this year. The cause is too many people demanding too much from ecosystems, or human overshoot of the biophysical carrying capacity of the Earth.
The crux of the problem is that mainstream environmentalists have siloed climate change as a phenomenon apart from the broad human ecological footprint, separate from deforestation, overgrazing of livestock, megafauna kill-off, collapsing fisheries, desertification, depleted freshwater, soil degradation, oceanic garbage gyres, toxification of rainfall with microplastics, and on and on — the myriad biospheric effects of breakneck growth.
Climate change is “but one symptom of an environmentally dysfunctional system of constant growth of economies and populations,” ecologist William Rees, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, told me.
Solar and wind occupy much larger acreage than oil and gas, requiring networks of roads and utility corridors, transportation and transmission capacity that doesn’t exist today. Environmental lawyer Michael Gerrard, founder and director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, estimates that the U.S. needs a tripling or even quadrupling of transmission capacity — up from the 160,000 miles of high-voltage power lines now in operation — to move all the new green energy to consumers, who are mostly in cities, from the remote places where it’s harvested.
Between the Devil and the Green New Deal | Commune
We cannot legislate and spend our way out of catastrophic global warming.
There is no solution to the climate crisis which leaves capitalism’s compulsions to growth intact. And this is what the Green New Deal, a term coined by that oily neoliberal, Thomas Friedman, doesn’t address. It thinks you can keep capitalism, keep growth, but remove the deleterious consequences. The death villages are here to tell you that you can’t. No roses will bloom on that bush.
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