Sunday, June 22, 2014
Earlier this year I read an article my friend Craig posted on Facebook. The article is about the end of the world as we know it...you know, some light reading. And so it inspired me to write something of a science fiction piece. Consider the following my own visualization of the nightmare scenario that may descend upon us within my own lifetime.
The World of 2032
Looking back it's so obvious that the signs of immense change were all around us. Unfortunately we as a species were careless. Or at least those in power were predominantly careless. Too often in human history the ones most able to effect meaningful change are least inclined to do so. Is it human nature? Perhaps it is. We have millennia of evidence to support that idea. Anyhow, as has happened too many a time the voices of reason, science and discernment were drowned out by the larger number of shrill, paranoid voices advocating a medieval (meaning limited) way of thinking and responding to a very modern era problem. In short, we replayed that iconic moment when Nero was said to have fiddled while Rome burned. Only this time the whole of the planet was effectively burning.
We had been fouling our collective nest for decades. And we lived in a fantasy world of delusion...we imagined that we could somehow successfully mitigate and even 'adapt' to the nightmare we were sowing in the atmosphere above us. Again I am using the collective 'We' as a bit of a gross over-generalization. There were many who thought very clearly back in the last decades of what we now see was relative stability compared to what we live with now. Back then our forebears had what many now perceive to be overly cute and arrogant terms to describe our way of relating to that collective nest known as planet Earth. A term especially maligned by the world of our present age is 'carbon management'. We were unleashing a genie out of a bottle we could not put back in. We could proclaim we were managing the problem all we wanted but we might as well have been tossing a glass of water in a raging bonfire.
The media of two decades ago in the United States played an important role in leading us to the point we are at now. To be perfectly honest the priorities of those days were completely out of whack. Whether it was programs with strange names like Honey Booboo or media called 'Fox News' Americans were sorely confused at best and paranoid at worst. They had lost touch with the most fundamental realities that a sustainable society must attend to. America became the New Rome of the modern era.
Societies prone to distraction aren't likely to be very sustainable. This is another lesson that can be gleaned from what unfolded in the last few decades. The 2010s were the decade in which it became clear the United States was not on a very sustainable course. Prominent domestic issues and the way a citizenry deals with them reveal much about the moral compass of a nation.
One big issue in the 2010s in America was gun violence. Shootings of innocent people (children and adults alike) became increasingly commonplace...or at least that was the perception. As the incidents frequently featured young, deeply troubled men it was a commonly held conclusion (and rightly so...to a degree) that the issue of mental health care and child development needed some close examination. But it was a complete farce to suggest that the problem of gun violence could be solved by addressing the health care system in general and mental health care for the young in particular alone. Young, highly alienated men can only do so much damage with their hands alone. Give them easy access to guns and it's an entirely different matter. When the American Congress failed to pass any substantive gun violence legislation whatsoever many Americans of all political persuasions began to have a growing feeling that something indeed was very wrong in America. But that had been made possible by many other bad policy choices. An exposition of these issues would be too long for my brief survey of the history of the first thirty years of the twenty-first century. Suffice it to say that a misunderstanding of the second amendment led many to make an overemphasis on their individual rights to the detriment of their local community's right to enjoy safety and stability.
Joblessness and insecurity also became a huge issue in America in the 2010s. The value of a college education became a matter of focus as no amount of skill and education seemed to be a guarantee of a stable job in many fields. As more young people came to doubt the value of investing in their own education a self-fulfilling prophecy began to unfold. As American workers became increasingly uncompetitive in the global marketplace it was only natural that more and more jobs would get off-shored to other nations. The low paying service economy jobs stayed behind because those are positions ideally suited to a workforce with a low level of education.
The United States also extended itself much too far abroad. In this way it also imitated the Roman Empire. Its wars of choice initially launched by the man now derisively called King Idiot (George W. Bush) began its inevitable decline. Later the nation's Congress became filled with adults who had the attention span and maturity of five year olds. Infighting and defense of their own voter base became more important than compromise. The center could only hold for so long. Eventually it all would inevitably collapse. But they kept putting bandaids on it for a long time...and smiling all along.
