Thursday 4 October 2012

The solution to climate change: gruesome catastrophes

Everybody is harping on about sequential tropical storms and the rising water level. I have something scarier to report. I live in an arid country, a large part of which is desert. A couple of years back it rained every day for four weeks. Now it snows in the desert. That’s scary.

I loathe litter, particularly glass and especially those bits of plastic wrapper that people deposit in my driveway. Although I smoke like a coal-fired power station, I find smog revolting. I stay away from aerosols, mainly because they produce painful inflammations in my armpits. I hate unnecessary cruelty to animals with a passion and I don’t approve of fur whatsoever.

But I am not a tree hugger. In fact, I wear leather shoes. I have a special bond with my refrigerator. And when I look at an antelope in the wild, my mind inevitably wanders to the point where I wonder how it would taste, and if it would require a marinade?

That being said, there seems to be cause for concern. The environment seems to have it in for the human race. God help us all.

Everybody is harping on about sequential tropical storms and the rising water level. I have something scarier to report. I live in an arid country, a large part of which is desert. A couple of years back it rained every day for four weeks. Now it snows in the desert. That’s scary.

I am told that the earthquakes and tsunamis are probably due to shifting of the tectonic plates, brought about by melting of the polar ice and subsequent shifting of weight on the plates. This also seems to imply more volcanic activity somewhere along the way. Taking mudslides in the mountains into account as well, I have had to abandon my plan of buying cans of beans and heading to the hills to avoid the rising tide and tsunamis.

Apparently global warning leads to death by natural disaster, psychopathic weather patterns, radio-active sunburn, famine and disease, as well as the extreme aggravation of infestations of self-righteous environmentalists who can’t comprehend why nobody has the time to convert the back yard into a feel-good organic vegetable garden capable of feeding the hungry masses of the world.

That being said, it feels as if I should go out and hug a tree if I had one tall and wide enough in my garden to hug, but I don’t think that it would help at this point. Somehow it feels as if we may well have reached a Malthusian point of no return.

Given the desire of poor people across the world to own freezers stocked with environmentally unfriendly microwave meals and cars that have the same effect on nature as Hannibal Lecter on a room full of overweight arts patrons, it will be a while yet before we can even stop the impetus and figure out exactly how far back was the point of no return.

There is a difficult paradox in the situation. Take the example of refrigerators, one of the culprits cited by environmentalists. (Remember the CFCs and the hole in the ozone layer?) Refrigerators were a turning point in civilization. Their advent meant that people could store food easily and didn’t need to haggle with the grocer every other day. Refrigerators also substantially reduced the gastric threat of a three course meal. Billions still don’t have refrigerators. Can we blame these people for wanting them? And can we deny them that comfort?

Now consider the impact of the car on civilisation. See what I mean?

The problem with an environmentally friendly lifestyle and civilisation is that it comes at an almost unmanageable cost. The simple life, a life that is one with nature, means becoming subservient to nature once again. Those who still live in nature, for instance the non-urbanised poor, speak eloquently of the charms of the things we take for granted, the products of industrialization.

It is easy enough to blame the Americans, Chinese and Indians. The north has taken consumer materialism to surreal new heights, and elevated the price of an oil barrel to a strange sexual fetish. South America has burned away huge swathes of rain forests. But we need to blame ourselves as well, if only for playing along.

Actually there isn’t a solution that we can implement, only a series of half measures. The solution lies in the way forward, as nature brings us back into line, with gruesome catastrophes and the attrition of disease and famine. Unfortunately, it is the most poor who are going to get it worst.

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