We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Geo-engineering: global warming quick fix?

by Vivien Langford from Green Left

The author reports on a lecture at Melbourne University of the noted author Clive Hamilton in which he gave a recent history of the "research and investment in geo-engineering solutions to global warming." His most recent book is entitled Affluenza, Scorcher and Requiem for a Species.
This book is about why we have ignored those warnings [about global warming], and why it may now be too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth—our capacity to reason and our connection to Nature—and those that, in the end, have won out—our greed, materialism and alienation from Nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures.
In his lecture entitled, “The Return of Dr Strangelove” he reviews the recent efforts to solve the climate crisis through the geo-engineering of nature by...
investors, such as Richard Branson and Bill Gates, who have a vested interest in business-as-usual growth, but also seem to have a vision of themselves as saving the planet in a unilateral way — a messiah complex.

Hamilton described these men as “so out of sync with modern attitudes to nature that they seem like a throwback”. 
Hamilton's view is that such efforts are extremely reckless with many unforeseen consequences and explains that...
...the world’s apparent inability to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is due to the profitability of fossil fuel use, it is probable that, rather than buying time for such a transition, geo-engineering would become an incentive for business to continue polluting as usual