Other portions of the world fared better in the last two decades. Russia's annexation of Crimea provoked civil unrest and mistrust in the former Eastern European Soviet bloc nations for many years. Eventually, though at first it seemed so unlikely, a mass migration of people within the borders of Ukraine occurred. This resettlement of the people within Ukraine's borders was something akin to what happened between India and Pakistan in the 20th century. But eventually the region stabilized politically...at least for a while.
Russian hegemony and the growing impact of climate change gave the EU pause in regards to its energy policy. Its heavy dependence on its neighbor to the East led many nations to a renewed debate regarding the merits and challenges of energy independence. Though a new Cold War never developed, relations between Europe and Russia also never returned to the new normal that developed once the Soviet Union collapsed around the year 1990.
Southeast Asia was marked by massive chaos. This was due in large part to the menace of a rising ocean. Compared to the number of those displaced and lost within the state of Bangladesh alone the much reported disappearance of the Malaysian flight (and of course its passengers and crew) in early 2014 was a proverbial drop in the bucket. Having become a huge economy and influential player on the global scale of geopolitics China began to exert its influence more firmly in the region. Though China's military never invaded its neighbors the state nonetheless exerted significant clout with the power of its economy. Surpassing the United States of America China created mitigation technologies that at least somewhat slowed down the disastrous financial and human costs that inevitably resulted as the oceans gradually rose and continued to acidify. As America's influence continued to wane China's neighbors began to look to China as a source of stability, resources and international aid. Southeast Asia effectively became a large satellite region of China.
Japan never fully recovered from the shock of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in 2011. Despite the assistance of other developed nations the repair of the economic, social and environmental fabric of the Japanese nation proved to be an extremely financial and time intensive process. Japan became the East Germany of the 21st century. Those who know their history well will recall that a major industry of the former East Germany was its import of toxic waste from other states. After the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and Germany was reunified in 1990 it became apparent just how degraded East Germany had become as a result of this special 'industry'. The Japanese government never made an intentional policy choice to make toxic waste import a major economic driver . But it didn't need to. The steady poisoning of the Japanese nation by the contamination unleashed by Fukushima was the effective equivalent. Though the Japanese economy did eventually return to marginal growth in the late 2010s and early 2020s historians often nonetheless look back at Fukushima as marking the beginning of Japan's gradual decline in prominence on the world stage. And by 2025 it didn't much matter anyhow. By that point everyone throughout the world had become obsessed with the damage being done by a three atom molecule known as carbon dioxide.
The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted that the concentration of this heat trapping gas breached 400 parts per million near the end of 2013. This was a monumental occurrence. Never in modern human history had so much of the gas filled our planet's atmosphere. But the denial of its impact would continue for several more years.
The year 2019 is often seen as the year in which human impact upon the environment could no longer be denied. The year 2019 was the first year in which all ice cover disappeared during the Northern Hemisphere Summer. The exact date this occurred was August 26, 2019. Scientists across the planet were amazed. And finally, finally, many citizens of their respective nations were finding themselves amazed. Human beings managed to do in a mere two centuries what the planet itself had previously needed many, many millennia to do. We had fundamentally terraformed the planet...without even trying...too much.
By 2020 the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide had reached four-hundred fifteen parts per million. And then even more frightful things began to happen. Any atmospheric scientist knows that carbon dioxide is not the only gas known as a greenhouse gas. There are others. And some of these others are far more effective at trapping heat on a molecular level basis. Methane is a great example. And for many years prior to the 2020s there was concern that continued warming in the Northern Hemisphere Arctic would eventually potentially cause such a significant thaw in regions once ruled by permafrost that the methane content locked therein would suddenly begin to rise into the atmosphere above. And this indeed did happen. And then we had the peril of a vicious feedback loop suddenly upon us.
It only was a few years into the 2020s when it became much more clear just how incredibly quickly the behavior of the atmosphere would change as a result of the sudden spike in the concentration of methane within the atmosphere. And then, finally, the fundamental unsustainable foundational assumption of our fossil fuel powered global society became glaringly obvious. It's not a pretty thing when an entire civilization is shown the pathology inherent to its foundational structure in the equivalent of a geological nanosecond. We had to change. And we had to change quickly. If we didn't we risked making Earth a sister planet of Venus in more ways than it already was.
