Five years ago I wrote out a short conversation I had in Silicon Valley, "Doug, would you rather we continue as we are now and collapse in fifteen years… or try to change now … and collapse now?” I think this is where many people are. It translates into a desire to have a few more years of this life and let the future collapse.
We can see humanity in three groups; an increasingly smaller but still large group that has little connection with the discussions. A second group, still growing, wants to keep things going because the risk of change is so great, and a smaller but increasingly larger third group who wants to try something because they see the facts of climate change closing in on them (us). The great hope of the majority is that we change without notice, leaving the economy and its policies, winners and losers, as is - driving the same car from the same cooled and heated house to the same workplace and to the same well-stocked supermarket.
The trouble is a majority of humanity wants this approach, holding on to the idea that tech and the experts can and should save us, doing things like replacing the current fossil fuel regime with an all-electric one without any analysis of how that electricity will be made: cost of materials and energy to make that new system.
The result of serious thinking has to be that we are likely doomed, either by heat death, starvation, or social unrest. The momentum of collapse is here and we are in it, and we are, because we blindly accepted the devil's choice of market economics, rather than doing the hard work to develop an economy that works for most and manages nature to be itself. The cause: We kept our eye on the road ahead, not thinking about the terrain it had to go through. We were smug, even willfully unconscious.
If we keep talking hope we will maintain that unthinking state of mind. One example: universities are opening new climate-oriented departments and institutes. But the underlying premise is jobs for students an projects for professors and keep tuition flowing. This is part of\ the green growth movement that thinks it can grow the economy and keep making the rich richer while cutting fossil fuel use, not part of rethinking from basic physics and requisite social organization. Too many people living of off of fossil fuel extraction and. all the self-serving dysfunction that could be financed. Anyone who has the education, access to the tech and an income has been a benefactor of this system which. helped us while marginalizing the rest. We used to think that we are in a system that paid off the top ten percent, trickled down to the next 600 % and that was tolerable (TINA). The game has shifted. The winners are a smaller and narrowing percentage. And we realize that the game, seen as about money, is really about culture and the quality of life.
\
Money, culture and quality of life. I’ve been camping around the country since June and I can clearly see this. This is the way to really see America and Americans. There’s even a big disgusting disparity in camping. Those who are doing it small and small footprint and those who are big/huge and thoughtlessly leaving their big footprints.
As some MLB color commentators preach, "Batters and pitchers all gotta make adjustments..." I'd add only, "Adjustments, possibly even daily but definitely mid- and long-term." Thanks again, Douglass.