Harmon€y

“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.