In 2023 a scandal erupted in the United States that rapidly accelerated the transformation of that nation. Irrefutable documentation was disclosed that provided new details about the terrorist attacks of 2001 that changed the focus of the United States' foreign policy. Back in 2001 most Americans could not yet 'connect the dots' because there simply was not enough evidence to do so. The next big dot came in 2014 when the United States House of Representatives passed an amendment that effectively prevented the Department of Defense from utilizing funds to address the national security impacts of climate change. The amendment, sponsored by Republican Representative David McKinley, contained the following language:
None of the funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to implement the U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nation’s Agenda 21 sustainable development plan or the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order.
To be fair there was resistance to what in hindsight can now be called such colossal stupidity. Other representatives (essentially the Democrats) noted the horrifying implication of the amendment. Representative Henry Waxman of California noted that "The McKinley amendment would require the Defense Department to assume that the cost of carbon pollution is zero." Meanwhile the Arctic was melting, California was enduring a historical drought and India was withering in a huge heat wave. The cost of carbon was rapidly accruing.
In 2023 it became public knowledge that the United States intelligence community had had incontrovertible evidence that terrorist attacks would specifically occur on September 11, 2001 several months before they took place. The attacks were allowed to take place for one primary reason. They were seen as an excellent opportunity for the country to justify the expansion of its military and surveillance infrastructure. But why would those within the United States government wish to do that? It was quite simple. The United States Department of Defense had been researching the security implications of climate change long before such research became public knowledge. And it was determined that a stronger security and military infrastructure would be essential to attempt to maintain order if and when the nation began to collapse under the weight of the impacts of the world's fossil fuel powered economy. In short, some of the conspiracy theorists were exonerated. Some of their worst fears had indeed come true.
The public outrage regarding the deceit perpetrated on the American people by their own government was immense. Some wanted to see something like medieval justice enacted; there were calls for the leaders of that time to be executed for their deceit. Thousands of Americans died in the wars the United States launched in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chaos in Iraq loomed large well into the 2010s. The scandal regarding the deeper story of September 11th also helped to bring about the downfall of the American Republican Party. But the damage had been done long ago. It proved extremely difficult to clean up the political, social and economic mess that had been gradually building for over two decades.
The United States military ultimately and finally withdrew from Afghanistan...in 2017. And unfortunately, despite the efforts of well meaning individuals as well as international aid organizations, the country shortly thereafter plunged back into the same conditions that had characterized it prior to the United States invasion in the 2000s. Despite growing Chinese hegemony nearby the chaos in Afghanistan proved a daunting policy nightmare for the entire region. And the United States' focus on Afghanistan caused it to ignore the more serious issues in neighboring Pakistan. In short, the United States made serious policy blunders both in its domestic affairs as well as abroad.
Transformational leaps in a society are often marked by periods of chaos in which the discourse of those with enough power to express their voices may become shrill, distorted, disoriented and highly disturbing. Europe went through a profound transformation as a result of the Black Death. In the twenty-first century we are undergoing something somewhat equivalent. Some derisively call what we inadvertently unleashed 'Carbon Death'.
It was only in the last ten years that the parasitic quality of the fossil fuel industry throughout the world became apparent. A very few people were being enriched in exchange for undermining the sustainability of the human 'adventure' in the long term. Earlier in this century (was it really only about two decades ago?) a noted economist by the name of Sir Nicolas Stern described climate change as 'a result of the greatest market failure that the world has seen.' We're just now starting to appreciate what this market failure has brought us. And it seems future generations may appreciate it even more. And I suspect whatever people follow us in the next hundred years are probably going to wonder how their forebears could have been so incredibly blind and stupid. Simply put...it was greed. It was shortsightedness. It was human self-absorption.
