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An incomplete meditation
We face many issues at the same time. All projects have impacts outside their own border that project managers want to externalize - meaning it is someone else's problem. Take shifting homes from gas to electric: major need for materials to deal with remodeling, ducts, piping, control panels, getting rid of propane tanks and gas lines. These new work-loads take people , energy and materials, workers need transportation and to be fed (that is not an externality).
Producing all these takes lots of energy which should be electricity, but we are nowhere near that yet, and the time frame looks far out (failure of infrastructure with rising temperatures is rarely taken into the accounts and may curtail the transition). The result is that the gas to electricity shift will lead to a rise in co2 and hence increasing temperatures. It is counter productive to undertake a project that will have unanalyzed side effects. In order to avoid these we need to think of common causes.
Temperature,
demographics (*numbers, generational and place),
pollutions
Culture
Land and water use
Capitalism (along with food and land use, my choice)
Power
technology
Religion (failure after Westphalia. Multiple fragments each trying to be a civilization.)
Failure of government
War
Perhaps a spirit of competition is the root we must all change. But notice how many “green” projects are motivated by competition and the desire to win.
We must take a system wide approach simultaneously with our tactical projects, or we will be working at cross purposes with others.
One that is important is that all new economic activity creates relationships and the parties to those relationships want them to succeed, But those relations, cross person and cross- institutional connection's - are, by being held on to, become part of the glue holding the existing society together that, all together, makes change difficult.
Coda: it is clear that neither a focus on small projects nor on the large will work without traumas. We, with population, rode up the hockey stick created by coal and then oil with increasing population being the link that drove it upwards. We are out on a limb that will break. My project, uniting food and habitat with land reform and a new culture of cooperation, along with many other community projects, faces a real challenge with the ubiquitous presence of guns and the political shift toward populist, legitimate but badly focused, anger.