"World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency" — recommendations living in La-La Land?

© 2019 Peter Free

 

06 November 2019

 

 

There is something about well-meaning, but unrealistic people . . .

 

. . . that drives practically minded folks up the wall.

 

 

For example — recommendations from the "World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency"

 

Those suggestions are so behaviorally and culturally extreme, as to defy possibility of implementation.

 

The authors urge humanity to:

 

 

"leave remaining stocks of fossil fuels in the ground"

 

"reduce the emissions of short-lived climate pollutants"

 

"protect and restore Earth's ecosystems"

 

"[eat] mostly plant-based foods while reducing the global consumption of animal products . . . especially ruminant livestock"

 

"shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality"

 

and

 

"strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates . . . . make family-planning services available to all people . . . . achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all"

 

© 2019 William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, and William R Moomaw, World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,  BioScience, biz088, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz088 (05 November 2019) (excerpts)

 

 

In other words

 

We (evidently) hope to instantaneously change hundreds of thousands of years of human mental, emotional and tribal evolution overnight:

 

 

no heat and light (for most people)

 

no distance-capable transportation

 

no polluting human traces

 

no meat

 

no greed

 

no tribalism

 

no kids

 

 

Consider two caveats

 

Overpopulation is the core problem. Humans breed like rabbits.

 

When they don't, as in Japan, national leaders worry about the economic effects of aging populations and the need to import workers.

 

And so on, in permutations, in many other places.

 

In a related vein, if you eat meat and I do not — why should you give that pleasure up (and put livestock farmers and ranchers out of work), just so that I can add a metaphorically 10th resource-consuming kid to my herd?

 

The list of hypotheticals is easy to expand.

 

 

The moral? — Screaming wildly is not going to accomplish climate-soothing

 

Instead, we need practically minded and persuasive people, with culturally doable ideas, to lead.

 

It is not that societies cannot change. It is that they cannot change virtually every aspect of their fundamental natures so quickly.

 

Given the inertia-laden human psyche, painful climatic effects are reasonably certain to take place.

 

As a culturally aware pragmatist, I would spend my time preparing for those, rather than unrealistically recommending the unachievable.

 

We are planetary prisoners of our species' mentality.