There is still some hope that levels of greenhouse gases within Earth's atmosphere may ultimately be stabilized. But to do so we have discovered...hopefully not too late...that de-carbonizing the economy of an entire planet is no small task. You don't put it on your 'To Do list' and expect to make much daily progress on it...at least not in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately the de-carbonization of the world economy is an immense task. Some call it "the fundamental evolutionary challenge to our species". A primary challenge has been simply dealing with people's collective thoughts about money, costs and the value of the future. As it became clear that Nicolas Stern was correct about global climate change representing the greatest market failure ever known the central question became this one: "How do we address the current and future costs of what greenhouse gases have done to our atmosphere and the planet as a whole?"
In essence, every time it seemed the solution to this global nightmare was 'not affordable' it became increasingly clear that it was our fundamental underlying assumptions about the validity of a world underpinned by money that were a major part of the problem. Put even more concisely, our species had been worshipping at the altar of money. We could not afford the costs of changing how we powered an entire world. And yet we obviously could also not bear the results of ignoring the costs of overloading our atmosphere for a few centuries. To do nothing was not an option. And yet to do what was necessary was overwhelming!
The amount of anger in the world these days is extreme. As people throughout what was previously called the developed and developing worlds began to wake up to what they had been unconsciously participating in (namely the whole-scale degradation of the planet) there was much outrage. This outrage was expressed in finger pointing, debate that would inevitably devolve into shouting matches and mass protest movements that advocated a complete opting out from participating in any and all aspects of the old society that had led us to the severe crisis that eventually came to define our everyday lives.
Today we cope with the errors of our past ways as best as we can. The most basic needs of human life define most of our efforts. We therefore had to redefine what luxury and a good quality life mean. Today a good quality life is defined primarily by one criteria: stability. If you have stability you have a good life. If you have minimal security you do not. Life today is inherently an adventure for anyone who is alive. We are experiencing the consequences of the shortsightedness of our ancestors. It may take us generations for us to adjust. But we have no real choice in the matter. Certain options were foreclosed by the actions of our ancestors.
Earlier this year I read an article my friend Craig posted on Facebook. The article is about the end of the world as we know it...you know, some light reading. And so it inspired me to write something of a science fiction piece. Consider the following my own visualization of the nightmare scenario that may descend upon us within my own lifetime.
The World of 2032
Looking back it's so obvious that the signs of immense change were all around us. Unfortunately we as a species were careless. Or at least those in power were predominantly careless. Too often in human history the ones most able to effect meaningful change are least inclined to do so. Is it human nature? Perhaps it is. We have millennia of evidence to support that idea. Anyhow, as has happened too many a time the voices of reason, science and discernment were drowned out by the larger number of shrill, paranoid voices advocating a medieval (meaning limited) way of thinking and responding to a very modern era problem. In short, we replayed that iconic moment when Nero was said to have fiddled while Rome burned. Only this time the whole of the planet was effectively burning.
We had been fouling our collective nest for decades. And we lived in a fantasy world of delusion...we imagined that we could somehow successfully mitigate and even 'adapt' to the nightmare we were sowing in the atmosphere above us. Again I am using the collective 'We' as a bit of a gross over-generalization. There were many who thought very clearly back in the last decades of what we now see was relative stability compared to what we live with now. Back then our forebears had what many now perceive to be overly cute and arrogant terms to describe our way of relating to that collective nest known as planet Earth. A term especially maligned by the world of our present age is 'carbon management'. We were unleashing a genie out of a bottle we could not put back in. We could proclaim we were managing the problem all we wanted but we might as well have been tossing a glass of water in a raging bonfire.
The media of two decades ago in the United States played an important role in leading us to the point we are at now. To be perfectly honest the priorities of those days were completely out of whack. Whether it was programs with strange names like Honey Booboo or media called 'Fox News' Americans were sorely confused at best and paranoid at worst. They had lost touch with the most fundamental realities that a sustainable society must attend to. America became the New Rome of the modern era.
Societies prone to distraction aren't likely to be very sustainable. This is another lesson that can be gleaned from what unfolded in the last few decades. The 2010s were the decade in which it became clear the United States was not on a very sustainable course. Prominent domestic issues and the way a citizenry deals with them reveal much about the moral compass of a nation.
