The threat to the environment from a range of human activites could end life as we know it.....
i know that we have all become desensitized to such remarks... maybe because the alarm bells have been sounding earlier than 1572 and we have just dulled the sounds into the background of our capitalistic life style.
Leading scientists warnings have been clear "the environment is suffering critical stress" in such areas as the atmosphere, the ocean, water resources, soil, forests, and all life forms. But hey, this process has been undertaken throughout human history that, over time, we have caused environmental disasters and unforeseen havoc to the world's ecosystem, aswell as being a threat to our own health and well-being. Some examples of such is that of Easter Island, how human tribal hunting extincted many large mammals and birds, in turn destroying the society that was founded upon Easter Island.
And this kind of damage has continued obviously to the present day, escalating in its effects. And through common sense one could even argue that humans are a plague upon the planet, however taking such a view one must possibly take the view of that the planet as being some sort of unchaging paradise, a perfect harmoniously balanced world, or that humas are somehow an unnatural addition to the world's living species.... which is obviously wrong.
Every life form, including humans, radicaly and mutually interact with the environment, creating as Rachel Carson once wrote "a fluid, ever-shifiting, constantly re-adjusting world".
Now being a spectic of global warming, one only has to take a historical approach to the worlds history to note that such events have occured in the past. One could say that history is hmm repeating itself?
Take the earliest example where mcroorganisims thrived in a world without oxygen, but to live meant producing oxygen - just as most plants do today. And like plants they pumped oxygen out, produing an environment richer in the gas and deadlier for them. If some of these organisms had not also developed the capacity to survive these risisng levels through genetic mutation, life on this planet would have died out then and there.
In other words we live on a constantly changing planet, a world where most of the species that have ever lived are now extinct, so are we going to create the sixth major global extinction ??
But hey capitalism and the market have a solution to such a problem, yes the magic of the market. It can turn water and other resource scarcity into a myth with the cling of a cash register. All you have to do is put a high enough proce on it and there will be plenty of water and resources to go around, well, atleast plent to go around to those who are able to pay for it.
So i leave this blog with a question that i am intersted in the responce, so comment away your answers.
Should we care about global warming when history has stated that such a looming doom has occured within the past ??
And if such changed are needed to prevent global warming, is it possible under capitalism?
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5 comments:
Well yes you should care if you are interested in the survival and the prosperity of the human race and/or other species.
The hard part is the solution. Capitalism won't solve global warming. It will only redirect resources around to minimize the effect. It doesn't make them magically appear.
But let's look at the problem. The problem isn't temperatures are rising, its temperatures are rising too quickly. And while I believe humans will be fine ( fine being not extinct :P) , you can expect years of technological development and advancement in our living standards to go down the drain.
I'm not too sure whether all this green-stuff to minimize global warming is going to be effective in the end. We're gonna need a plan to help protect crucial bits of civilization as we live through the really bad times, so that we can recover quickly.
Well Yes mr Benz, i do agree with you that capitalism will not solve this issue. I ask to you then what form of government would?
I ask this out of inerest because from my perspective, the best form of a sustainable solution woulf be to take a marxist socialist perspective.
After much thought, I've concluded that there are two options, both which must occur on a global scale: everybody helps each other (Marxism) or only a few survive (capitalism).
To be honest, I don't really know anymore. There's too much variables to predict which is the best path forward. Global marxism sounds unlikely while capitalism would mean a lot of people die for a few people to gain a lot. It's quite a bleak outlook. The whole thing is a massive resource problem, namely energy, and how to share it.Maybe green technology such as solar energy will be highly useful. I still think carbon trading is a load of crap though.
Marxist socialism would work, but there needs to be significant technological improvement to manage resources properly.
no government...no government at all...
im currently over it, and just waiting for someone to magically come up with an answer which seems to be the perfect one...
then turns out to screw us all over when we least expect it...
round and round it goes...
where it will stop, no-body knows
ps: my orchards are growing...
There is a term for the problem that capitalism faces in dealing with Global Warming. It's called Market Failure. Nothing in the current capitalism system makes the envirnment an internality. This is also visible in such ideas as the "Tragedy of the commons". The manner in which it is possible that capitalism may hold a solution is if the cost of environmental damage done by companies is born as a monetary cost [vis-a-vis carbon taxation/cap and trade(credit)]
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