Thread by @SteB777

We need to have a serious discussion about the climate and ecological emergency. I don't usually watch the TV but I've been watching it for nearly 2 weeks whilst house sitting. It's now crystal clear that there is mass misunderstanding about this crisis.

It's far more serious than just @GretaThunberg's point about that the crisis is not seen as a crisis. The much deeper problem is people (the public), educated TV commentators, politicians etc, mistakenly think they know what the problem is, when they totally misunderstand it.

Misunderstanding is a far bigger problem than no understanding. With misunderstanding, people mistakenly think they understand the problem and will not listen to any other explanation of the problem, because they mistakenly think they already understand it.

There's this bizarre mistaken perception that it's just about electric cars, wind energy, heat pumps, insulating housing, and then we can carry on as normal. It is really difficult to know where to start with this profound misunderstanding.

Even if governments threw all the money necessary at these solutions, it would not even fully address us heading in the wrong direction. Only massive system change can do this.

Principally, the problem is that it is an ecological crisis, a sustainability crisis, and the climate crisis, although a critical part of it, is only a small part of the problem. The biodiversity part of the ecological crisis alone is at least as serious.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Yet, none of these technological solutions to the climate crisis will in anyway address the biodiversity crisis, let alone the rest of the ecological/sustainability crisis. In fact, they are likely to make it far worse.

Take seeing electric vehicles as a solution. A simple switch to private electric vehicles from petrol and diesel cars, will cause a surge in demand for minerals, that will devastate natural habitat, leading to bigger biodiversity loss.
therevelator.org/ev-batteries-s…

You see, private cars have only reached saturation in the richer developed world. The vast majority of the world does not yet have private car ownership at this level. But just a simple switch to private electric cars will see the rest of the world heading towards this level.

Remember, I am just highlighting one small part of lifestyle. There are similar potentials for massive increases in air travel, general consumption and waste. The Earth is already groaning in just a minority living like this.

Ecological/sustainability, means looking at the whole system, future trends. Trying to not only maintain, but to increase this high consumption lifestyle in rich countries, will see every country in the world trying to catch up.

Even worse, in these rich developed countries, only a relative small part of the population, lives these really high consumption lifestyles, with the less well off trying to catch up with it.

If you just play this through, and ahead, with the present economic model, we are just going to see increasing consumption, and increasing impacts on biodiversity and natural habitat, in theory forever.

Of course we will never get there. You would need many Earths to support the whole world living the lifestyles of Americans now. Plus remember, Americas politicians wants Americans to get forever more prosperous.

We have got a gigantic problem with consumption and energy use at present levels, without a massive increase in this in the future. Let's imagine this energy could be provided by nuclear fusion.

Even if magically, this energy production involved no GHG emissions or pollution itself, the increased use of other resources would.

Yet all I see, are all western politicians talking about increases in prosperity, and what is euphemistically called green growth (none of this type of growth can be green).

Actually, the real crisis is not the effects of this over-consumption and over-exploitation of the natural world. These are just the symptoms. The real problem are the false beliefs, the delusions that it can continue.

As I am sick of saying. It is not about what I want or think should happen. There are real limits to growth. Continue with this delusion of infinite growth in a finite world, and we will just eventually see the total collapse of our civilization.

We need equity, not unconstrained growth. We need to understand the planetary boundaries, and we need to learn this fast.
stockholmresilience.org/research/plane…

@GeorgeMonbiot @ClimateHuman @GretaThunberg @KateRaworth @JKSteinberger

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