We’ve never had it to start with!

“If we get 2 degrees of warming, then it doesn’t matter what we do with our emissions, runaway climate change becomes inevitable.”

And what the heck does THAT mean? The earth and humanity have survived all manner of global warmings. Put a sock in it, panicmongers!

The real danger is wasting our remaining resources on green gadgetry. Bah humbug.

Claire, you got it right. Certainty is what gets us every time, and you bet there are people all lined up to profit from the coming “green” bubble.

but we had to leave the UK to do it, as uk planning laws dont allow people to live on their land.
land reform is what is needed to offset peak oil

the future may mean less of some things – plastic crap, stupid jobs, stress, living off someone elses labour – but if we start making the changes properly now, we may find that we gain more of the things that really matter – healthy food, excercise, community, free time!

unfortunately though, we are perhaps in a bind, as switching to a land based society will take energy and worsen climate, so most of us probably have to make the best of where we are now?

My DH and I have reduced our natural gas consumption by 62% compared to our 1990 consumption. We’ve reduced electricity use by 37% compared to 1990. This is with all mainstream technology. Our house looks like any other. No one can tell we’ve done anything till I tell them our electric or natural gas bill. We still have a fridge, hot water heater, central AC even. At this point, we still use them.

To get where we are now, we sacrificed, in the sense that we spent the two inheritances we’ve received to date on very energy-efficient appliances and on a very thorough program to seal all air leaks, seal and insulate ductwork, and add lots and lots of insulation. That was instead of spending it on “something for ourselves” as mass media advertising would have had us do. In some sense it hasn’t really been a sacrifice, though, not when our last month’s electric bill was $22 and our last month’s natural gas bill was $115 (both very low for this area for wintertime). We do sacrifice a little since we keep the thermostat at 65 degrees during the day (58 at night). We also use AC less than most, but not none. We live in Missouri, where summers are reliably hot and humid and most people run AC for three or four months. We usually run ours for 3 to 6 weeks depending on the summer.

But I think we still have to do a lot more, and the next bit will be much harder. We have to reduce driving more than we have, maybe to almost zero, difficult in our large metro area where many of our friends, and our Zen Center, are 20 miles from home. I can stand loss of AC as the basement stays cool, but loss of heat in the winter … we’ll glass in the south facing front porch and that will help at times, but I will miss central heating a whole lot, and central hot water more. We’ve camped without refrigeration, but right now we depend on it as our cooking and eating style involves making enough for leftovers. But if I didn’t know how bad things are now and how much worse they are likely to get, I wouldn’t be able to push myself to make these last choices (keep reminding me I need to!). The first set weren’t nearly the sacrifices that the last set will be. I think Sharon’s point is a good one: unless we let people know the enormity of the situation and acknowledge that it will be very difficult to make the changes it looks like we need to make, no one will want to sign on. I think she argues too – certainly it’s in D & A – that we gain some things as well with the sacrifice. So let’s be as honest as we can be, yet remember to offer that some good comes out of this even for us – less money spent on wasteful stuff, hopefully closer friendships, family relations, and community ties.

In the end, Gaia has the last say. So we can also acknowledge we aren’t in control, we don’t know for sure what will happen, whatever we do or don’t do. One of the things we need to give up is certainty. Our hold on life, our place in the universe, is far more precarious than we like to think. With lots of cheap energy, it was easy to think we had control. Remembering in our bones and being that we don’t have control, really getting in touch with our fragility, may be the most difficult and most necessary thing for us to do. We don’t know what the future will bring, but we still need to do what the moment needs from us.

Most of the damage has already been done, we are apparently already past a tipping point, and the global climate is going to change in a very unfavorable way.

It is the old Prisoner’s Dilemma non-zero-sum game. If the whole world cooperates together, then we might just have a real chance to at least mitigate. However, the temptation is to leave it to everyone else, continue with BAU in your own country, and reap the profits, while everyone else is stuck with the sacrifice. In non-zero-sum games, everyone usually loses. Absent an effective world government (which isn’t going to happen), whatever is done will be done by too few, and thus be too little, too late.

At this point, we had best just focus on preventing our extinction as a species, which is starting to look like a real possibility. I don’t know how many species or ecosystems we can remove before the whole web of life collapses, but we had better find out, and do whatever it takes to make sure that we at least level off well short of that point. As Samuel Johnson said, the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight wonderfully concentrates one’s mind. Maybe the prospect of extinction will have a similar effect on humankind’s collective consciousness.

Sharon