Thread by @SteB777

1) This animated graphic shared shared by @GretaThunberg illustrates something quite profound about the cause of not only the climate crisis, but the whole ecological crisis.

https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1391053577951617029

2) It illustrates how one country, the UK, that then had a great world wide empire in which it was exploiting other people countries to create wealth for it's wealthy few, created industrial production fuelled by fossil fuels, to exploit the natural resources of the world.

3) It illustrates how this modus operandi spread at first to other wealthy countries, and that the US a much bigger more populous country overtook the UK in it's fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions.

4) It illustrates how as globalization progressed, this model of industrial exploitation of the Earth's natural resources spread around the world, that other bigger countries with much bigger populations, tried to catch up with industrialization.

5) The wealth of the so called developed countries and their high consumption lifestyles was powered by fossil fuels and still is. Naturally, in this context, every country and person in the world wants to catch up.

6) Not only do the rich countries not want to give up their high consumption lifestyles, but they want to carry on economically growing and increasing this consumption.

7) You constantly hear westerners saying, but look at the carbon emissions of China, India (often created to provide their consumer goods), they are now bigger than our carbon emissions. Look at how many people these countries have, they are breeding too much.

8) Yet China and India (and other countries) were much bigger, much more populous countries than the UK, when the UK started the industrial revolution. It should be obvious that every country, every individual in the world will try to catch up with our lifestyles.

9) As these countries are much bigger, with much bigger populations, if they try to increase their level of consumption to that in the wealthiest western nations including the UK, carbon emissions and exploitation of the Earth's natural resources will massively increase.

10) It's been calculated that if every country and every person consumed resources at the level of the US, it would require 4 Earths to provide those resources. Remember, the US is still trying to grow it's economy and therefore consumption.
bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-…

11) Trying to blame other countries for the consequences of trying to catch up with our high consumption lifestyles is just absurd and hypocritical. Especially when not only do we refuse to cut down, but we are still trying to massively grow our economies.

12) These other graphics shared by Greta illustrate how carbon emissions (a proxy for general consumption) are directly related to someone's wealth and income. The greater their wealth/income, the much greater both their carbon and ecological footprint.

https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1389639143051890691

13) Yet the world's billionaires, the other very rich, the richest countries are still trying to massively increase their wealth and income. This is what economic growth means.

14) As a distraction it has been claimed that in theory economic growth doesn't have to involve an actual increase in consumption. Yet the empirical evidence, proves actual wealth and economic growth, does mean a massive increase in the consumption of resources.

15) It is beyond absurd to blame the rest of humanity, with a much smaller carbon and ecological footprint, as the problem, simply because they are trying to catch up with a lifestyle, of people still trying to get richer and consume even more.

16) Somehow it has been imagined that the status quo would remain i.e. you had a few very rich high consumption lifestyle countries, trying to increase their wealth and consumption, and the rest of humanity should stay poor and impoverished.

17) Self-evidently, this whole system puts us on a course for global suicide. It is driven by inequality, with the poor trying to catch up with the richest. Even in rich countries, the poorest are trying to catch up with the richest.
theguardian.com/environment/20…

18) It is plainly absurd and socially unjust, to imagine that the rich should be allowed to live these incredible high consumption lifestyles, where the richest 10% produce more or less half of all global emissions, and the poor should remain poor.

19) Therefore the unpalatable truth for the wealthy, both countries and individuals, is that they only way to create a sustainable society, not on course for global suicide, is that this inequality has to end.

20) This is not an ideological goal, Marxism or whatever. This is based on pure practicality and survival. It is based on how systems work.

21) Humans are an innately cooperative species, who for probably 98% of their existence, lived in egalitarian societies where resources were shared equally. Inequality was a deliberate policy of the industrial revolution to create competition, to grow wealth for the richest.

22) I can absolutely support this statement. Read the last 2 paragraphs of Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, Chapter 10.
gutenberg.org/files/944/944-…

23) The whole of Ch.10 in Voyage of the Beagle is describing a highly unethical social experiment in which several Fuegians were kidnapped, bought back to UK, educated, given possessions, deliberately to try and create an unequal Fuegian society.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jemmy_But…

24) Charles Darwin believed deliberate enforced inequality was necessary to create competition, to "improve" society as he saw it. This wasn't just Darwin's idea, it was part of liberal economic ideology of the time.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

25) What this illustrates is how a deeply unequal, and highly competitive society was not just something that happened, because of the innate competitiveness and selfishness of humans, but it had to be engineered, enforced.

26) As Darwin clearly explains in the last 2 paragraphs of Ch.10 of Voyage of the Beagle, that he was aware in the early 19th Century, that in it's natural state, humans shared resources equally, and had to be manipulated into being selfish, by creating deliberate inequality.

27) Modern societies and their governments with their neoliberal doctrines (a re-statement of liberalism), have to constantly whip people into being selfish and competitive. See this article by @GeorgeMonbiot
theguardian.com/books/2016/apr…

28) My point is not to judge this from any ideological perspective (I'm opposed to ideology per se, but that would take too long to explain). I am merely pointing out what the consequences of this are, and how it works as a system.

29) All my thinking is systems based i.e. looking at how systems operate. Not how in idealism it is wished systems work (one of my objections to all ideology), but how they actually operate in reality, not how it is wished they operate.

30) My analysis is not based on how I think society should be. I am purely looking at things in terms of the practical way in which this system operates, and what the the long term consequences are.

31) Indeed this is the whole problem with the highly artificial society that the few wealthy people controlling our societies created, to get even wealthier. They were not looking at the wider consequences, only what they wished for.

32) To create a truly sustainable society i.e. a civilization that won't eventually collapse because we destroy the natural systems that sustain our lives, we need to look at the big picture of how things work.

33) I am grateful for an education in scientific ecology, because understanding how natural systems, populations of species operate, is essential for understanding the long term viability of our civilization.

34) Unfortunately, scientific ecology is rather arbitrarily demarcated, in that it only studies the populations of non-human animals and their interaction with other life and other non-living natural systems.

35) In a very artificial way humans and their societies are treated as if they are apart from the rest of the natural world. In fact, this is a profound myth of our modern culture, that we are no longer reliant on the natural world. This is profound hubris and delusion.

36) All the evidence of modern science points to human societies and populations as being entirely reliant on natural systems. This is why the climate and ecological emergency has occurred, because we act as if we are not reliant on natural systems.

37) Our modern culture imagined that we could escape the physical limits of the Earth on which we live, by colonising other planets and the universe generally. This whole fantasy, is just insane.

38) Even if we could colonise other planets other worlds, and there is no evidence it is practical - there is no practical way we are going to ship billions of people to these other worlds. It is a dangerous fantasy.

39) The only way the people of this planet are going to avoid an ecological crisis which will threaten much of the Earth's human population, is to finally look at the ecological reality of how systems operate.

40) Any population of a species which grows beyond what the ecological carrying capacity of that ecosystem can sustain, collapses. This is what sustainability is about, and we are not immune from this ecological reality.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainab…

41) The whole current economic model developed during and after the industrial revolution, imagines that the natural resources of the Earth are infinite. This is self-evidently an actual delusion i.e. an insane false belief.

42) The reality is that you cannot have infinite growth in a finite system i.e. on a planet with finite resources. There is no escaping this fact, but amazingly our economic system is in denial of this.

@ClimateHuman @JKSteinberger @KateRaworth @GeorgeMonbiot @GretaThunberg @KevinClimate @ProfSteveKeen @NaomiAKlein

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