Jonathan Schofield
#climateDiary
We’ve constructed a culture which venerates something we’ve made up – money – and ignores something we’re made of – carbon.
Which makes us less intelligent than frogs.
- - -
“As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.”
https://archive-srel.uga.edu/outreach/ecoviews/ecoview071223.htm
MarjorieR
@urlyman in mitigation I did spend my last 6 years (2009-15) working at DECC trying to improve the UK's response to climate change: I was modelling the UK's energy and emissions and how these could be reduced by policy. Needless to say soon after I retired and with the 2015 Tory election victory the department was abolished and a lot of the good policies initiatives (home insulation, Zero carbon new homes) were then also minimised or postponed.
Jonathan Schofield
…* The “nearly” bit derives from The Limits to Growth report being published in 1972: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
I’d just turned 8 years old and so was not on top of it.
Although I’d still not heard of that report, I had an inkling when I read Small is Beautiful just over a decade later.
But the pull of bullshit was too strong for the next 2 decades. After that, I started making tokenistic changes, but here I am still doing a bullshit job in a bullshit society.
I’m stupider than a frog
MarjorieR
@urlyman I read Limits to Growth when I was studying at University. As a BA Technological Economist I found it's feedback model approach pretty persuasive. It predicted that with exponential growth we would start to run out of (economically extractable) resources within my lifetime. It's big ommision was fossil fuelled CO2 emissions and the consequent feedback cycle screwing with climate. Needless to say I was being sponsored at Uni by BP and then joined the NCB when I graduated. Slow learner.
Jonathan Schofield
It’s pretty obvious our mainstream notions of the path to #netZero aren’t going to work.
They’ve been very much not working nearly* all my life and I’m 60 next month.
So the question is, when do we start behaving more intelligently than frogs?
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/111764803381513650
Jonathan Schofield
Carbon is the base unit present in every form of life on Earth, “from the thin green smear covering the crust to the bottom of its deep blue oceans.
Money is an abstraction invented 5,000 years ago by a 300,000-year-old species.
…
Humans have created our pan, our hob and gas. We’re not drowning in money, but money is providing the gas that’s heating the pan.”
https://seethroughnews.org/money-its-a-gaslight-climate-change-finance
Jonathan Schofield
“Seeing money as the solution to all our problems is a form of capitalist gaslighting.
View the world through money goggles, and they filter out all the non-financial wavelengths. All problems appear as Money Problems. All solutions appear as Money Solutions.
…
If three decades of financial tinkering has resulted in more CO2, it’s delusional to gamble our future on marginally better tinkering.”
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