COP26
The 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference starts on Sunday.
“COP” = Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference
For two weeks you’ll be hearing a lot of verbiage and much bloviating.
Steps will be taken.
I’ll guess that two steps will be taken on the thousand-step journey toward ecological sanity that the human race is facing. Maybe three.
Paraphrasing Jeff Gibbs:
Our human ability for self-deception is unrivaled. The basic reality is that our population exploded from around 1 billion to a projected (by 2100) 10 billion once we tapped into fossil fuels. The notion that that might continue is one of the most foolish, and I might, add selfish, beliefs possible.
But it gets worse. Our per-person consumption has also increased (though, of course, much more for some than for others) by more than ten-fold since fossil fuels. That means, population times consumption, our total global economy will soon be 100 times larger than before we began to burn through literally millions of years of stored fossil energy every year. And it would take the continuation of the giant, planet-wrecking industrial system to produce the renewables that supposedly could replace the fossils. Solar panels don’t grow on trees.
Even at 1% of our human presence around 150 years ago, before fossil fuels, the forests, grasslands, whales and wildlife of the planet were being actively destroyed as “civilization” spread to every corner of the living earth. To believe that a human presence a hundred times larger than that already destructive baseline will remain in the economic stratosphere is a lie; a deception so great, it is almost unfathomable. Yet, business, industry, academia, politics, narcissism, our own comfort, civilization itself, requires the lie to keep us going down this insane road with blinders on.
Oceans and mountains of fossil fuels powering mega-machines and enabling more logging, mining, building, fishing, hunting, paving, agriculture and humans have enabled the vastly expanded rape of nature. Half of all wildlife has been obliterated in recent decades; 90% of the fish are gone; 96% of mammals; 70% of forests cut. That is why the pursuit of the supposed solution of “renewable” energy (even if it was possible to run modern civilization on renewables, which it’s not) is quixotic. THERE IS NO SOLUTION other than a vast downscaling of production, depletion, and pollution.
Anyone who thinks that our population and economy can remain orders of magnitude above baseline is participating in the greatest delusion in planetary history. Ignoring how vastly beyond overshoot we humans are, and how hard we will be coming down, is irresponsible, verging on immoral.
And this:
