“Nature can
be conquered if we can but to find her weak side” said James Watt, the man
whose steam engine invention, in 1776, gave a jumpstart to this race that eventually
leads to ending the life (as we know it) on our planet.
Eager as we
are, it didn’t take us too long to find the Nature’s weak spot: the human greed.
The systematic exploitation of this nature’s weakness has lead us to have 85
people controlling more than half of the entire world population’s wealth. Unfortunately,
the trail of their fortune is stained by fossil fuel and CO2 and it is hard
to imagine them stepping of the path that led them to create this immense fortune
without a really, really, really good reason.
One of the
reasons could be the social pressure pushing the governments to adapt drastic
measures that put an end on fossil fuel dependence and switch to green energy. Unfortunately,
the way the system works today, it is hard to expect that the politicians who in
a few years of being elected are more concerned of getting reelected and pay
back the money they got from the lobby’s to get elected, than serving the will
of people by whose vote they came to power in the first place.
Another reason
may come from outside the political system and it has to do with the individual
power of will to change the life style that foments the idea of the infinite growth
and consume.
Simply by applying
any nature’s law anyone can understand that the infinite growth is in the
absolute contradiction with the finite resources the planet has to offer. Of
course, applied to an Excel chart this contradiction is easily ignored by
fabricating theories sustained on what we came to believe to be a natural
resource, but it is not.
I mean money.
It is why
the change must come from finding back the harmony between the nature and the
human nature. And this can be done by changing the incentives that drive
our motivation and shape our character.
It can be
done by understanding that money is not the root of harmony.
It can be
done by switching on to the evolved brain that I wrote in the previous post.
This brain knows that the environmental protection lies in the core of all the
major challenges the humanity is facing. One of this challenges is the fast growing gap in
social inequality.
In order to
prevent the Planet from collapsing we need to reduce the emission of carbon
dioxide to around 10% a year. This would mean pulling the brake on a steaming
productivity that pumps up our GDP's.
And now the
western cynicism says “OK we are ready. We can pull the break but we won’t do
so until the undeveloped and developing countries to do the same”.
This would
work if our starting positions were the same. But after centuries of
pumping up the CO2 into the atmosphere, while these countries’ economies were
still vastly based on agriculture and low energy consume trade, we can’t ask to
be treated equally.
It would be
as if a group of us would have thrown a banquet full of everything. At the end of
it we would have invited a group of friends to come for a coffee and when the
bill comes we ask them to split it equally. It would be wrong and if there was
any decency in us even the coffee should be on us for a mere fact of making
than suck up our smoke.
The
contribution these countries had to global warming is insignificant compared to
the one made by western countries. Even the todays champion of CO2 emission,
China’s contribution, seen from the historic perspective is insignificant do to
the fact that it has been only few decades ago that they started to smoke up
their skies. And still most of the effects of global warning are not related to
their factories but to the shipping and using of the products they ensemble to
be sold in the West.
It is why
the sacrifice we must make can’t be equal. It must be just. The West must give
an example, help the undeveloped to come out of poverty and set a new paste
towards a new cycle where the only accumulation that would be worth admiration
and respect would be the memories of love, growing and sharing, which
eventually are the universal. Because none of the 85 richest people on Earth will get to carry with
him/her not a single $,€ or gold out of this life.
And that’s
living with harmon€y.
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