Ask Google or the Siri: “What are the solutions for climate change?”
And the results will most probably include the answers such as tree plantation, replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, buy an electric car, use less plastic, ride a bicycle for the short distances, etc.
Go to the climate rallies and you will hear the similar solutions being cried about and in very rare cases do they talk about degrowing the economy, which I think is the most effective mainstream solution being talked of.
There are many sectors in our economies that need not be there and there are many sectors that need not be as large as they are, but if you think about it honestly, you will recognize that even pushing for degrowth can’t save us from the catastrophe we are headed toward.
Why? First of all, for degrowth to become a reality, every nation in the world has to work toward it, even if a single country continues its fever of GDP growth, the degrowth model will collapse and we will continue our trajectory toward destruction. You might say that we can force all the governments to comply. Now that sounds quite revolutionary, but all these talks are nothing more than a mere mumbo jumbo when it’s known that most of the countries has failed in keeping their growth limits at least inside the boundaries set by Paris Climate Accord of 2015, let alone degrowing their economies.
If you really think that you can force the governments to follow your degrowth model, why not first force them to at least follow the Paris accord guidelines? But the truth is that the governments can literally move out of this accord whenever they want, like the US did under the Trump administration, so what makes you think that your degrowth model will be followed till the end of eternity?
I do not doubt the efficacy of the degrowth model, but tell me honestly: Is it possible in a world where everyone is addicted to consumption? Even if you think you can force it upon the world one day, do you think you can do it before we hit the point of no return, which we are quickly approaching?
Be realistic. Don’t try to come up with an ideal answer.
And the same goes with the cult of renewable energy. Again, I am not saying that renewable energy is bad, but I want you to think in realistic terms.
How fast do you think that the entire world’s grid can be replaced by the renewable energy? However fast you think, the climate change is happening faster than that.
How is it possible that we do not discuss tree plantation as being marketed as a solution? People literally think that the damage that we have done to our environment can be recovered if we just plant trees. Experiment it with your family members, ask them how we can prevent the phenomena like global warming, and we all know what’s going to come from their side.
“Plant trees, son. They can easily absorb the carbon dioxide we emit.”
Again, I am not against planting trees. I am against the narrative that says we can transcend the climate catastrophe either by simply planting the trees ourselves or funding the organizations that work in this regard.
Let’s do the numbers: A tree can absorb approximately 1 ton of CO2 over the time period of 40 years, while an average human activity releases about 40 billion tons of the same greenhouse gas per year.
“This means we would theoretically have to plant 40 billion trees every year, then wait for decades to see any positive effect. By the time 40 years had passed, the trees we had originally planted would only cancel out the increased CO2 levels today,” writes CO2Meter.
Tree plantation will help in reducing the impact of climate change as much as the drop of water would help quench the thirst of someone who hasn’t drunk water for a full day in the hot summer. Sure, a drop of water would help the thirsty in a tiny way, but under no circumstances can that be called as an overall solution in itself.
It’s dangerous when people don’t consider climate destruction as a thing, but it’s even more dangerous when people are taking the least effective ways to tackle the problem as big as climate change and start thinking of themselves to be some kind of “climate warriors.”
It’s not dangerous to plant trees but it’s dangerous when people develop the sense of moral superiority and start playing the blame-game.
“I am doing my bit to save the planet by planting trees. But my neighbor is so irresponsible, he never planted a single tree. Look at me, I have planted hundreds of trees because I’m quite sincere toward my responsibility as a human.”
Who will tell him that planting trees to stop the breakdown of climate is like trying to stop the fired bullet with a fishnet?
We are ready to invest billions of dollars in the tree planting schemes but we don’t want to have confrontation with the reality of the so-called solutions or with the actual solutions like having one less child or an adopted child, because that would hurt our fragile egos.
People say that less awareness about the rampant onslaught of the climate change over the planet and humanity is the only barrier in tackling this monster. They say that this monster thrives on the lack of awareness, and we can weaken it if we can tell more and more people about how climate change is very likely to end the human civilization.
I disagree, not with the attempts to raise awareness but with the attempts to raise awareness of the problem without putting the light on the worthlessness of the mainstream solutions being carried out, and the latter is what’s happening around us.
Talking about climate change is useless as long as you are not simultaneously talking about the phoniness of the trending solutions, because if you convince someone of the realness of the problem at hand without enlightening him about the fakeness of the presented formulas, the chances are that he will be found promoting those fake solutions while the situation continues to get out of hand.
During the past decades, we have raised a lot of awareness, but the monster continues to get larger and larger because that raised awareness doesn’t take into account the awareness about the “solutions” being fake. Even if all of the 8 billion in this world join the climate fight, the Grim Reaper would still keep tightening its yoke around the neck of humanity because a bigger chunk of the billions will be involved in the things like recycling, tree plantation, ditching plastic bags, electric cars, etc.
Yes, raise the awareness about the problem at hand, but that’s not the end of story. You have to simultaneously raise the awareness about the bogus nature of the mainstream solutions. The job doesn’t finish at convincing the populace about the climate change, it starts there.
Apart from not helping the climate, these “solutions” give the climate change deniers the most credible reason to remain climate deniers. Much of their reasons surrounding their denial of climate change come from the ineffectiveness of the solutions being implemented. They often bring forward the failure of mainstream climate solutions to tackling the climate problem as a proof that climate change is a hoax, which is like saying, “Your cancer is a hoax because the medicine you are being given is not ending it.”
It’s clear as bell that almost all of the proposed solutions do nothing other than wasting money, time, and energy. Instead of at least slowing down, we are speeding up toward the ultimate collapse even after decades of campaigns against fossil fuels, plastic bags, or after decades of campaigns for tree plantation, buying “carbon-negative products”, going vegan, etc. Things like these certainly help but only up to a certain point and they should be treated as such.
But the so-called “climate activists” have no other “solutions” in their guidebook other than the ones that have been failing from the day one. It might not be wrong to say that the biggest hurdle to a world beyond climate change are the “climate warriors” themselves. They not only preach the solutions that won’t fix the issue in any meaningful way, they not only give people the sense that they are “doing their bit,” but they also strengthen the positions of climate deniers by continuously being ignorant.
Almost all of the ways presented as a “solution” to prevent the humanity and the biosphere from drowning are nothing more than a mere virtue-signaling. They can get you followers, likes, or even a Nobel Prize, but they will never get you a world in which climate change belongs to the history textbooks.
We are not actually opposing our trajectory toward apocalypse; we are just talking about it to get some dopamine hits.
That much I can confidently say looking at the present scenarios.
If your house is burning now, you would not sit and start thinking about the ways you can save your house because the fire won’t wait for your ideal solution to become a reality.
The correct approach is to do the most effective and realistically thing possible in the present moment, which we will discuss in the next article.
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Fantastic post. Something I would like to add as to maybe why the real solutions to climate change are not defended by governments and most climate activists is because, at least during the first years, there would be an overwhelming number of unemployed citizens due to, as you said, the shutdown of all useless sectors of our economy and the reduction of many others.
In a society like ours (I live in Brazil, by the way, but the thinking is the same as in the USA), people are taught, since childhood, that not having a job/career equals not having meaning, you become worthless not only to the eyes of society but to yourself. This would likely lead to an increase in depression, suicide and criminality.
The solution to that would be, of course, goverments offering free university/training in the useful sectors of the economy (healthcare, energy, food production, ecology, etc) to all those recently unemployed, but all that requires massive work and investment, something current governments are not willing to do in order to deal with a problem that, in their opinion, still lies in the horizon.