ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
To solve climate change, we need to think for ourselves and decide for ourselves what kind of world we want.
Are electric cars better for the environment than gasoline cars? Wrong question.
We’re not asking the right questions until we look at all of our major choices, especially our COLLECTIVE choices, and ask what are the costs, the benefits and the alternatives to this or that policy?
Everybody knows that electric cars are better for the environment. But be careful when you believe what EVERYBODY knows. What does everybody supposedly know? And how did they arrive at that conclusion?
Some facts and considerations.
1. Automobiles are the most resource intensive consumer good for those of us who don’t own a plane or a boat.
2. Worldwide, we churn out 65 million new cars per year. Don’t we have enough cars to last us from here on out? Who benefits when we make 65 million NEW cars every year? Shouldn’t we fix the ones we have?
3. The next time you’re on a major highway, look around you. It’s not unusual to see 50 cars at a glance, no trains and no buses. This is not an accident. Our transportation system was chosen FOR us in the 1940s and 1950s.
4. We didn’t choose the transportation system where everybody needs a car just to get around. Big business and big government chose for us, on our behalf, without our input.
5. Neither did we choose a system where everybody has to work 40 or 50 hours a week just to survive. I’d like to give you back half your time and half your money. We will get back half of our time and half of our money by looking COLLECTIVELY at how we spend money.
6. We spend money on defense ($15,000 per year per family of four), on patented pharmaceuticals (developed at our expense), overpriced health insurance, student loans and automobiles ($8,000 per year, on average). This is not a system that we CHOSE.
7. As taxpayers we pay for the research and development that leads to virtually all of our technology. And yet we don’t get our fair share of the profits.
8. Nor do we get our fair share of profits made from public airwaves that are used to manufacture our consent for wars, for consumerism or for the economic strangulation of our neighbors.
9. Nor do we get our fair share of the profits derived from mining and drilling on public lands.
10. Nor do we get to decide democratically how our technology gets deployed, even though we paid for its development.
11. Technology gets used for surveillance, for weaponry, and a range of industrial and consumer products that we would not want or need if we got a chance to deliberate on these issues democratically. But we don’t deliberate on these issues democratically, do we?
12. Let’s work collectively to make choices that work for US.
Some environmentalists have an almost religious belief that we will bring climate change under control via heavily polluting, carbon-intensive techno-fixes, made with slave labor and controlled by oligarchs.
I have a great deal more faith in democracy.
Some environmentalists have an almost religious belief that gadgets like solar panels will save us. And yet the very same people have no discernible understanding of how nature works or where our food comes from.
All the solar panels, windmills, electric cars and utility scale Tesla battery arrays will not save us from a food system that is at war with life on earth.
It is. Our food system—driven by the agribusiness giants—is at war with life on earth. Bill Gates does not know how to fix this. Apparently, he does not want to know.
And all the solar panels and techno-fixes will not save us from a foreign policy that promotes opulent consumerism while most of the people of the world live on a few dollars a day, and don’t get to control the land on which they COULD grow their food, if our empire would allow them to use their own land.
Climate change is violence. If we don’t address violence we are not addressing climate change.
And climate change is a natural and biological phenomenon. If we don’t understand the basics of our ecosystems, our forests or our food production we will not save the climate. And in the meantime we will be used by people who pretend to be solving the problem.
But they’re just pretending.
Another thing that is not being about is the plundering of fish species apparently wiped out by 90 percent as well as the water waste, environmental pollution caused by large scale animal agriculture.