One big issue in the 2010s in America was gun violence. Shootings of innocent people (children and adults alike) became increasingly commonplace...or at least that was the perception. As the incidents frequently featured young, deeply troubled men it was a commonly held conclusion (and rightly so...to a degree) that the issue of mental health care and child development needed some close examination. But it was a complete farce to suggest that the problem of gun violence could be solved by addressing the health care system in general and mental health care for the young in particular alone. Young, highly alienated men can only do so much damage with their hands alone. Give them easy access to guns and it's an entirely different matter. When the American Congress failed to pass any substantive gun violence legislation whatsoever many Americans of all political persuasions began to have a growing feeling that something indeed was very wrong in America. But that had been made possible by many other bad policy choices. An exposition of these issues would be too long for my brief survey of the history of the first thirty years of the twenty-first century. Suffice it to say that a misunderstanding of the second amendment led many to make an overemphasis on their individual rights to the detriment of their local community's right to enjoy safety and stability.
Joblessness and insecurity also became a huge issue in America in the 2010s. The value of a college education became a matter of focus as no amount of skill and education seemed to be a guarantee of a stable job in many fields. As more young people came to doubt the value of investing in their own education a self-fulfilling prophecy began to unfold. As American workers became increasingly uncompetitive in the global marketplace it was only natural that more and more jobs would get off-shored to other nations. The low paying service economy jobs stayed behind because those are positions ideally suited to a workforce with a low level of education.
The United States also extended itself much too far abroad. In this way it also imitated the Roman Empire. Its wars of choice initially launched by the man now derisively called King Idiot (George W. Bush) began its inevitable decline. Later the nation's Congress became filled with adults who had the attention span and maturity of five year olds. Infighting and defense of their own voter base became more important than compromise. The center could only hold for so long. Eventually it all would inevitably collapse. But they kept putting bandaids on it for a long time...and smiling all along.
Other portions of the world fared better in the last two decades. Russia's annexation of Crimea provoked civil unrest and mistrust in the former Eastern European Soviet bloc nations for many years. Eventually, though at first it seemed so unlikely, a mass migration of people within the borders of Ukraine occurred. This resettlement of the people within Ukraine's borders was something akin to what happened between India and Pakistan in the 20th century. But eventually the region stabilized politically...at least for a while.
Russian hegemony and the growing impact of climate change gave the EU pause in regards to its energy policy. Its heavy dependence on its neighbor to the East led many nations to a renewed debate regarding the merits and challenges of energy independence. Though a new Cold War never developed, relations between Europe and Russia also never returned to the new normal that developed once the Soviet Union collapsed around the year 1990.
Southeast Asia was marked by massive chaos. This was due in large part to the menace of a rising ocean. Compared to the number of those displaced and lost within the state of Bangladesh alone the much reported disappearance of the Malaysian flight (and of course its passengers and crew) in early 2014 was a proverbial drop in the bucket. Having become a huge economy and influential player on the global scale of geopolitics China began to exert its influence more firmly in the region. Though China's military never invaded its neighbors the state nonetheless exerted significant clout with the power of its economy. Surpassing the United States of America China created mitigation technologies that at least somewhat slowed down the disastrous financial and human costs that inevitably resulted as the oceans gradually rose and continued to acidify. As America's influence continued to wane China's neighbors began to look to China as a source of stability, resources and international aid. Southeast Asia effectively became a large satellite region of China.
Japan never fully recovered from the shock of the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in 2011. Despite the assistance of other developed nations the repair of the economic, social and environmental fabric of the Japanese nation proved to be an extremely financial and time intensive process. Japan became the East Germany of the 21st century. Those who know their history well will recall that a major industry of the former East Germany was its import of toxic waste from other states. After the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 and Germany was reunified in 1990 it became apparent just how degraded East Germany had become as a result of this special 'industry'. The Japanese government never made an intentional policy choice to make toxic waste import a major economic driver . But it didn't need to. The steady poisoning of the Japanese nation by the contamination unleashed by Fukushima was the effective equivalent. Though the Japanese economy did eventually return to marginal growth in the late 2010s and early 2020s historians often nonetheless look back at Fukushima as marking the beginning of Japan's gradual decline in prominence on the world stage. And by 2025 it didn't much matter anyhow. By that point everyone throughout the world had become obsessed with the damage being done by a three atom molecule known as carbon dioxide.
The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted that the concentration of this heat trapping gas breached 400 parts per million near the end of 2013. This was a monumental occurrence. Never in modern human history had so much of the gas filled our planet's atmosphere. But the denial of its impact would continue for several more years.
The year 2019 is often seen as the year in which human impact upon the environment could no longer be denied. The year 2019 was the first year in which all ice cover disappeared during the Northern Hemisphere Summer. The exact date this occurred was August 26, 2019. Scientists across the planet were amazed. And finally, finally, many citizens of their respective nations were finding themselves amazed. Human beings managed to do in a mere two centuries what the planet itself had previously needed many, many millennia to do. We had fundamentally terraformed the planet...without even trying...too much.
By 2020 the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide had reached four-hundred fifteen parts per million. And then even more frightful things began to happen. Any atmospheric scientist knows that carbon dioxide is not the only gas known as a greenhouse gas. There are others. And some of these others are far more effective at trapping heat on a molecular level basis. Methane is a great example. And for many years prior to the 2020s there was concern that continued warming in the Northern Hemisphere Arctic would eventually potentially cause such a significant thaw in regions once ruled by permafrost that the methane content locked therein would suddenly begin to rise into the atmosphere above. And this indeed did happen. And then we had the peril of a vicious feedback loop suddenly upon us.
It only was a few years into the 2020s when it became much more clear just how incredibly quickly the behavior of the atmosphere would change as a result of the sudden spike in the concentration of methane within the atmosphere. And then, finally, the fundamental unsustainable foundational assumption of our fossil fuel powered global society became glaringly obvious. It's not a pretty thing when an entire civilization is shown the pathology inherent to its foundational structure in the equivalent of a geological nanosecond. We had to change. And we had to change quickly. If we didn't we risked making Earth a sister planet of Venus in more ways than it already was.
In 2023 a scandal erupted in the United States that rapidly accelerated the transformation of that nation. Irrefutable documentation was disclosed that provided new details about the terrorist attacks of 2001 that changed the focus of the United States' foreign policy. Back in 2001 most Americans could not yet 'connect the dots' because there simply was not enough evidence to do so. The next big dot came in 2014 when the United States House of Representatives passed an amendment that effectively prevented the Department of Defense from utilizing funds to address the national security impacts of climate change. The amendment, sponsored by Republican Representative David McKinley, contained the following language:
None of the funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to implement the U.S. Global Change Research Program National Climate Assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, the United Nation’s Agenda 21 sustainable development plan or the May 2013 Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order.
To be fair there was resistance to what in hindsight can now be called such colossal stupidity. Other representatives (essentially the Democrats) noted the horrifying implication of the amendment. Representative Henry Waxman of California noted that "The McKinley amendment would require the Defense Department to assume that the cost of carbon pollution is zero." Meanwhile the Arctic was melting, California was enduring a historical drought and India was withering in a huge heat wave. The cost of carbon was rapidly accruing.
In 2023 it became public knowledge that the United States intelligence community had had incontrovertible evidence that terrorist attacks would specifically occur on September 11, 2001 several months before they took place. The attacks were allowed to take place for one primary reason. They were seen as an excellent opportunity for the country to justify the expansion of its military and surveillance infrastructure. But why would those within the United States government wish to do that? It was quite simple. The United States Department of Defense had been researching the security implications of climate change long before such research became public knowledge. And it was determined that a stronger security and military infrastructure would be essential to attempt to maintain order if and when the nation began to collapse under the weight of the impacts of the world's fossil fuel powered economy. In short, some of the conspiracy theorists were exonerated. Some of their worst fears had indeed come true.
The public outrage regarding the deceit perpetrated on the American people by their own government was immense. Some wanted to see something like medieval justice enacted; there were calls for the leaders of that time to be executed for their deceit. Thousands of Americans died in the wars the United States launched in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chaos in Iraq loomed large well into the 2010s. The scandal regarding the deeper story of September 11th also helped to bring about the downfall of the American Republican Party. But the damage had been done long ago. It proved extremely difficult to clean up the political, social and economic mess that had been gradually building for over two decades.
The United States military ultimately and finally withdrew from Afghanistan...in 2017. And unfortunately, despite the efforts of well meaning individuals as well as international aid organizations, the country shortly thereafter plunged back into the same conditions that had characterized it prior to the United States invasion in the 2000s. Despite growing Chinese hegemony nearby the chaos in Afghanistan proved a daunting policy nightmare for the entire region. And the United States' focus on Afghanistan caused it to ignore the more serious issues in neighboring Pakistan. In short, the United States made serious policy blunders both in its domestic affairs as well as abroad.
Transformational leaps in a society are often marked by periods of chaos in which the discourse of those with enough power to express their voices may become shrill, distorted, disoriented and highly disturbing. Europe went through a profound transformation as a result of the Black Death. In the twenty-first century we are undergoing something somewhat equivalent. Some derisively call what we inadvertently unleashed 'Carbon Death'.
It was only in the last ten years that the parasitic quality of the fossil fuel industry throughout the world became apparent. A very few people were being enriched in exchange for undermining the sustainability of the human 'adventure' in the long term. Earlier in this century (was it really only about two decades ago?) a noted economist by the name of Sir Nicolas Stern described climate change as 'a result of the greatest market failure that the world has seen.' We're just now starting to appreciate what this market failure has brought us. And it seems future generations may appreciate it even more. And I suspect whatever people follow us in the next hundred years are probably going to wonder how their forebears could have been so incredibly blind and stupid. Simply put...it was greed. It was shortsightedness. It was human self-absorption.
There is still some hope that levels of greenhouse gases within Earth's atmosphere may ultimately be stabilized. But to do so we have discovered...hopefully not too late...that de-carbonizing the economy of an entire planet is no small task. You don't put it on your 'To Do list' and expect to make much daily progress on it...at least not in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately the de-carbonization of the world economy is an immense task. Some call it "the fundamental evolutionary challenge to our species". A primary challenge has been simply dealing with people's collective thoughts about money, costs and the value of the future. As it became clear that Nicolas Stern was correct about global climate change representing the greatest market failure ever known the central question became this one: "How do we address the current and future costs of what greenhouse gases have done to our atmosphere and the planet as a whole?"
In essence, every time it seemed the solution to this global nightmare was 'not affordable' it became increasingly clear that it was our fundamental underlying assumptions about the validity of a world underpinned by money that were a major part of the problem. Put even more concisely, our species had been worshipping at the altar of money. We could not afford the costs of changing how we powered an entire world. And yet we obviously could also not bear the results of ignoring the costs of overloading our atmosphere for a few centuries. To do nothing was not an option. And yet to do what was necessary was overwhelming!
The amount of anger in the world these days is extreme. As people throughout what was previously called the developed and developing worlds began to wake up to what they had been unconsciously participating in (namely the whole-scale degradation of the planet) there was much outrage. This outrage was expressed in finger pointing, debate that would inevitably devolve into shouting matches and mass protest movements that advocated a complete opting out from participating in any and all aspects of the old society that had led us to the severe crisis that eventually came to define our everyday lives.
Today we cope with the errors of our past ways as best as we can. The most basic needs of human life define most of our efforts. We therefore had to redefine what luxury and a good quality life mean. Today a good quality life is defined primarily by one criteria: stability. If you have stability you have a good life. If you have minimal security you do not. Life today is inherently an adventure for anyone who is alive. We are experiencing the consequences of the shortsightedness of our ancestors. It may take us generations for us to adjust. But we have no real choice in the matter. Certain options were foreclosed by the actions of our ancestors.
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I invite you to accompany me as I document my own journey of healing. My blog is designed to offer inspiration and solace to others. If you find it of value I welcome you to share it with others. Aloha!